Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé

by F. Barham Zincke

Feræ Naturæ.

As to the Feræ Naturæ, Egypt offers little cover or feeding-ground for them. I saw none but jackals and foxes. They can, therefore, have no place in a traveller’s sketch of the country. The crocodile is all but extinct below the cataract. The steamboat it is, which in this part of the river, is scaring it away.[9] Formerly, both the crocodile and the hippopotamus appear to have disported themselves even in the Delta.

CHAPTER LIII.
BIRDS IN EGYPT.

The cawing Rooks, and Kites that swim sublime

In still repeated circles, screaming loud,

The Jaye, the Pie, and e’en the boding Owl

Have charms for me.—Cowper.

In the picture of Nature the birds’ place must not be left quite in blank. The first to greet you in Egypt are two familiar home companions. As you near the harbour of Alexandria—and even sometimes before you sight the land—the wagtail comes on board, and, without a moment lost in reconnoitring, begins to look about the deck for crumbs. He flirts his tail as usual. Here, in our bird-persecuting part of the world, it means that he is on the alert; but on the deck of the steamer, that is entering the harbour of Alexandria, it means, ‘All right. I am not afraid: I am quite at home. Every one here is glad to see me, and I am glad to see you. Here no boys throw stones at me.’ Every flirt of his tail sends a little ripple of pleasure over your heart.

On entering Alexandria your only thought is of what is new and strange: the last that would occur to you would be that you were about to encounter an old friend. But the first object that meets your eye, as you step through the custom-house gate into the street, is a very old cosmopolitan friend you left in London a few weeks back—the house sparrow. ‘What!’ you exclaim. ‘You here, you ornithological gamin?’

As you go by rail to Cairo, and as you ascend the river, you are never long out of sight of a mud-built village. The saddest and sorriest of habitations for men and women are these Egyptian villages I have ever anywhere seen. West India negro huts are better-furnished abodes. Their best-lodged inhabitants are the pigeons. The only storey that is ever raised above the ground-floor—which is of the ground as well as on it—is the dovecot. This, therefore, is the only object in a village which attracts the eye of the passer-by. In the Delta the fashion appears to be to raise a rude roundish mud tower, full of earthenware pots for the pigeons to breed in. These are inserted—of course, lying horizontally—in the mud of which the tower is built. In Upper Egypt these towers have assumed the square form, about twelve feet each side. Three or four tiers of branches are carried round the building for the pigeons to settle on; these are stuck into the wall, and as the branches depart from the straight line, each according to its own bent, each belt of branches presents a very irregular appearance. No village is without its dovecotes. From the summit of the propylæa of the grand Ptolemaic temple of Edfou, I counted about forty of these dovecotes on the tops of the mud hovels below me. The number of domestic pigeons in Egypt must be several times as great as that of the population. I suppose if they kept pigs they would not keep so many pigeons. They must consume a great quantity of corn—more, perhaps, than would be required for the pigs of a pig-eating population as large as that of Egypt.

In going up the river from Cairo, the first birds that put in their appearance are the pelicans. They are generally in parties of eight or ten. They are fishing, in a line across the stream. They always keep out of gun-shot. They loom large, showing about the size of swans, and, as seen from a distance, of the colour of cygnets. They do not care to go more than about two hundred miles above Cairo.

All up the river you see herons of several species: like their English congeners, they are patient watchers for passing fish; and when watching, more or less solitary.

The wet sand and mud banks are thronged with countless mobs of ducks of various kinds, of geese, and of other aquatic birds. Experience has taught them also how far guns carry.

As to the geese, you frequently hear and see overhead large flights of them. Sometimes as many as four or five flocks are in sight at one time. They are going to and from their feeding grounds. When aloft they are generally in some figure; but very far from always, as some say, in the form of a wedge. Perhaps the figure in which they place themselves depends on the currents of wind where they are. If they are driving against the wind, the wedge would of course be the best figure for them to move in; but if they are going down the wind a line one deep would be better, as it would give the full help of the current to every individual of the flock; and this is a figure they are often seen in. In the lately disinterred temple of Serapis, between the dilapidated pyramids of Sakkarah, and the marvellous catacomb of the sacred bulls, I saw, in painted relief, a scene which tells us how geese were fattened in old Egypt. Men are seated at each end of a table which is covered with pellets, probably of some kind of meal. Each man has a goose in his lap, down the throat of which he is cramming one of these pellets. The priests of Serapis liked their geese fat.

In the neighbourhood of Siout I saw several flocks of flamingoes on the wing. As they approached with the sun upon them, they showed like discs of silver, supported on black wings. When they had passed, the eye was charmed with their backs of rosy pink.

Among the land birds the commonest in the village palm groves are the Egyptian turtle-dove, and the hopoe. Where there are so many pigeons you might expect a great many hawks: these you see of several species. Larks are everywhere in the fields. You frequently fall in with bevies of quail, and with plovers. A small owl is common: I heard and saw it during the day-time, in the tamarisks near the pool in the sacred enclosure of Karnak, and elsewhere.

Our English rook—it has a wide range, being a denizen of Africa as well as of every part of Europe—appears among the birds of Egypt. My bedroom at Zech’s, late Shepheard’s, Hotel at Cairo was off the back gallery, looking across a road on to a large garden. Exactly opposite the window was the sakia which supplied the garden with water. The creaking and shrieking, every morning, of its lumbering wooden wheel whilst it was being worked by a patient, plodding bullock, was far from unpleasant to one who wished to become acquainted with the sights and sounds of Egypt. In this garden were many palms. These were tenanted by a colony of rooks. I was, day after day, interested in noting that they had just the same bearing and manners as their English relatives. Like them, they sought the society of man, and seemed to watch his doings with the same kind of satisfied observation, accompanied with the same harsh cries, expressive of security and confidence. They were in every respect quite undistinguishable from our London rooks, and those that affect our rural homesteads. I looked upon them with the thought that just as we, at this day, are pleased with their social and familiar ways, so must, many thousand years ago, have been the old Egyptians.

The banks of the river are full of bird life, as every bird in Egypt must daily come to the river to drink.

CHAPTER LIV.
THE EGYPTIAN TURTLE.

Cum ventre humano tibi negotium est, qui nec ratione mitigatur, nec prece ullâ flectitur.—Livy.

It is hard lines for an Egyptian turtle when he once gets turned on his back in Aboukir Bay. After that, for the remaining term of his natural life, it is all Ramadan with him, after sunset as well as after sunrise. He is carried to Alexandria, and sold there, if a fine well-grown reptile, for half a sovereign: the smaller reptiles go for less. He is put on board a P. and O. boat, and carried to Southampton, all the way on his back, for another half sovereign. Add to this whatever one may have to pay for his railway journey, and you may take him home with you, and two or three more with him for your friends, at no great cost. Though perhaps it would be hardly worth while to give a turtle to one who knows no other way of having him cooked than converting him into soup.

Something ought to be done, and might be done to mitigate their long fast from Aboukir Bay to London. At sea, gourmandizing is the order of the day; but the turtle on board are famishing all the while. It might not be ill done, if those, whose only occupation is eating, and then eating again, were to give a thought to the difference in this matter between themselves and those of their fellow-travellers who are getting nothing at all to eat. It makes the matter worse that we inflict starvation on the very creature we are contemplating as a feast for ourselves. It is no justification to say, learnedly, that Chelonians can dispense with food for long periods. It is bad for all concerned. It is morally hardening to those who inflict unnecessary suffering, and to those—the passengers on the P. and O. boats—who witness its effects, progressing regularly from day to day. As the poor wretches lie on their backs—there were about fifty on board the boat I came home by—you see that the plastron, that is the name the belly shell goes by, is changing its shape. At first it is convex. It gradually, as the fasting is prolonged, loses its convexity, and becomes flat. This must be bad, but there is worse yet to come. Times goes on, and what had become flat, begins to sink, and becomes concave. The fifty owners of these shrinking and subsiding stomachs must have found the process very pinching: and the more so as they had nothing else in particular to think about while lying all this time on their backs. The alterations of shape they have been passing through measured their sufferings. They had never themselves done anything so bad to what they had fed on. How could they without reason?

CHAPTER LV.
INSECT PLAGUES.

Who can war with thousands wage?—Percy’s Reliques of Ancient Poetry.

As to the insect plagues of Egypt, I found the mosquitoes alone annoying. Had I been in the country in the summer or autumn, my experience would, I have no doubt, have been different. And as to the mosquitoes, I found them seriously annoying only at Alexandria. At one time I had my face, hands, and ankles very badly bitten. My own carelessness, however, was the cause of this, for I was at that time in the habit of reading and writing at night with open windows. This was giving my bloodthirsty assailants, who had been attracted by the candle, every facility. They had free ingress, and found their victim off his guard and exposed to their attacks. At Zech’s hotel at Cairo, I found no mosquitoes. In going up the river I had a chasse every night, before I turned in, to clear off the few that might be in my berth. I generally found one or two. Herodotus mentions the use by the Egyptians of the mosquito net.

In a Belgravian hotel I have been badly bitten, and by a larger, blacker, and more venomous kind of mosquito than those that forced themselves on my notice in Egypt. On the same occasion I saw ladies who were suffering so much from their attacks that they were obliged to have recourse to medical treatment. This ferocious species is supposed to have been imported to Thames-side in some one or other of the earlier stages of insect existence, through the medium of the water-tanks of our West African palm-oil traders.

It is curious that fleas, which so abound in Egypt, are not found in Nubia. Many insects are very local: but one is surprised at finding such a cosmopolite as the flea conspicuously absent in a country, which might have been supposed especially adapted to his manners and customs. In Egypt, as has been the case elsewhere, I often felt industrious fleas at work upon me; but I am not aware that a flea ever yet succeeded in biting me. Others I heard complaining much of them.

The boat in which I went up the river had just been painted, and so I saw nothing in it of the Egyptian bug; but I heard that they abounded in other boats. I found the Hotel d’Europe, at Alexandria, and Zech’s, at Cairo, quite free from them.

The domestic fly is about as troublesome in Egypt in winter as it is in this country in autumn.

CHAPTER LVI.
THE SHADOOF.

He shall pour the water out of his buckets.—Book of Numbers.

In Egypt, where mythology, manners and customs, writing, and all the arts appear never to have had a period of infancy, or of adolescence, but to have come into being all in a perfected state and all together, it is hard to say what is older than other things. It is so with everything Egyptian; and so, of course, with the shadoof, the machine used in raising water, by human labour, for irrigating the land. It is the oldest machine with which we are historically acquainted: though, of course, it implies the use of the plough, which, as well as the hoe, must have been brought into the valley of the Nile by the immigrant ancestors of the Egyptians.

