f the Nile. Napoleon's mind was formed for
dominion in the East, and where he failed in Europe he would have
infallibly succeeded in Asia. There little policies are useless, and
great ones root themselves in a congenial soil; and he was possessed
with an idea which must have flourished. His English opponents, judging
him only by the scale of their own thoughts, credited him with the
inferior design of invading India through Persia, and called it a mad
one; but India was, in fact, a small part only of his programme. When he
publicly pronounced the Kelemat at Cairo, and professed the faith of
Islam, he intended to be its Head, arguing rightly that what had been
possible three hundred years before to Selim was possible also then to
him. Nor would the Mussulman world have been much more astonished in
1799 at being asked to accept a Bonaparte for Caliph, than it was in
1519 at being asked to accept an Ottoman. With Napoleon's genius for
war, and but for the disastrous sea fight on the Nile, all this might
have been, and more; and it is conceivable that Europe, taken in
reverse by a great Moslem multitude, might have suffered worse disasters
than any the actual Napoleonic wars procured her, while a more durable
empire might have been founded on the Nile or Bosphorus than the
Bonapartes were able to establish on the Seine. As it was, it was an
episode and no more, useful only to the few who saw it near enough to
admire and understand.[11]

Among these who saw and understood was Mehemet Ali, the Albanian
adventurer, who undertook the government of Egypt when England restored
it to the Porte. Bonaparte from the first was his model, and he
inherited from him this vision of a new Caliphate, the greatest of the
Napoleonic ideas, and worked persistently to realize it. He was within
an ace of succeeding. In 1839 Mehemet Ali had Mecca, Cairo, and
Jerusalem in his hands, and he had defeated the Sultan at Konia, and was
advancing through Asia Minor on Constantinople. There, without doubt, he
would have proclaimed himself Caliph, having all the essential elements
of the Sultan's admitted right on which to found a new claim.

Nor is it probable that he would have found much religious opposition to
the realization of his scheme from the Turkish Ulema. These, already
alarmed by Sultan Murad's administrative reforms, would hardly have
espoused the Sultan's defence with any vigour; and though Mehemet Ali
himself was open to a charge of latit