and intelligence England was an age ahead of him, as the others were an age behind him; and the two opposing forces of ignorance and enlightenment crushed him in the end like the upper and the nether millstone. CHAPTER V THE EXPEDITION TO EGYPT[6] [Footnote 6: Boulay de la Meurthe: Le Directoire et l'expédition d'Égypte. De Villiers du Terrage: Journal et Souvenirs sur l'expédition d'Égypte. Otherwise as before.] French Policy Regarding Egypt -- Bonaparte's Use of It -- His Military Dispositions and Expectations -- His "Complete Code of Politics" -- The Alternatives He Saw -- Friction Between Bonaparte and the Directory -- The Fleet and the Army--The Departure. Taken in its largest sense, the social life of the world has been due to the relations of commerce, thought, and religion between the Orient and the Occident. The short road from one to the other is by way of the Red Sea, the Isthmus, and the Mediterranean. The controlling site on that thoroughfare is Egypt. From the crusades onward the domination of the countries and lands in that great basin was the prize for which France and England were always contending. Pierre du Bois proposed the seizure of Egypt to Philip le Bel in the fourteenth century; Leibnitz sought to draw Louis XIV out of Germany by explaining to him the dazzling advantage of the same enterprise; d'Argenson suggested the Suez Canal in 1738; and Choiseul kept alive the plan of occupying Egypt. The republic had inherited the notion of world conquest which had occupied both Philip le Bel and Louis XIV, although in another form. Bonaparte, in the double rôle of Raynal´s disciple and supplanter of the Revolution, was full of the same idea. It was his early study of the "Philosophical and Political History of the Two Indies" which made him, in one of his conversations before Campo Formio, designate Europe as a mole-hill when compared with the six hundred millions of men in the East. In these same pages, as in Plutarch, he had read of Alexander the Great, and had learned to admire his example; there, too, he was told that with a proper population and a firm administration Alexandria would rise to greater eminence than London, Paris, Constantinople, or Rome. These opinions he imbibed and never changed, reiterating them even at St. Helena, where he confessed that but for the repulse at Acre he would have founded an Oriental empire. The policy of the Directory was no doubt partly his; but to a far greater extent it mirrored the feeling abroad in the entire nation, and among all its agents, that the times were ripe for the seizure of Egypt. Talleyrand had called the attention of the Institute to its feasibility, and Magallon, the French consul at Cairo, filled his despatches with suggestions as to ways and means. By the spring of 1798 the plan of the Directory was formed and their preparations were finished. Under Talleyrand's supervision a statement