Mechanically, the shadoof is an application of the lever. In no machine which the wit of man, aided by the accumulations of science, has since invented, is the result produced so great in proportion to the degree of power employed. The lever of the shadoof is a long stout pole poised on a prop. The pole is at right angles to the river. A large lump of clay from the spot is appended to the inland end. To the river end is suspended a goat-skin bucket. This is the whole apparatus. The man who is working it stands on the edge of the river. Before him is a hole full of water, fed from the passing stream. When working the machine, he takes hold of the cord by which the empty bucket is suspended, and, bending down, by the mere weight of his shoulders dips it in the water. He then rises, with his hand still on the cord. His effort to rise gives the bucket full of water an upward cant, which, with the aid of the equipoising lump of clay at the other end of the pole, lifts it to a trough into which, as it tilts on one side, it empties its contents. The man continues bending down and rising up again in this manner for hours together, apparently without more effort than that involved in these movements of his body. What he has done has raised the water six or seven feet above the level of the river. But if the river has subsided twelve or fourteen feet, it will require another shadoof to be worked in the trough into which the water of the first has been brought. If the river has sunk still more, a third will be required before it can be lifted to the top of the bank, so as to enable it to flow off to the fields that require irrigation. I sometimes saw as many as twenty series of shadoofs at work, two or three in each series, within a range of half a mile. The poor fellows who work them are, except for the barest decency, completely divested of every article of clothing: an almost invisible loin cloth, and a tight-fitting cotton skull-cap, are the whole of their apparel. They work all day in the wet, and in the sun. As the materials for the shadoof—the pole, the prop, the skin, and the clay—are all to be had on the spot, the poor fellah is able, in a few minutes, to set up a machine that is of great service to him, at little or no cost.

The other machine used in Egypt for raising water is called the sakia. This is the Persian water-wheel. It is a large wheel with a continuous row of jars arranged on its tire, something like the buckets of a dredging-machine. These jars dip up the water as the wheel revolves, and empty it, as the further revolution of the wheel brings their mouths downwards, into a trough. It is worked by bullocks, or buffaloes. A few years back there were many more of these at work than there are at present. A murrain, or rinderpest, having destroyed the cattle, the fellahs were obliged to take their place, and revert to the old shadoof of the early Pharaohnic times.

CHAPTER LVII.
ALEXANDRIA.

Wide will wear. Narrow will tear.

Ancient Alexandria left its mark on the world. Its history, however, appears to connect it rather with great names than with great events. Fancy is pleased with the picture of the greatest of the Greeks, Philip’s godlike son, Aristotle’s pupil, who carried about with him his Homer in a golden casket, the Conquistador of Asia, and the heir of the Pharaohs, tracing, with the contents of a flour-bag, the outlines of the nascent city, which was to bear his name of might, and to sepulchre his remains.

The trade of Phœnicia revived in its harbours, and on its quays. It became the Heliopolis, as well as the Thebes, of Hellenic Egypt. Even the Hebrew part of the population caught the infection of the place, and showed some capacity for philosophy and letters. Here it was that their sacred Scriptures were, in the Septuagint translation, first given to the educated world. And Plato, too, was soon more studied in the schools of Alexandria than in his native Greece.

Here fell the Great Pompey. And here, in pursuit of him, came the Cæsar, who bestrode the world like a Colossus; to be followed in our own time by the only modern leader of men, whose name, if he had possessed the generous magnanimity of the two captains of Greece and Rome, history might have bracketed with theirs.

Here ‘the unparalleled lass,’ rather, perhaps, of the greatest of poets than of history, having beguiled to his ruin the soft triumvir, preferred death to the brutalities of a Roman triumph.

Matters, however, of this kind—and they might be multiplied—are only bubbles on the surface. They interest the fancy, but have no effect on the great current of events. We, at this day, are neither the better nor the worse for them. But of the theology of Alexandria we must speak differently. It is through that that it affected, and still affects, the whole of Christendom. Sixteen hundred years have passed, and Alexandrian thought still holds its ground amongst us.

It would help us to a right understanding of what this thought was, and how it came to be what it was, if we knew something about the city, the times, the country, and the mental condition of its inhabitants. Alexandria, like Calcutta and New Orleans, having been called into existence by the requirements of commerce, had been obliged, for the sake of a harbour, to accept a singularly monotonous and uninteresting site. This alone must have had much influence on the cast of thought of its inhabitants. All who visit it will, I think, feel this. One cannot imagine a healthy and vigorous literature springing up in a place where Nature has neither grandeur nor beauty. Being mainly a commercial city, its inhabitants—as must be the case in all large commercial cities in the East—were composed of many nationalities. They had brought with them their respective religions and literatures, as well as manners and customs. It also contained the most brilliant Greek Court in the world, in which we might be certain that Greek inquisitiveness, and mental activity, would not be extinguished. This will account for the libraries and the schools of Alexandria.

We must understand why it never could become anything in the world of action. It was not because the Egypt of the Ptolemies was inferior to the Egypt of the Pharaohs. It might have been its superior in every particular of power and greatness, and yet have been unable to do anything in the outer world. What kept it quiet was a consciousness of moral and intellectual inferiority to the people time had at last educated and organized on the northern shores of the Mediterranean.

The mental activity of the Alexandrians was all connected with their libraries and schools. The work they did belongs to a condition of mind which can use libraries and schools, but which really originates nothing. It was all work upon other people’s work. They never produced anything of their own. They never could have had an Æschylus, or an Aristophanes; a Thucydides, or an Aristotle. The genius that can originate implies vigour, freedom, individuality, irrepressible impulse—in two words, expansive humanity. Nothing of this kind could have been the growth of Alexandria. The possession it was of these qualities which made the Greeks original, and great in everything they undertook: in art, in war, in government, in colonization, in philosophy, in poetry, in history. The genius which showed itself in their literature was only the same genius which showed itself in other forms and directions, as needs required: which showed itself in everything Greek. Alexandria could not have produced a Pericles, or a Phidias, or an Alexander, any more than a great writer. It would have taken the same mental stuff to make one of these, as to make a poet, an historian, or a philosopher. They all work with the same motive power. The main conditions, too, are the same in all. It is the object only to which the work is directed that varies. The Greeks were, emphatically, men. It was this that made them creative. Humanity was the soul of everything they created; the stamp upon everything they did; and this it is that gives to their work its eternal value.

The mind of Alexandria was a parasitical plant. It fastened itself on the work of others; and endeavoured to extract from it what they had already assimilated, and which its own limited capacities disqualified it from extracting, first hand, for itself from the rich store-house of Nature. It could live upon their work, and turn it to its own narrowly-bounded purposes. For instance, the Greek language had been perfected by the long series of generations who had used it, and who had known nothing of grammars and dictionaries: but at Alexandria it was studied for the sake of the grammar and of the dictionary. Homer had been loved in the Greek world, because he spoke, as a man, to men’s hearts and imaginations. He was valued at Alexandria, not for his poetry—the men and women he had created—but because he supplied a text to comment on. So with the divine dreams of Plato: their use, at Alexandria, was that they supplied some materials for the construction of systems.

It was exactly in this spirit that the Gospel was laid on the dissecting tables of Alexandria. The object proposed was to set up a skeleton to be called Christian Theology; and to inject and arrange certain preparations, to be called Christian doctrines. Here was a strange perversion. Never were the uses to which a thing had been ingeniously turned so thoroughly alien to its real nature and design. The objects of the Gospel were moral and religious. Its appeals were addressed to the ordinary conscience, and to the ordinary understanding: in them its philosophy is to be found. But the systematizers of Alexandria had no taste for dealing with such materials. The Christian religion, as presented to us in their theology, has not one particle of the Gospel in it: no heart, no soul; no human duties, no human motives—nothing human, nothing divine. It is something as hard, and as dry, as a mummy; and would be as dead, were it not for its savage, truculent spirit. It is an attempt to construct a material god, mechanically, of body, parts, and passions—the Egyptian passions of the day; such as burnt, volcanically, in the hearts of the crocodile haters, and crocodile worshippers, of Ombos and Tentyra, and impelled them to eat each other’s still quivering flesh, and drink each other’s blood hot. The watch-word, the source, the main-spring, of Christ’s religion, the one word that fulfils it, is absent from this travesty of it.

This anatomical Christianity, in which there is no Gospel, this systematic divinity, in which there is nothing divine, this mechanical theology, which contradicts the idea of God, Alexandria had the chief hand in inflicting on the world, and a grievous infliction they were. Christendom is still suffering from it. It is the anatomy of a body from which the heart, the blood, the flesh, the muscles, all that rendered it a living power, and made it beautiful and beneficent, have been removed. It is the systematization of a Hortus Siccus. It is a theology that kills religion, in order that it may examine it. The religion that is fixed and formulated; a matter of definitions, and quantitive proportions; that can be handled, and measured, and weighed; that can be taken to pieces, and put together again by a monk in his cell, just as if it were a Chinese puzzle; cannot be the living growth of minds whose knowledge is ever being extended, and of consciences that are ever becoming more sensitive. It cannot indeed, as far as these things go, be a religion at all. A religion, though burdened with them, and perpetually dragged by them into the sphere of formalism, controversy, and passion, may, and will, live on in spite of them; for nothing can kill religion: still the two are antagonistic and incompatible.

The Alexandrian theologians interpreted Christianity in accordance with the criticism, the knowledge, the ignorance, the mind, and the conscience of their day. They could hardly have done otherwise. They came from caves in the desert, and from old tombs, and they returned to them for fresh inspiration. They had a right to interpret things according to the light that was in them. So have we. Our light, however, is somewhat different from theirs. ‘The New Commandment’ was not one that at all commended itself to their sepulchral, troglodytic minds. It finds no place in their creeds. We, however, give it the first place in ours. The perfect law of liberty was unintelligible to them: their only thought about it was to make it impossible: to us it is as necessary as the air we breathe. They held that man is for the creed: we that the creed is for man. Which is right makes much difference.

For the traveller who is desirous of seeing the present in connexion with the past, Alexandria has many other reminiscences. Homer mentions the Isle of Pharos, which formed the harbour. On this classic rock Ptolemy Philadelphus built a magnificent lighthouse of white marble. This was reckoned one of the seven wonders of the world. Its name, which was borrowed from the rock on which it had been placed, has passed into most of the languages of Europe, as the appellative of these useful structures. We, however, who employ them more largely than any other people, and who have in our Eddystone the finest and most interesting structure of this kind in the world, built under widely different conditions from those of the tideless middle sea, very properly give to them a name of our own.

The causeway, three-quarters of a mile in length, which was formed for the purpose of connecting Ptolemy’s Pharos with the mainland, having been enormously expanded, in the course of two thousand years, by the same process, which, in the same period, has raised the present to more than twenty feet above the original level of Rome, is now the Frank quarter of the city. The whole of this space must, therefore, in the time of Homer, and down to the time of Alexander, have been under water.

The city, having become the capital of Egypt, grew rapidly in population, wealth, and splendour. The Ptolemies disposed of the revenue of Egypt, which had now become the chief entrepôt of the commerce of the world; and they spent it with no niggard hand in embellishing their capital. Few great cities have had so large a proportion of their space occupied by magnificent public buildings. Nothing, however, need be said here of its palaces, theatres, and temples, except that they were worthy of the city which filled the first place in the cities of the Greek world, and in the universal empire of the Cæsars was second only to Rome.

Pompey’s Pillar, as the inscription upon it informs us, was erected in honour of Diocletian.

Cleopatra’s Needle had originally stood at Heliopolis, where it had been set up by Thuthmosis III., and afterwards seen by Joseph and Moses. It was transplanted from Heliopolis to Alexandria by one of the Roman Emperors, after the time of Cleopatra. It had been cut from the granite quarries of Syené. It has, therefore, travelled from the John o’Groat’s House to the Land’s End of Egypt.

