The fact itself holds a lesson for all who fatuously imagine that the history of the world is enacted in a series of accidents and that the business of diplomatic agents consists in meeting and dealing with these accidents as they automatically appear. The work of all great foreign ministers whom the world has known has, on the contrary, consisted in providing for contingencies long foreseen and patiently awaited. What Prussia's unique foreign expert worthy of that name in the story of its whole diplomacy—Bismarck—achieved in this way as preparatory to the campaigns of 1864, 1866 and 1870, British Diplomacy is always and eternally achieving. To the process of its perennial vigils and deliberate acts we may apply the famous remark: "There it is, the great engine, it never sleeps," and as the custodian of the set principle that no single Power shall overrule the rights of other nations, men are beginning at last to realise what in reality it represents, and that not only is Great Britain now and for ages invincible and indestructible, but that in her self-charged world-rôle of defending the Right there is that which, if need were, shows the mind of watchful Providence itself. When, in 1798, Bonaparte set out for his Egyptian campaign, there were already in active existence two redoubtable forces with which his ambition was destined to become fatefully engaged—namely, Nelson and British diplomatic vigilance. Long before his début on the Nile, British Secret Service had put all its forces in motion in order to upset his designs against England's Eastern dominions, and not one of these designs was unknown to Downing Street. Egypt then, as now, was in respect of its commercial activities almost wholly under the domination of English political and monetary influences, the result being that from the moment of his arrival at Cairo, an extraordinary web of espionage had already been woven round the Corsican. It is suggestive enough that the means which the secret agents of London proposed to employ for the undoing of the young conqueror of Italy were based mainly on the idea that Napoleon was easily susceptible to feminine influences. His quasi-public heart-affairs with Madame Colombier, Caroline Bressieux, Madame Saint-Huberti, Desirée Clary and the woman Turreau, in Paris, had misled the British Cabinet, strangely enough, with the notion that he could be destroyed through the agency of ministering angels of the venal variety. At all events, the system of espionage was conceived upon Bonaparte's supposed foible and its direction was undertaken by Sir Sidney Smith—whose interminable after-dinner tales of his exploit at St Jean d'Acre were afterwards to win him the title of "Long Acre"—assisted by John H. Barnett, a secret-service agent in British employ.