Now, while this was most certainly the correct manner in which to face the question, and while Egypt has benefited enormously by this singleness of purpose in her officials, it was, historically, a false attitude. Egypt is not a little country: Egypt is a crippled Empire. Throughout her history she has been the powerful rival of the people of Asia Minor. At one time she was mistress of the Sudan, Somaliland, Palestine, Syria, Libya, and Cyprus; and the Sicilians, Sardinians, Cretans, and even Greeks, stood in fear of the Pharaoh. In Arabic times she held Tunis and Tripoli, and even in the last century she was the foremost Power at the east end of the Mediterranean. Napoleon when he came to Egypt realised this very thoroughly, and openly aimed to make her once more a mighty empire. But in 1882 such fine dreams were not to be considered: there was too much work to be done in the Nile Valley itself. The Egyptian Empire was forgotten, and Egypt was regarded as permanently a little country. The conditions which we found here we took to be permanent conditions. They were not. We arrived when the country was in a most unnatural state as regards its foreign relations; and we were obliged to regard that state as chronic. This, though wise, was absolutely incorrect. Egypt in the past never has been for more than a short period a single country; and all history goes to show that she will not always be single in the future. With the temporary loss of the Syrian province Egypt's need for a navy ceased to exist; and the fact that she is really a naval power has now passed from men's memory. Yet it was not much more than a century ago that Muhammed Ali fought a great naval battle with the Turks, and utterly defeated them. In ancient history the Egyptian navy was the terror of the Mediterranean, and her ships policed the east coast of Africa. In prehistoric times the Nile boats were built, it would seem, upon a seafaring plan: a fact that has led some scholars to suppose that the land was entered and colonised from across the waters. We talk of Englishmen as being born to the sea, as having a natural and inherited tendency towards "business upon great waters"; and yet the English navy dates from the days of Queen Elizabeth. It is true that the Plantagenet wars with France checked what was perhaps already a nautical bias, and that had it not been for the Norman conquest, England, perchance would have become a sea power at an earlier date. But at best the tendency is only a thousand years old. In Egypt it is seven or eight thousand years old at the lowest computation. It makes one smile to think of Egypt as a naval power. It is the business of the historian to refrain from smiling, and to remark only that, absurd as it may sound, Egypt's future is largely upon the water as her past has been. It must be remembered that she was fighting great battles in huge warships three or four hundred feet in length at a time when Britons were paddling about in canoes.