Its deservedly world-famous library recurs to every one who thinks about Old Alexandria. No other library had ever such a history. It was founded two hundred and eighty-three years before the Christian era; that is to say, before Rome had entered on her Punic wars. While those wars were raging the Alexandrians must, within the walls of this library, have canvassed the news of the day with much the same feelings with which we were ourselves, but just now, talking over the last intelligence from Sedan and Metz, from the Loire and the Seine. In the Greek world a public library had never before been heard of. It was connected with a great mass of buildings called the Museum, which was a kind of institution for the promotion of study, discussion, and learning. Eventually it contained 700,000 volumes. Of these 400,000 were at the Museum; the remainder were in a building connected with the great Temple of Serapis. With the Ptolemies the enrichment of this library was always a great concern. They dispersed their collectors wherever books were to be obtained; and were ready to pay the highest price for them. It was the boast of the city that the library contained a copy of every known book. At last it was overtaken by the fate which awaits all the works of man. In Cæsar’s attack on the city the great library of the Museum was accidentally burnt. The library, therefore, which is supposed to have been destroyed by the command of the Caliph Omar, could only have contained the books, that might have remained to his time, of the inferior library of the Serapeum. This we know had been very much dilapidated by neglect, and in other ways, during the intervening seven centuries of occasional violence, and of constant decay. One, however, is hardly disposed to acquiesce in the opinion on this subject of the historian of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; for, among so large a collection of books, there must, one would suppose, have been some precious works of antiquity, which we should now value highly, but which were then lost to us irreparably.

While we regard with reverence this great library, both for the antiquity of the date of its establishment, and for the useful and noble purposes it was intended to serve, those of perpetuating, and of extending, knowledge, we should be guilty of an injustice if we were to forget that it was not the first institution of its kind. The idea of establishing a public library, which the Ptolemies deserve much credit for carrying out liberally and thoroughly, had nothing original in it in one country, at all events, of the world, and that one was Egypt. Eleven centuries before their time, as we have already seen, the Great Rameses, in his temple-palace at Thebes, had erected a public library. The walls of it are still standing. We need not repeat what we have said elsewhere about the sculptures on its walls, the inscription over its doors, the manuscripts dated from it still in existence, and the tombs of its librarians. This was done more than three thousand years ago. Perhaps, then, other ideas and practices, we may be in the habit of regarding as modern, were also familiar to the Egyptians of that remote day. Those times, indeed, may, in some not unimportant matters, be virtually nearer to us than the times of our Edwards and Henries.

CHAPTER LVIII.
CAIRO.

Mores hominum multorum, et urbes.—Horace.

Just as the interest of Alexandria belongs to what we call antiquity, so does Cairo derive the whole of its interest from existing sources. I say what we call antiquity, for by that word we mean the classical period of Greece and Rome; but this classical period is, in reality, only the connecting link between our modern world and the old primæval world of Egypt; it is thus the true middle ages of universal history; while true antiquity is the domain of Pharaohnic Egypt. But as to Cairo: El Islam is of the things that now are, and Cairo was never anything but a Mahomedan city. Its most interesting memories are of the mighty Saladin, who fortified it, and preferred it to all other cities. It is the true capital of Arabdom. Not its holy city, but its Paris. Its history is all of Caliphs and Khedivés.

But the first thing to understand about any famous city is how it came to be where it is. Cairo is where it is, because Memphis was where it was. Its site is the natural centre of Egypt. It occupies, by the dispensation of Nature, the place in Egypt which the heart does in the human body. Being situated at the apex of the Delta, it commands the axis of communication throughout the whole of the upper country, and all the divergent lines of communication which traverse the Delta. He who establishes himself here has cut the country in two; and can concentrate all its resources, or assail any point, at his will. It is the vital centre. Just so was it with Memphis under the old Monarchy, and the Hyksos, and during the subsequent history. No sooner had an invader got a firm footing here than the rest of the country was prostrate, and helpless. The master of Cairo is the master of Egypt.

The city is situated on the right bank of the river, at the foot of a spur of the Mokattam, or Arabian, range of hills. In order to get drinkable water it was necessary that it should be placed so low as that the water of the river might be brought into it. The reader is now aware that there are no springs in Egypt, and that the water of the wells, from the nature of the soil, is brackish and undrinkable. There is, however, in the citadel of Cairo a well of sweet water; the well is sunk through the limestone, of course to somewhat below the depth of the height on which the citadel stands; and so it came to suggest to me the thought that, if borings were made of sufficient depth to pass completely through the nitrous alluvium of the valley, and to perforate the subjacent strata, it might be possible to find water fit for drinking anywhere, and everywhere. It might not often be worth while to go to this expense, because in most places it would still be cheaper to get water from the river; but it would be interesting to ascertain whether or no good water could be obtained in this way. If so, there would then be one small matter, at all events, which had escaped the sagacity of the old Egyptians.

But to return to the site of Cairo: the level ground, on which it stands, beginning at Boulak, its harbour on the river, reaches back about a mile, where it is met by the high ground, which enters the city at the south-east angle. On this point stands the citadel commanding the city. The hills of the range which throws out this spur are seen rising, to a considerable height, on the east of Cairo. They are utterly devoid of vegetation; and being of about the colour of the sand of the desert (they are of limestone), they glare in the sun, and are very striking and conspicuous objects in the scenery of the place. Wherever you leave the city, except at its north-west angle, and in the direction of the river, you enter at once on the absolute desert.

There is no view in Egypt to be compared with that from the Citadel of Cairo. The city, with all its oriental picturesqueness, is at your feet. Domes and minarets are everywhere. You look over it, and your eyes rest sometimes on the green culture, sometimes on the drab desert of Egypt. Beyond, stretching away till it is lost in the haze of distance, is the Valley of Egypt. Through it winds old Nile. It is closed on either side by the irregular ranges of the Libyan and Arabian hills. You know that these pass on through Egypt into Nubia, as the boundaries of the valley. Beyond the river, at the distance of eight or nine miles, on the lower stage of the Libyan range, stand the Great Pyramids of Gizeh. Further off, at about double the distance from you, stand the older Pyramids of Abouseir. Seen from no other point are the Pyramids so impressive. There they stand, at the entrance of the valley, and have stood for more than five thousand years, to tell all who might come down into Egypt of its greatness and glory. They have none of the forms, or features, of architecture. They are mountains, escarped for monuments, by Titan’s hands.

And a little further on are the mounds of Memphis. There lived the men—one would give something to see a day of the life of that old world—who imagined, and made these mountains. You remember that all you saw of them at Memphis was a colossal statue prostrate on the ground. As you look now on the Pyramids you understand that Colossus. These Titan builders felt themselves more than men.

You think how pleasant it would be to sit here, on the parapet of the citadel, inhaling the calumet of memory and imagination; your dear friend, however, who is with you, and who is the most patient and best fellow living, has had enough of it; and he summons back your thoughts from their flight into the far-off tracts of antique time, by a proposal to take another look at the Khan Khaleel Bazaar. As you move away you tell him, to be revenged, ‘that history, like religion, has no power over those who have no imagination; or an imagination furnished only with the images of their own sight-and-self-bounded world.’ ‘Nonsense,’ he replies; and you find yourself again jostling your way through the narrow, crowded, irregular streets of Cairo, upon an ass, with a little swarthy urchin running before you to clear your path. And though everybody seems to submit to him, and to attend readily to his shouts of ‘Right,’ ‘Left,’ ‘Mind your legs,’ you will always have to keep a sharp look-out yourself. You will often be brought to a standstill. There are no trottoirs. The people on foot, the camels, and donkeys, are all jumbled up together. The projecting loads on the camels’ sides seem almost arranged for giving you a lick on the head, and knocking you off your ass.

At last you emerge from the side streets into the Mouské. This is the main artery of the city, and here is the full tide of Cairene life. It is now between four and five o’clock, and the tide is at the top of the flood. The street is straight, and, for a Cairene street, wide enough; the crowd is great; but here everybody, as a matter of course, endeavours to make way for everybody. What you first notice is the abundance of colour. The red tarboosh is perhaps the commonest covering for the head. The turbans vary much; some are of white muslin; some of coloured shawls. The variety of dress is great. Nineteen-twentieths of the passers-by are clad in some form or other of Oriental costume. Their complexions vary as much as their dress. There is every shade, from the glossy black of the Nubian to the dead white of the Turk. The predominant colours are the different shades of yellowish brown which have resulted from the varying degrees of intermixture of Arabs and Copts. Here, at home, the men being at work during the day, it often happens that there are as many women in the street as men. In Cairo the former are often entirely wanting in the street scene, and are never seen in a large proportion. In stature the men are almost always above what we call the middle height, well proportioned, and never fat or pursy, like our beef-eating and beer-drinking people. Their features are regular and pleasing. Their bearing staid and dignified.

There are in the crowd men with water-skins and water-jars. For some insignificant coin—there are four hundred paras in a shilling—they sell drinks to thirsty souls. There are hawkers of bread, of fish, of vegetables, of dates, of oranges, and of a multitude of other matters. These articles are generally cried, if not in the name of the Prophet, still with some pious, or, if not so, then with some poetical, formula. Perhaps a carriage of the Viceroy passes containing some of the ladies of the hareem. They will be escorted by two black guardians of the hareem on horseback, one on each side of the carriage, and preceded by two runners carrying long wands, and dressed in spotless white, with the exception of their red fezes and gaily-coloured shawls. The latter they use as sashes. Each will have cost them fifteen pounds, or more.

When you have become accustomed to the people in the streets, you look at the people in the shops; of course not the Frank, but the native shops. These are merely recesses in the walls of the houses, which form the street. The merchant, or shopkeeper, seldom lives in the house, in the ground floor of which his shop is situated, but generally somewhere at a distance. He has no shopmen, or assistants. The recess, in which he carries on his business, if large, is about in space a cube of ten or twelve feet. It has no door or windows, but is closed with shutters, which the shopkeeper takes down when he comes to do business. He puts them up whenever he wants to go to Mosk, or elsewhere. When his shop is open for business he will be seen seated, cross-legged, on the floor in front of his goods. Every shop being a dark hole, and having its owner seated in front of it, reminded me of a prairie-dog village, where every hole has a prairie-dog seated in front of it, much in the same way; and, too, on the look out. These traders appear to have no Arab blood in them, but to be Greeks, Jews, Turks, Syrians, anybody and everybody except the people of the country. Many of them have an unhealthy appearance. Few of them are good-looking.

As to the houses, what most frequently attracts the eye is the carved wood lattice of the windows. The first floor is frequently advanced beyond the ground-floor. The archway of the door is, in the better class of houses, often ornamented with carved stone-work; and the door itself decorated with a holy text—reverently; perhaps, also, with some lurking idea of excluding evil influences.

But this style of building is now becoming obsolete; and the new houses in and around the Esbekeyeh, and between the Esbekeyeh and Boulak, are being built in the Frank style. The Viceroy has here, for the space of about a square mile, laid out broad macadamized streets, with broad trottoirs on each side, as if he were contemplating an European city. Not much, however, with the exception of these roadways, has yet been done towards carrying out his grand designs, except around the Esbekeyeh. This is the grand place, or square, of Cairo. It now contains a public garden, that would be an ornament worthy of any great European city. It is well lighted with gas made from English coal. As you go to the opera—for there is an opera, too, in Cairo—and return after it is over to your hotel, you are glad of the light; but you are, at the same time, conscious of a little sentimental jar. You did not go to Egypt to find coal gas, and London gas-lamp-posts in the city of Saladin, and of the Caliphs, and in the land of the Pharaohs. You are no longer surprised that the new houses are built in the Frank style.

The Mosks of Cairo may be counted by the hundred. Some have great historical interest; some great artistic merit; some are the great schools of the country.

The old Mosks of Cairo throw much light on the history of the pointed arch, particularly the oldest of them all, that of Ahmed Ebn e’ Tooloon; which, however, is in so ruinous a condition that it is no longer in use. Its date, as recorded in two Cufic inscriptions on the walls, is 879 A.D.—that is to say, three hundred years before the pointed arch was adopted in this country. It is very improbable that this Mosk of Tooloon was the first building in which it was used, because it is not introduced here hesitatingly, as would have been done had it been struggling for recognition, but is boldly and firmly carried out in every part of the structure, and even with some combination of the horseshoe shape, as if it were a form with which the architect had become so familiar that he had even begun to modify it. So great a change in construction, and in the effects produced by form, must have had to fight for some time against previously-established forms. We may, therefore, safely decide that its introduction reaches further back than the date just given. This is saying that the world is indebted for it to Saracenic thought, and taste. This need not surprise us, because at that time there was no other people whose thought was so prolific; and theirs was prolific because it had been aroused to effort by their great achievements. Just as we learn to walk by walking, and to talk by talking, so do men learn how to do great things by doing great things. Other Cairene Mosks continue this history of the pointed arch.

The Mosk of Sultan Hassam has features that are worth noticing. Few buildings exhibit greater freedom of design, which comes, I suppose, of that depth of feeling, which is able to break the fetters of thought. Such a structure could have been the product only of a time when mind was deeply moved, and had become conscious of its power. Men knew then what they wanted, and believed in themselves, that they could satisfy their want. In such times servile imitations, and reproductions are impossible. They do not express what all feel. They do not supply what all are asking for. In this Mosk the porch, the inner court, the astonishing height of the outer wall, springing from the declivity of the hill-side, all the details, and the whole general effect, show that those who built it were conscious of real, deep aspirations, and were not acting under factitious ones; and that they were conscious also of possessing within themselves the power of giving form to their aspirations. It interprets to us the mind of its builders. They were full of vigour, and self-reliance. They yearned to give expression, in forms of beauty, and grandeur, to what was stirring within them.

As I was thus communing, historically, with the intense Mahomedan feeling, which had given a voice to every stone in the building, I was interrupted by another voice, but it was one of a kind, which, we may presume, will never have a thought of clothing itself in forms of beauty, and grandeur. ‘Look,’ it said to me, ‘up there at those crosses.’ ‘No,’ I replied. ‘It is impossible. There can be no crosses here.’ The objects I was invited to look at crown the cornice of the central, hypæthral court. They bear some kind of resemblance to fleurs de lis. ‘Yes,’ the voice continued. ‘Any one can see now just how it all is. These are the old places from which those ritualists get their mediæval crosses, and all that kind of thing.’

The great Mosk of El Azar is the university of Egypt, and of the surrounding countries. The foreign students are divided according to nations. Those of Egypt according to the provinces they come from. The cycle of religion, law, science, and polite learning, as these words are understood in the East, is here taught. Some come merely to qualify themselves for professions, or occupations, in which what they may acquire here will be needed. Others come with the intention, as was contemplated in our own universities, of life-long study.

Some of the tombs of the Memlook, and of other dynasties, that have ruled modern Egypt, are good examples of oriental taste, and feeling. These tombs are generally connected with Mosks. This connexion was intended to add dignity to the tomb, and to enhance its sacredness. The Mosk and tomb together are regarded as the monument of the deceased prince. The desire to honour the dead has, in many of these monuments, produced admirable work, the beauty of which is proportionate to the depth of the desire which prompted it. Sad, however, is it to see such beautiful work now falling into decay. New dynasties in the East care nothing for the monuments of the dynasties that preceded them.

The money spent in building the utterly useless Mosk of Mohamed Ali in the citadel would have put into repair all these monuments, which abound not more in exquisite work than in historical interest; and which, then, would have been secured to the world for some centuries longer at least. But nothing of this kind can be expected of Orientals. To repair and maintain the monuments of past generations is not an idea that has ever commended itself to their minds. People build there to show forth their own greatness, and to perpetuate their own names. If, therefore, I have money to spend on wood and stone, why should I so spend it as to perpetuate another man’s name, and to set forth the greatness of some other builder? For this is what I should do if I repaired his Mosk, or palace. Would it not be wiser for me to spend it in perpetuating my own name, and setting forth my own greatness?

To us there occurs the thought of the historical value of the monuments of the past. This, however, is not an idea than can have any place in the mind of an Oriental. He has no conception of the historical value of anything; nor has he any idea of what history itself is. There can be no history where there is no progress; and his religion, by settling everything once for ever, excludes from his mind the idea of progress, and with it goes the idea of history.

But still, from our point of view, it is a waste of money and labour to build when you might repair. To repair is cheap, to build is costly. But this is precisely what commends the Oriental practice to the Oriental’s mind. That it will cost much money, and much labour pleases him. In matters of this kind, ideas of prudence and utility have no place. An hundred kings of England, we can imagine, occupying in succession Windsor Palace, and preferring it, simply on account of its antiquity, to anything they might be able to build themselves. Every one of them would think it a folly to entertain the idea of building another palace. But every Khedivé of Egypt, just like every King of Nineveh, must build a new one.

Private houses in Cairo appear to be in the same predicament as the Mosks. None are kept in a state of repair. Everything is either being built, or is falling into decay.

Every other Englishman you meet in Cairo, and it is more or less so throughout the East, has some story to tell you of the rapacity, and roguery of the bazaars. The complaint is made somewhat in the following style:—‘What do you think of that slippered, and turbaned old villain, of whom I bought this amber mouthpiece, and this kafia, having had the conscience to ask me four napoleons for each of them? I was not going to be done in that way, so I said to him, “You shocking cormorant, I’ll give you four napoleons for the two: not one para more. Four napoleons is my figure.” “Four napoleons!” he said, with a shudder, “I give you the things for nothing. Take them away with you.” And he pretended to put them into my hand. But I showed him the money. He could not stand the sight of the gold; and so you see I have got the amber, and the silk, at a fair price?’ Well: perhaps you have; or, perhaps, you have given too much for them, after all. But your story is no proof that the old fellow in slippers and turban was a rogue. It is you who do not know the circumstances and the customs of the country: and in this matter theirs differ from ours. With us there is so much competition in trade, that all the leaning is the other way. Every trader wishes to attract by the lowness of his prices. But still, here as there, the rule is to buy as cheap, and sell as dear as you can. This is the rule on which the slippered, and turbaned old fellow acts. He knows, though it is very hard for him to admit the idea—yet he admits it without understanding how it can be so—that you are travelling for your amusement. He, therefore, infers that you must have plenty of money to spare: otherwise you could not be travelling in this way. You want this kafia, or mouthpiece. There is no regular market-price, where there is so little competition. So he will try to get for it as much as he can. Small blame to him for that. When you command the market at home for any article, what do you do yourself? You ask for it what you can get, without reference to cost price. You sell a good weight-carrying hunter at a fancy price. You sell a piece of land to a neighbour at an accommodation price. If you can’t get what you asked at first, you abate something, and take less. He does the same.

You go into a shop anywhere in Italy, say a bookseller’s, and ask the price of a book. ‘So many lire,’ he replies: several more than he intends to take. He will receive it, if you give it; but he does not expect you to give it. He is very fond of a little talk; and to have a little talk with you is an agreeable addition to the pleasure of selling the book. You call this, contemptuously, chaffering; or, angrily, cheating. It is detestable to you, but the reverse of detestable to the Italian bibliopole. You are annoyed at it. He can’t understand why.

But to go back to our friend in the slippers and turban. The seat he invites you to take, and the coffee and pipe he offers to you, imply that he supposes you will not give what he asks at first; and that the price ultimately agreed upon will be the result of a long negotiation. He is in no hurry; nor, as I can show, is he without conscience. I bought a pair of bracelets of one Mohammed Adamanhoury, in the Khan Khaleel. I had liked the appearance of the bracelets, and I had asked the price. It did not occur to me at the moment that I was in Cairo, or perhaps what was the regular practice in transactions of this sort in Cairo. Perhaps I had fallen into this temporary oblivion, because the conversation and bearing of Mohammed were pleasant. I had brought him a little souvenir from an Englishman who had travelled throughout Syria with him, and knew his many estimable qualities. Mohammed’s beard was just beginning to be grizzled with age, so he had had time to see the world, and to know it. His complexion was fair for Egypt, a pale yellowish brown. His features, singly, and in their general expression, were good. His shawl-turban, and shawl-sash, and all his get up were unexceptionable. His voice and manner were as smooth as oil. His style of conversation perceptibly flowery and complimentary; but that is the manner of his people. I should myself of all things have liked to have travelled through the East with him. It would have been very pleasant at the time; and not unpleasant afterwards to be one’s self remembered, and talked of, as he talked of my friend whom, a year or two back, he had accompanied in his wanderings. But about the bracelets: I had given, without hesitation or comment, what he asked. A friend, I was travelling with, finding me at his shop, and seeing what I had bought, would like to have a pair of the same kind of bracelets. He asked the price. I told him. ‘No,’ interposed Mohammed, addressing himself to my companion, ‘your friend gave all I asked; and, therefore, I must name a less price to you.’ Conscience is then not extinguished utterly in those who ask, at first, for the goods they are selling more than the cost price, plus the legitimate profit (if there be such a thing as legitimate profit). Mohammed Adamanhoury of the Khan Khaleel is my demonstration.

CHAPTER LIX.
THE CANALIZATION OF THE ISTHMUS.

Sic vos non vobis.—Virgil.

I went from Cairo to the Suez Canal by the new branch railway from Zakazeek to Ismailia. The original direct line from Cairo to Suez has been abandoned on account of the expense both of working the inclines over the intervening high ground, and of supplying a line through the desert with water, a great part of which had to be carried in skins on camels’ backs.

As you pass along the rails you see, in the occurrence, here and there, of patches of alluvial soil in the desert, indications of former cultivation. This cultivable soil must have been created by the water of the old Bubastis Canal. You see, also, that cultivation is now re-establishing itself all along the Sweet Water Canal, which supplies the towns and stations of the Suez Canal with drinking water as it did, from the first and throughout its excavation, the army of fellahs that was employed on the work. The fact is that there is a great deal of argillaceous matter in what appears to be merely the grit, and siliceous sand, of the desert: all, therefore, that is requisite, in many places, for at once rendering it fertile is a sufficiency of water.

The history of the canalization of the desert is full of interest. The earliest attempt of the kind with which we are acquainted is that ascribed to the Great Rameses. That first Canal was between fifty and sixty miles in length. It left the Nile at Bubastis, and reached the neighbourhood of Lake Timsah. Upon it Rameses built his two treasure cities Pithom, and Ramses, mentioned in the first chapter of Exodus. By treasure cities is probably meant strongly-fortified places, in which were caravanserais for the trade with Asia, and large depôts of the warlike materials kept in store by the king for his Asiatic campaigns. That they could have been treasure cities, in the ordinary acceptation of the word treasure, is impossible. That would not have been kept on the most exposed border of the kingdom; and the treasury of Rameses must have been at Thebes, his capital, at the other extremity of Egypt. Herodotus, and others mention Pithom. The site of Ramses, though its name occurs nowhere, excepting in Exodus, has been ascertained by the discovery of a granite statue of Rameses, between the figures of the two gods, Ra and Atmu, with the name of the king several times repeated in the inscription upon it. This was found at the time of the French expedition. Rameses must have been worshipped in his own city; and his being placed between these two gods, in this piece of sculpture, shows that it belonged to a temple. The mound, therefore, of rubbish from which was disinterred this group of figures in which the king is presented as an object of worship, must be the débris of the city of Ramses. There is no doubt about the site of Pithom.

Especial interest is attached to these cities. We know that the Israelites were employed in building them: and, as it seems probable that the cities and Canal were parts of a single plan, we may suppose that the Israelites were forced to labour in the construction of the Canal also. Of this a part, that near Bubastis, still remains in use. With how much interest then does it become invested, when we feel that we may regard it as the possible, even as the probable, work of the people Moses led out of Egypt. At all events we can stand on the ruins of the cities they built with the certainty that here was the scene of their labours. But something more remains to be said. We have in this first chapter of the history of the canalization of the isthmus an ascertained date, which enables us to fix the date of the exodus. The oppression took place in the reign of the Pharaoh who preceded the one to whose reign the exodus belongs. As then the oppression took place in the reign of the builder of Pithom and Ramses, the exodus must have occurred in the reign of his son, and successor, Menophres.

The extension of the cultivated soil of Egypt was only a secondary object in the construction of this Canal. Its main object was to strengthen that side of Egypt which was exposed to invasion from the dreaded and hated Hyksos. One of the greatest works of the great Rameses was the covering the whole of Egypt with a network of waterways in connexion with the river. These Canals, or wet-ditches had a double purpose. They would greatly extend the supply of water, in exact proportion to which was the capacity of Egypt for supporting life; and they would also have an invaluable defensive utility, for they would render it impossible for a mounted army, such as that of their north-eastern neighbours would be, to overrun the country. This Canal, then, branching off from the Nile at Bubastis, and running out for sixty miles into the desert, with the strong cities of Pithom and Ramses upon it, would be the first check to an invading army, which would have either to turn the Canal, or to sit down in the desert before those cities. The history, therefore, of the canalization of the desert begins with a work, the first object of which was national defence, and which also greatly promoted the (in its case) secondary object of national extension. To create a means of communication between the two seas is not a purpose we are under any necessity for ascribing to the designers of this first Canal.

We have spoken of Rameses as its constructor, and the reasons for assigning it to him are amply sufficient, still it may be as well to remember that it might have dated far back beyond his time. The Egyptians had been great then for more than a thousand years in Canal making. This implies familiarity with the art of taking levels, and with other branches of hydraulic engineering. The Bahr Jusuf Canal, which ran parallel to the river throughout almost the whole of the valley of Egypt, and was many times as great a work as this Pithom-Ramses Canal, had been constructed at so remote a time that all tradition of its date and construction had been lost. Amenemha, under the old primæval monarchy, had carried out enormous hydraulic works in the Faioum; and Menes, the first human name in Egyptian history, had been great in this department of engineering; for he had, at Memphis, given a new channel to the Nile itself. There would, therefore, have been no difficulty whatever in this particular Canal we are now speaking of having been constructed many ages before the time of the great Rameses; and the district through which it passed was one to which attention must have been directed from very early days, both for the purpose of strengthening it against any sudden inroad, and because it was the necessary base of operations in all Egyptian invasions of Asia. It is, however, easy to wander about in the region of possibilities; what we know with certainty is that this Canal existed in the time of Rameses, that he fortified it, and that he had the credit of having constructed it.

There is no evidence that he seriously entertained the project of connecting the Nile with the Red Sea by the prolongation of the Canal. Some such idea must have occurred to so sagacious a people as the Egyptians of that day, and they would have found no difficulty in carrying it out. They made, however, no attempt of the kind. The reason is on the surface. Defence was what people were then thinking about, and a through water-way would only have been making a road for their enemies; and it would have been one, of which Arabs, as they have always shown a certain kind of aptitude for maritime affairs, and as the inlet to it might have been easily reached by sea, would not have been slow in availing themselves. There can be no reasonable doubt that there was, at that date, a great deal of commerce, on the Indian Ocean, and, therefore, on the Red Sea; indeed, we may be pretty sure that the annual number of clearances in and out of Aden in the time of Rameses would not be looked upon as insignificant at the present day.

Perhaps also the reason given by Aristotle had some weight. It was known that the level of the Red Sea was higher than that of the Bitter Lakes; the influx, therefore, of the salt water, which might take place through the Canal, if it were extended to the sea, might, it was feared, overwhelm a great deal of land which had lately been brought into cultivation by aid of the fresh water of the Canal from Bubastis.

The date of the first Canal, supposing it to be no earlier than the time of Rameses, was the fourteenth century before our era. It was still in use in the time of Herodotus, being then about one thousand years old. Necho, who planned and carried out the expedition that circumnavigated Africa, and who of all the Pharaohs was the one most disposed to maritime enterprise, was naturally inclined to the idea of connecting the Red Sea and the Mediterranean by some system of internal navigation. But whatever his designs were, he does not appear to have gone further in their execution than the extension of the Canal of Rameses, which had then been in existence at least seven hundred and fifty years, as far as the Bitter Lakes. Herodotus was informed that he abandoned the enterprise on having been told by an oracle that he was working for the barbarians.

Darius, in the time of the Persian occupation of Egypt, carried out the grand idea to its completion, by extending the work of Rameses and Necho to the Red Sea. As there had, all along, been an apprehension of the effect upon cultivation of admitting into the land the salt water, we find, as we might have anticipated, that it was not allowed a passage into the Bitter Lakes, but was kept back by a lock. The connexion of the Red Sea and the Mediterranean by an unbroken water-way was now complete. A vessel might leave the Red Sea at the modern Suez, or somewhere in that neighbourhood, and enter the Mediterranean at the Pelusiac mouth of the Nile. This through communication was in actual use in the time of Herodotus. Darius’s completion of the work followed Necho’s extension at an interval of about a century.

The ensuing century and a half was a period of troubles and decadence. We are, therefore, not surprised to hear that when Alexander the Great entered Egypt, he found the Canal no longer open. A larger expenditure may have been required to keep up the banks, and to dredge out the sand that was always drifting into the channel, than could have been commanded in such times; and so it had been neglected and had become impassable.

Another century elapses; order and prosperity have been restored to Egypt; and Ptolemy Philadelphus re-opens the connexion of the Bitter Lakes and the Red Sea. He did not clear out the old Canal of Darius which had been blocked up, and abandoned, but cut a fresh one. He had it constructed of sufficient width and depth to allow ships of war to pass from the Sea to the Lakes, intending to carry it through, on the same scale, to the Mediterranean. But this magnificent project had to wait two thousand years for its realization. It is, however, possible that Ptolemy did not contemplate the direct route. If his war-vessels could have found water enough in the Bubastic branch, he would of course have contented himself with enlarging, and deepening the Bubastic Canal. We are told that his design was that of a Canal 100 feet in breadth, and 40 feet in depth. The latter appears incredible, because unnecessary. He built Arsinöe, the modern Suez, at the Red Sea terminus of his Canal, at which he constructed locks to exclude the salt water, and retain the fresh.

There was also a second Canal from the Nile to the neighbourhood of Lake Timsah in the mid-desert. It was known by the name of the Emperor Trajan. It left the river at Babylon—possibly the Babylon from which the first Epistle of St. Peter is dated—a few miles to the south of the site of modern Cairo. It thus received its supply of water from a higher level than the Canal of Rameses. It watered a new district in its passage through the desert.

The Canals are now lost to sight for several centuries. At last, 644 A.D., they are again rescued from the obscurity into which they had fallen by the Caliph Omar, who repaired, and restored them to use. About a century after his time they were again destroyed.

There was then nothing new in the idea, or in the fact, of a water communication between the two seas. The old Egyptians had fully debated the question of whether it was better to have, or not to have it. If they had thought it advisable to undertake it, they would have engineered it in the completest manner, and on the grandest scale. They, however, rejected the plan from motives of policy. The idea was actually carried out, and through communication kept up by Persians, Greeks, Romans, and Saracens. Apropos, then, to the recent opening of the Suez Canal, we may say that the thing itself is more than two thousand years old: the idea more than three thousand.

That it is direct, that is one hundred miles in length, instead of indirect, which made the navigation nearly double that length, is the difference, and the gain.

The only absolutely new point is that it is a salt water, and not a fresh water Canal; and with respect to this, I think we may feel certain that if old Rameses, or Necho, had engineered it, instead of M. Lesseps, it would not, in this respect, have been as it is. They would have decided in favour of fresh water, because they could then have constructed it at half the cost; and would, furthermore, by so doing, have had a supply of water in the desert, sufficient for reclaiming a vast extent of land, which would have more than repaid the whole cost of construction. Instead of cutting a Canal deep in the desert at an enormous cost, they would, as it were, have laid a Canal on the desert. This they would have done by excavating only to the depth requisite for finding material for its levées, and for the flow of the water which was to be brought to it from some selected point in the river. It is evident that this kind of Canal might have been made wider, and deeper, than the present one at far less cost. The river water would then have filled the ship Canal, just as it now does the sweet-water Canal parallel to it. The sweet-water Canal now reaches Suez. A sweet-water ship-Canal might have done the same. As far as navigation is concerned, the only difference would have been that locks would have been required at the two extremities, such as Darius, and Ptolemy had at Arsinöe. These locks would have been at Suez, and at the southern side of Lake Menzaléh.

But the diminution in the cost of construction, say 8,000,000l., instead of 16,000,000l., would not have been the chief gain: that would have been found in the fact that the Canal would have been a new Nile in a new desert. It would have contained an inexhaustible storage of water to fertilize, and to cover with life, and wealth, a new Egypt. Though, indeed, not new historically; for this would only have been the recovery from the desert of the old Land of Goshen, and the restoration to it, by precisely the same means as of old, of the fertility it had possessed in the days of Jacob and Rameses.

It was natural that the French should have been the most prominent supporters of this scheme. Every Frenchman appeared to come into the world with the idea in his mind that France, by the order and constitution of Nature, was as fully entitled to Egypt as she was to the left bank of the Rhine; and that nothing but an unaccountable combination of envy and stupidity, withheld the human race, especially those to whom these fair portions of the earth belonged, from recognizing the eternal truth, and fitness of this great idea. Here we had a gauge for measuring the moral sense of the educated portion of the French nation. As to the Canal, their idea appears to have been that they were only making improvements in a glorious property, the reversion of which must be theirs. It would give them, too, such a footing in the country, and such materials for the manufacture of pretexts, and claims, that it would enable them, almost at their will, to expedite the advent of the day when the reversion would fall to them.

I heard, while I was in Egypt, that the Imperial charlatan of France had been behaving towards us in the matter of Egypt in the friendly and straightforward manner it appeared he had been behaving in the matter of Belgium. Our discerning friend, and staunch ally, I was told, had been confidentially exhorting the Viceroy to disregard English policy and advice, and to prepare for asserting his independence of the Sultan. Only let Egypt become an independent kingdom, and then there would be a clear field for the realization of the grand French idea M. Guizot declared, some thirty years ago, no Frenchman could ever abandon. Under such circumstances, nothing could be more easy than at any moment to find, in the affairs and management of the Canal, grounds for a quarrel, that is to say, for taking possession of the country: though perhaps the world, taught by history, would predict that the attempt would not succeed. The plan was to have things ready for turning to account, at any moment, any opportunity that might arise.

The catastrophe of the last twelve months would have prevented my making any such remarks as the fore going, were I now thinking of making them for the first time. In that case they would have appeared too much like being wise after the event; and too much, also, like being hard on those who are down. I feel myself, however, at liberty to make them now, for in so doing I am only repeating what I ventured to predict in print four years ago (the fact even then for some years having been manifest to many), that the rôle of the Latin race was played out. People said to me, ‘What can you mean? The French have the largest revenue, and the finest army in Europe, and their military glory is untarnished.’ My answer then was, that the French army appeared to have been changed into a Prætorian guard; and that the French nation appeared to have lost the moral instincts which compact a population into a people. Among those instincts, the sense of right and justice, the absence of which we have just been noticing, holds the first place: without it the formation and maintenance of political society are impossible.

There are three towns on the Canal: Port Saïd, which is almost entirely French; Ismailia, which is so to a great extent; and Suez, which has a French quarter. At these places I heard that the French were far from popular; that they are regarded as arrogant, and illiberal in their dealings with the Arabs they employ; and vicious to a degree which offends even the tolerant natives, who trouble themselves very little about the morality of unbelievers. It would require some familiarity with the life of these places to know how far such accusations are true: they are only set down here because they are current among the non-French part of the population. Certainly, however, at Port Saïd some things are paraded which in most other places an attempt is made to keep out of sight. But Port Saïd is the Wapping of the Canal. This town is built on a reclaimed sand-bar. The hotel is better than one would have expected. The Place, Place Lesseps it is called, is ambitiously large. In some parts of the town the stenches make you feel bad: of course on a low sand-bar there can be no drainage. It seems to do a considerable trade in pilgrims: those we saw were chiefly Russians. On being introduced to the American Consul—he appeared to be an Italian—he offered to show me his garden. It proved well worth seeing. It contained a good collection in a small space, of African, Australian, and Brazilian plants. Many, that with us require almost constant stove-heat, were flowering here, in January, in the open air. Among the inhabitants, as at Ismailia, are to be found many of the (in the East) ubiquitous Greeks.

Ismailia is very preferable every way to Port Saïd. It is in the heart of the desert, and on the shore of a considerable lake. I can imagine a not unprofitable, or over dull, month spent here by a man who finds a pleasure in coming in contact with strange sorts of people; and who also takes an interest in natural history and botany; for the natural history and botany of such a place must be very peculiar. It must, too, be pre-eminently healthy, for it combines the pure air of the desert with that of the sea-shore, for such is now the shore of Lake Timsah. It has a pretty good hotel, a place yclept Champollion, a French bazaar, a promenade, an Arab town, a good house surrounded by a garden belonging to M. Lesseps, and a more ambitious one surrounded by sand, built by the Khedivé, at the time of the opening of the Canal, for the Empress of the French, and his other Royal visitors. Ismailia might also be made the head-quarters for a great deal of very interesting Egyptological inquiry. Within easy distances are Pelusium, the Abaris of the primæval monarchy, Arsinöe, Pithom, Ramses, and Heroonpolis. Persians, Greeks, and Romans alike left their marks on this neighbourhood. Here, too, was the Goshen of the children of Israel. It would be interesting also to ascertain how far into what is now desert reached the land that was then cultivated; and what, relatively to the sea and river, was the level of the bottom of the old Canal.

Suez is in a state of rapid decay. Many houses are untenanted. This has been caused by the diversion of the traffic. What formerly passed through the town now passes by it on the Canal. Here, again, the hotel is good. Its Hindoo waiters are to be preferred to the Italian waiters of Alexandria and Cairo. They are clean, quiet, and alert. Nature seems to have fitted them for the employment, but perhaps you might think they have heads for something better.

I was two days in passing through the Canal from end to end. For this purpose I chartered at Suez, jointly with two friends who happened to be with me, a small steamer. It was an open boat that might have held four passengers. The crew consisted of three men. The distance is about one hundred miles. Herodotus gives it very accurately when he says that the Isthmus has a width of one thousand stadia.

To one who is on the look out for beautiful scenery and stirring life, the two days’ steaming from Suez to Port Saïd will not give much pleasure. As long as you are on the actual Canal, you pass along a straight water-way between two high banks of sand. The sky overhead is the only additional object in Nature. There is no vegetation. There are but few birds. There is no animal on the banks, or insect in the air. At long intervals there are small wooden shanties for watering stations. A great many dredging machines are passed. Some are at work; but the greater part of them are rusting, and rotting. They are large floating structures, moved and worked by steam. Each of them costs between five and six thousand pounds. Their business is to dredge up the mud, or sand from the bottom of the Canal to a lofty stage which each carries, a little above the level of the bank. From this elevation what is dredged up is run down on an incline to the point on the bank where it is to be deposited, and there shot out. They are called mud-hoppers. They are hideous-looking objects; of all the works of man that float the most unsightly: but they are what you here see most of. You occasionally have the excitement of meeting a small steamer, carrying some official on the business of the Canal, or for his own pleasure. The officials have quite a fleet of these little steamers: almost every one his own. The rarest object on the Canal is that for which it was constructed: a vessel of one, or two, thousand tons passing through it. On the first day we saw three. This was a good day. On the second day, our good luck, and that of the Canal, continuing, we saw the same number. But, as the wind was fresh, two of the three had got aground: of these two one was an English troop ship with a regiment for India on board. Three little steam tugs were hauling away at each. It is difficult to say how large vessels, drawing within an inch or two of the greatest depth of water, and which is to be found only in the mid-channel, can manage to keep out of trouble: the margin for inattention, bad steering, for not making proper allowance for wind, &c., being not far from nil. There are mooring posts all the way along to enable one ship to make fast while another goes by. The company’s regulations give them the power of blowing up a vessel they consider hopelessly grounded.

But you are not always in a straight watercourse, between two high mounds of sand. The two Bitter Lakes, and the Lakes Timsah and Ballah, are passed through, and cover nearly half the distance. In the large Bitter Lakes you are pretty nearly out of sight of land. A glass shows you that there is a slight rise in the ground along their shores, upon which are seen, here and there, stunted tamarisks, more like shrubs than trees. The bed of these lakes, before the water was admitted, was full of detached trees of this species. They grew larger on the lower ground. The tops of some are still seen in and above the water. If, therefore, you leave the channel which is buoyed out for you, you stand a chance of being snagged. I take it for granted that in old time when none but sweet water from the Nile, brought by the Bubastis and Babylon Canals, was admitted to this district, much land now under salt water, and much more in the neighbourhood, was then under cultivation.

The evaporation from the surface of the Bitter Lakes, as might be expected in the hot dry desert, is enormous. This I was told had perceptibly affected the climate, making it more cloudy, and more inclined to occasional showers. Of course, whatever effect it has had, must be in this direction; but seeing how small a proportion these lakes bear to the contiguous seas, I am disposed to think the amount of this effect very slight. There is, however, another effect of this rapidity of evaporation, which we may measure, and weigh, and which is felt by the fish. It increases the proportion of salt in the water to such an amount, that in summer one gallon of water yields thirteen ounces of salt: a gallon of Dead Sea water yields eighteen ounces. This, last summer, killed almost all the different species of fish that had come into the lakes the previous autumn, on the first opening of the connexion with the two seas. I was told that at that time, the surface of the water was covered with the dead. It is believed that some species proved, by surviving, that they possessed a power of resisting a degree of saltness they had never been exposed to before.

Lake Timsah is a large natural basin in the very centre of the Isthmus. As its area is much less than the Bitter Lakes, while its shores are higher, and more irregular, it possesses an approach to something like a kind of picturesqueness you might not have been expecting. In this midland harbour we found a fleet of large vessels: some of them men-of-war; some even ironclads. A sense of surprise comes over you at seeing not only a pleasing expanse of water in the thirsty, scorching waste (how one wishes it were fresh water), but in addition a fleet of mighty ships in the mid-desert.

The traffic of the Canal is increasing rapidly; and, I think, for obvious reasons must go on increasing, till it has absorbed the whole of the traffic of Europe with Asia. At first people were not prepared for it. They had not the data requisite for their calculations, and so they would hardly have been justified in building steamers in advance of the demonstration of the practicability, and advantages of the route. That demonstration is now complete: and I suppose there are now very few sailing vessels being built in this country, or anywhere else, for trading with the East. This part, therefore, of the question, may, I take it for granted, be regarded as settled. I saw one of the P. and O. boats, the Candia, passing through the Canal. The whole of its fleet must eventually make use of it. The only wonder is that they do not do so at once; for, while they are hesitating, multitudes of other steamers, built for the India and China trade, and in which every improvement for economizing coal, and for the convenience and comfort of the passengers, has been adopted, have been put upon the line of the Canal. And as the majority of passengers object to the trouble and expense of being hurried overland from Suez to Alexandria, a great many of the old customers of the P. and O. Company, and of travellers who would have been glad to use the boats of so well-known a concern, are now going by these new boats which take the through route. And this is only what the P. and O. Company must, like the rest of the world, come to at last. Their delay is only driving the custom into the hands of their rivals. It is in fact creating, and maintaining those rivals. When, however, they have taken to the Canal, this single company will pay for its use more than 100,000l. a year: for they will be bound to despatch, as they do now, a vessel each way each week. The tonnage of their vessels will not be less than two thousand. The Canal charges are 8s. a ton, so much for each berth for passengers, and some other items, which together bring up the total to not far short of 10s. a ton. This on a vessel of not less than 2,000 tons, will not be less than 1,000l.[10] Each way this will have to be paid. But it is what others are doing; and it will be, on the whole, a gain over the present system of land-transport, for passengers and cargo from Suez to Alexandria, and vice versâ; and practically, whatever it may be on paper, at no loss of time.

For the Canal to take 100,000l. a year from one company would seem a great deal: but it is a sum that is soon absorbed in the expenses of so big a concern. I understood that at the beginning of this year: it was February when I was there: they were taking about 1,000l. a day. This was a great advance on what had been done previously; but it implies only one ship of 2,000 tons through in the twenty-four hours. And is very far short of what is indispensable for completing and keeping up the works. This at present demands 3,000l. a day, or about 1,000,000l. a year. It seems imperative that, even if a few more inches are not added to the depth of water, the deep mid-channel should be widened.

The traffic is increasing so fast, and it is so certain, that all who can come this way will, that we may believe that the Company, whether the existing one, or some new company to which the existing one may be obliged to sell the concern, will somehow or other find the means for carrying out the necessary completions, and for maintaining the affair; but it is hard to believe that, even if every keel that cuts the Indian Ocean were, going and coming, to take this route, anything could remain over for dividend in the lifetime of the present shareholders; for even should a dividend be declared, the incredulous world will surmise that it is paid, not because there are net profits to justify it, but with a view to enabling the Company to raise loans needed for necessary completions, for which the revenue would be inadequate.

It is natural to ask of what advantage to Egypt is this Canal? We might answer, and perhaps rightly, that if the Isthmus had been divided by the wand of a magician, and the Canal thus made at the cost of a word, or of the waving of a hand, presented to the country, the advantage would not have been very considerable. But we will take things as they are: Suppose the case of the P. and O. boats. They have hitherto discharged everything at Suez, and at Alexandria; and their passengers and cargo have been carried across Egypt. We will suppose that the cost of this operation has been for each boat 1,000l. The whole of this 1,000l. has been left in Suez and Alexandria. It was so much toll paid to Egypt for so much work done in helping passengers and cargo through. But how would it stand with the same boats going through the Canal? We will suppose that they will pay precisely the same amount. But the question is, into whose hands will it go? Primarily to the account of the Company. If it should so happen that the concern has reached the point of paying dividends, a great portion will then be remitted to Europe for dividends. From that Egypt will derive no benefit; nor from that portion of the salaries of officials they may save, and remit to Europe; nor from what will be paid in Europe for materials, and machinery. The officials, too, being Europeans, and always in the end returning to Europe with their families, will not at all increase, or improve, the human capital, or human stock, of the country. In fact, Egypt would gain little except from the small amount of native population that would be brought into being to supply the food, and some of the other wants of the officials, and others employed on the Canal. Some of these latter also, being natives, must be reckoned as part of the gain accruing to Egypt. With these small exceptions, Egypt is no more benefited by English ships passing through the Canal, than it would be by a flock of wild geese flying over the Isthmus.

But the question which concerns us is, of what use will the Canal be to ourselves? To us it will be of very great use. First to our commerce. As our trade with the East is taking this route as fast as steamers—which alone can pass through the Canal and Red Sea—can be substituted for sailing-vessels, there can be no doubt but that, on the whole, it is advantageous for them. For this trade all kinds of sailing-vessels are now antiquated. That it would have been better to have left things as they were, the owners of these sailing-vessels will naturally think: but this is a rococo thought. The P. and O. Company also will, of course, have to accommodate their business to the new order of things. This will be costly and inconvenient to them: and they, too, will grumble; and, for a time, endeavour to fight against necessity. The world, however, will not be convinced with the logic of either; nor will they be convinced themselves with their own arguments.

The new order of things is superseding the old only for one reason, and that reason is that the preponderance of advantages is on its side. It does not claim the advantage in every respect. So much for the commercial side of the question, as far as we are concerned.

It is manifest that for Southern, and Central Europe the Canal is, in proportion to the amount of their trade, a still greater advantage than to ourselves. It will be a great lift to Marseilles; and even in a higher degree to some port on the Adriatic, whichever it may be that will be found most convenient for Central Europe. It may be Trieste. It may be Venice. It is a question of harbours, railways, and policy conjointly considered. If it be Venice, the channel from the sea to the quays of the Grand Canal will have to be deepened. If the German provinces of the Austro-Hungarian empire should eventually gravitate towards Northern Germany, it will, I suppose, be Trieste. Or, should a mid-European railway be completed from Hamburg to Constantinople, much of the traffic of East with West may again be attracted to the quays of the old world’s Imperial centre.

But there is for us another question besides the commercial one: that is the naval one. Suppose England at war with some maritime power. It is obvious that in these times it would be impossible for us to protect our vast eastern commerce on the open ocean. But if the whole of this commerce be carried on through narrow seas it may be possible. These narrow seas for the whole distance is precisely what the Canal gives us. After having left the extreme point of China, where we have the naval station of Hong Kong, our trade will enter the Straits, where we have Singapore. It will then pass by Ceylon, another naval station. Here, whatever may be coming from Calcutta and Madras will join the main stream. It will then be forwarded to Aden, which will guard the Red Sea; and which is, in fact, the key of the Canal. Malta will make the Mediterranean safe. The short remainder of the voyage will be to a great extent protected by Gibraltar, and Plymouth. Nothing could be more complete. The Canal gives us the very thing we want: a defensible route. From a naval point of view, a defensible route is a great gain; but very far from being all the gain. The whole trade with Europe of India, China, and the Straits, and a great part of that with Australia must take the line of the Canal; and all of it must be carried in ocean steamers; that is to say, four-fifths of all these steamers will belong to England. This will give to us a fleet of ocean steamers outnumbering those of all the rest of the world combined; and these will always be at our disposal for, to say the least, the transport of troops, and of the materials of war. Of the remaining fifth a large proportion will be built in this country, as our resources and arrangements for the construction of iron ships and marine engines are superior to those of any other country.

If, then, it should prove that this forecast of the advantages of the Canal to us in war is correct, it would seem to follow that, in time of war, we should be under the necessity of holding it ourselves; or, at all events, of occupying its two extremities. We should be obliged to take care that neither an enemy blocked it up, nor a friend permitted it to go out of repair.

CHAPTER LX.
CONCLUSION.

Beatus qui intelligit.—Book of Psalms, Vulg.

No one can see anything in Egypt except what he takes with him the power of seeing. The mysterious river, the sight of which carries away thought to the unknown interior of the great Continent, where solar heat, evaporation, and condensation are working at their highest power, giving birth abundantly to forms of vegetable and animal life with which the eye of civilized man has yet to be delighted, and instructed; the lifeless desert which has had so much effect in shaping, and colouring, human life in that part of the world; the grand monuments which embody so much of early thought and earnestness; the contrast of that artistically grand, morally purposed, and wise past with the Egypt of to-day; the graceful palm, and the old-world camel, so unlike the forms of Europe; the winter climate without a chill, and almost without a cloud; all these are certainly inducements enough to take one to Egypt; but how differently are they seen and interpreted at the time by the different members of the same party of travellers; and with what widely different after-thoughts in each!

And just as many of us are dissatisfied with life’s journey itself, if we can find no object in it, so are we with the travel to which a fraction of it may have been devoted, if it be resultless. Should we, when we look back upon it, be unable to see that it has had any issues which reach into our future thought and work, it seems like a part of life wasted. For, whatever a man may have felt at the time, he cannot, afterwards, think it is enough that he has been amused, when the excitement of passing through new scenes is over, and he is again in his home,—that one spot on earth where he becomes most conscious of the divinity that is stirring within and around him, and finds that he must commune closely with it.

But as to particulars: that which is most on the surface of what Egypt may teach the English traveller is the variety of Nature. It has not the aspects of the tropics, in which the dark primæval forest, and tangly jungle, are the predominant features; yet its green palmtufted plain, and drab life-repelling desert, are a great contrast to our still hedge-divided corn-fields, and meadows; to our downs, and heaths, and hills, and streams; and so are its clear sky, and dry atmosphere to our clouds and humidity. To see, and understand something about such things ought, in these days, to be part of the education of all who can afford the time and money requisite for making themselves acquainted with the riches of Nature; which is the truest, indeed the only, way to make them our own. In saying this, I do not at all wish to suggest the idea that in variety, and picturesqueness of natural beauty, the scene in Egypt is superior to what we have at home. The reverse is, emphatically, the case. Every day I look upon pleasanter scenes than any Egypt can show: scenes that please the eye, and touch the heart more. Nature’s form and garb are both better here. So, too, is even the colour of her garb. To have become familiar, then, with the outer aspects of Egypt, is not only good in itself, as an addition to our mental gallery of the scenes of Nature, but it is good also in the particular consequence of enabling us to appreciate more highly the variety and the beauty of our own sea-girt home.

Of course, however, the source of deepest interest in any scene is not to be found in its outer aspect, but in its connexion with man. If we regard it with the thought of the way in which man has used, modified, and shaped it, and of how, reversely, it has modified, and shaped man, how it has ministered to his wants, and affected the form, and character of his life; or if we can in any way associate it with man, then we contemplate it from quite another point of view, and with quite different feelings. Indeed it would almost seem as if this was the real source of the interest we take even in what we call the sublime and beautiful in nature. Man was only repelled from snow-capped mountains, and stormy oceans, till he had learnt to look upon them as the works of Intelligent Mind akin to his own. Conscious of intelligence within himself, he began to regard as grand and beautiful, what he had at length come to believe Supreme Intelligence had designed should possess these characteristics. This is, perhaps, the source of the sentiments of awe, and admiration, instead of the old horror, and repugnance, with which we now contemplate cold and inaccessible barrier Alps, and angry dividing Seas. To Homer’s contemporaries, who believed not that the gods had created the visible scene, but that, contrariwise, they were posterior to it, and in some sort an emanation from it, the ocean was only noisy, pitiless, and barren. And the modern feeling on these subjects has, of late, been greatly intensified, and become almost a kind of religion, since men have come to think that they have discovered that these grand objects were brought into being by the slow and unfailing operation of certain general laws which they have themselves ascertained. So that now, to some extent, they have begun to feel as though they had themselves assisted at their creation: they stood by, in imagination, as spectators, knowing, beforehand, the whole process by which Alps and Oceans were being formed. That they were able to discover the laws and the steps by which Omnipotent Intelligence had brought it all about, alone and sufficiently demonstrates the kindredness of their own intelligence. It is the association of these ideas with natural objects that causes the present enthusiastic feeling—almost a kind of devotion—they awaken within us, and which would have been incomprehensible to the ancients, and even, in a great measure, to our forefathers. They seem like our own works. They were formed by what is, in human degree and fashion, within ourselves. We know all about them; almost as if we had made them ourselves.

Regarded, then, in this way, it is not the object itself merely that interests, but the associations connected with it. Not so much what is seen, as what is suggested by what is seen. The object itself affects us little, and in one way; the interpretation the mind puts upon it affects us much, and in quite a different way. In this view there are reasons why the general landscape here, at home, should be more pleasing to us than it is in Egypt. It is associated with hope, and with the incidents and pictures of a better life than there is, or ever has been, in Egypt. I have already said that the natural features are not so varied and attractive there as here; their value to us, in this respect, consisting in their difference. But what I now have in my mind is the thought of the landscape as associated with man; and in this other respect also I think the inferiority of Egypt great.

The two pre-eminently grand and interesting scenes on this kind in Egypt, where our Egyptian associations with man’s history culminate, I have already endeavoured to present to the imagination of the reader. They are the scene that is before the traveller when he stands somewhere to the south-east of the Great Pyramid, looking towards Memphis, and commanding the Necropolis in which the old Primæval Monarchy is buried, the green valley, the river, and the two bounding ranges; or, to take it reversely, as it appears when looked at from the Citadel of Cairo; and the scene, for this is the other one, which is presented to the eye, again acting in combination with the historical imagination, from the Temple-Palace of the great Rameses at Thebes, where you have around and before you the Necropolis, and the glories of the New Monarchy.

What, then, are the thoughts that arise in the mind at the contemplation of these scenes? That is precisely the question I have been endeavouring to answer throughout the greater part of the preceding pages. My object now, as I bring them to a close, is somewhat different; it is to look at what we have found is to be seen in Egypt from an English point of view; with the hope that we may thus be brought to a better understanding, in some matters, both of old Egypt and of the England of to-day. This will best be done by comparing with the Egyptian scenes, which are now familiar to us, the English scene which in its historical character, and the elements of human interest it contains, occupies, at this day, a position analogous to that which they held formerly. These are subjects that are made interesting, and we may say intelligible, more readily and completely by comparisons of this kind than by any other method. Anatomical and philological comparisons do this for anatomy and philology, and historical comparisons will do the same for history. We shall come to understand Egypt not by looking at Egypt singly and alone, but by having in our minds, at the time we are looking at it, a knowledge of Israel, Greece, Rome, and of the modern world. Each must be set by the side of Egypt.

We will come to ourselves presently. We will take Israel first. It proposed to itself the same object as Egypt, that of building up the State on moral foundations, only it had to do its work under enormous disadvantages. Considering, however, the circumstances, it attained its aims with astonishing success. We must bear in mind how in the two the methods of procedure differed. So did their respective circumstances. Egypt had the security which enabled it freely and fully to develop and mature its ideas and its system. This precious period of quiet was no part of the lot which fell to Israel. It had to maintain itself and grow up to maturity under such crushing disadvantages as would have extinguished the vitality of any other people, except perhaps of the Greeks, the periods, however, of whose adolescence and manhood were also very different from those of Israel. At those epochs of their national life they had freedom, sunshine, and success. Israel, on the contrary, had then, and almost uninterruptedly throughout, storm and tempest; overthrows and scatterings. The people never were long without feeling the foot of the oppressor on their necks. Still they held on without bating one jot of hope or heart; and by so doing made the world their debtors, just as did the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans. Regarding the point historically, we cannot say that one did this more than another; for, where all are necessary, it would be illogical to affirm that one is greater or less than another. Neither the seeing nor the hearing, we are told, can boast that it is of more importance than the other; for, were it not for the seeing, where would be the hearing? and, were it not for the hearing, where would be the seeing? In the progress of man the ideas, and principles, and experience contributed by each of these constituent peoples of humanity were necessary: and if the contribution of any one had been wanting, we should not be what actually we are; and that something that we should be then would be very inferior to what we are now. We could not dispense with the gift of any one of the four. Egypt gave letters, and the demonstration of the fact that morality can, within certain limits, be deliberately and designedly shaped and made instinctive. Greece taught the value of the free development of the intellect. Rome contributed the idea of the brotherhood of mankind, not designedly, it is true, but only incidentally, though yet with a glimmering that this was its mission. Without Rome we might not yet have reached this point. Israel taught us that, if the aims of a State are distinctly moral, morality may then be able to maintain itself, no matter how great the disadvantages, both from within and from without, under which the community has to labour; and even when morality is unsustained by the thought of future rewards and punishments: a lesson which has thrown more light on the power the moral sentiments have over man’s heart than perhaps any other fact in the history of our race.

I bow down before the memory of the old Israelite with every feeling of the deepest respect, when I remember that he abstained from evil from no fear of future punishment, and that he laid down his life for truth and justice without any calculation of a future heaven. In this view the history of the world can show no such single-minded, self-devoted, heroic teachers as the long line of Hebrew Prophets. They stand in an order quite by themselves. Socrates believed that it would be well with him hereafter. They did not touch that question. Sufficient unto them was the consciousness that they were denouncing what was false and wrong, and that they were proclaiming and doing what was true and right.

We will now turn to the Greeks. The interest with which they contemplated the antique, massive, foursquare wisdom of Egypt is well worthy of consideration. It is true they did not get much from Egypt, either in the sphere of speculation or of practice: still for them it always possessed a powerful attraction. The reason why it was so is not far to seek. The Egyptians had done great things; and they had a doctrine, a philosophy of human life. This was that philosopher’s stone the Greek mind was in search of. And they inferred from the great things done by the Egyptians (and this was not a paralogism) that there must be something in their doctrine. In fact, however, they learnt little from Egypt: for if it was the cradle, Greece itself was the Holy Land of Mind. Nor was it possible that they could learn much from it, for the two peoples looked upon society and the world from quite different points of view. Greece acted on the idea that in political organization, and in the well-being of the individual, man is the arbiter and the architect of his own fortune. Egypt acted on the supposition that these things rested on an once-for-all heaven-ordained system. Greece believed that truth was to be discovered by man himself, and that it would, when discovered, set all things right; and that freedom, investigation, and discussion were the means for enabling men to make the needed discovery. Egypt thought that truth had been already communicated; and that freedom, investigation, and discussion could only issue in its overthrow. What Greece regarded as constructive, Egypt regarded as destructive. It could not therefore learn much from Egypt.

Rome we will now set by the side of Egypt. It will bring the two into one view sufficiently for our purpose, if we endeavour to make out what Germanicus must have thought of old Egypt, when he was at Thebes. He must often have compared it with Rome; in doing which he could, of course, only view it with the eyes of a Roman. And the time for such a comparison had arrived, for the work of Rome, and the form and pressure of that work upon the world, were then manifesting themselves with sufficient distinctness. What he was in search of was light that would aid him in governing the Roman world. Probably he came to the conclusion that the wisdom of Egypt could be but of very little use to him. The aim of Egypt had been all-embracing social order, maintained by morality, compacting the whole community into a single organism, in which every individual had his allotted place and work, neither of which he could see any possibility of his ever abandoning, or even feel any desire to abandon. Egyptian society had thus been brought, through every class and member, to do its work with the regularity, the smoothness, the ease, the combined action of all its parts, and the singleness of purpose of a machine. I need hardly repeat that they had understood that the morality by which their social order was to be maintained must be instinctive, and that they had made it so. The difference between them and other people in this matter was, that they had understood distinctly both what they wanted for their purpose, and how to create what they had wanted. Germanicus must have been aware, if he had seen this point clearly, that no government could frame the general morality of the Roman Empire; and that the single moral instinct upon which he would have to depend, if he could create it, must be the base and degrading one of obedience and submission brought about by fear. No attempt could be made, in the world he expected to be called to govern, to cultivate an all-embracing scheme of noble and generous, or even of serviceable, morality. Much, indeed, of what was best would have to be repressed, and stamped out, as hostile and subversive; as, for instance, the sentiment of freedom, and the consciousness that the free and full development of a mans inner being (in a sense the Athenian and the Christian idea) is the highest duty. He would have to provide not for what would encourage his future subjects to think for themselves, and to make themselves men, but for what would indispose them to think for themselves, and would make them only submissive subjects. He had to consider how many abundant and virulent elements of disorder, discontent, and corruption could be kept down: under such a system an impossible task. These evil growths of society had, each of them, been reduced to a manageable minimum, spontaneously, by the working of the Egyptian system; but, under the circumstances of the Roman world, they were inevitably fostered and developed. The application, however, of the Egyptian system to that world was out of the question and inconceivable. So, here, Egypt could give him no help. It could not show him how he could eliminate or regulate these evils. He would not be able to get rid of the elements of discord and discontent in the Egyptian fashion, by creating such instincts of order and submission as would dispose every man to accept the position in which he found himself as the irreversible appointment of Nature. Nor, again, would he be able to counteract social corruption, in the Egyptian fashion, by making virtue the aim of the state, of religion, and of human life.

There were also two other problems to the solution of which he would have to attend. How was the ring of barbarians that beleaguered the Empire to be kept in check? and how was the enormous military force that must be maintained for the internal, as well as the external, defence of the Empire to be prevented from knowing, at all events from using for its own purposes, its irresistible, unbalanceable power? For doing every thing of every kind he had to do, he had but one instrument, and that was force, law being degraded into the machinery through which that force was to act; and being also itself at discord with much that was becoming the conscience of mankind, that is, at discord with its own proper object. He could make no use of the Egyptian instruments, those, namely, of general morality, of religion, and of fixed social order. The task, therefore, that was before him, however strong the hand and clear the head might be which would have to carry it out, was ultimately hopeless. For one of two things must happen: either men must rebel against the order he would have to maintain, and overthrow it, or it must corrupt and degrade men. For, in the long run, nothing but law and religion, both in conformity with right reason, and aiming at moral growth, can govern men; that is to say, government must aim at human objects, to be attained by human means. Men, of course, can be controlled otherwise, as, for instance, by armed force, the only means that would be at the disposal of Germanicus; but then the product is worthless. Egypt, therefore, could give him no assistance. It could only tell him that the task before him was to him an unattainable one. It was not the one the Egyptians had taken in hand, nor could it be carried out by Egyptian means. A great fight had to be fought out in the bosom of Roman society, and under such conditions that its progress and issue would be the ruin and overthrow of society, as then constituted.

We all know that the man who, in a period of dearth, withholds his corn for a time, is thinking only of himself, though it eventually turns out that what he did was done unintentionally for the benefit of the community: a law, above and beyond him, had been working through him, and shaping his selfish act so that it should contribute to the general good. So was it with the Roman Empire. It subjugated and welded together all people merely to satisfy its own greed, but in so doing it had further unfolded and advanced the world-drama of human history. When it had played out its part, it was seen that that part could not have been dispensed with, because, though so hard for those times, it was essential to the great plot, for it was that that had given birth to, and brought to maturity, the sentiment of the unity and brotherhood of mankind.

And now at last we come to ourselves. All, including Egypt, have become teachers to us. We are the inheritors of the work of all. To us—and how pleasant is it to know this—the wisdom even of old Egypt is not quite a Dead Sea apple, something pretty to look at, but inside only the dust of what had been the materials of life. We can feel our connexion with Egypt, and that we are in its debt; and we shall not be unworthy of the connexion, and of the debt (a true debt, for we are benefited through what they did), if we so make use of them as that those who shall come after us shall have reason to feel that they, too, are, in like manner, debtors to ourselves. Inquiries of this kind enable us to discover what are the historical, which means the natural and actual, bases of our own existing civilization.

What we now have to do is to compare ourselves with old Egypt. Things of this kind become more intelligible when made palpable to sense by being taken in the concrete. We have looked on the scenes in Egypt which are invested with an interest that can never die, because it is an interest that belongs to the history of humanity. By the side of them we must set the scene in the England of to-day, which holds the analogous position. Of course it must be in London. And as it must be in London I know no better point at which we can place ourselves than on the bridge over the Serpentine, with our back upon Kensington, so that we may look over the water, the green turf, and the trees to the towers of the old Abbey and of the Palace of Westminster. The view here presented to us is one which obliges us, while looking at it, to combine with what is actually seen what we know is lying behind and beyond it. It is not a scene for which an otiose glance will suffice, because it is precisely the connexion between what is before the eye, and what is to be understood, that gives it its distinguishing interest.

What is immediately before you, in its green luxuriance of turf and leaf, is peculiarly English; you might imagine yourself miles away from any city, and yet you are standing in the midst of the largest collection of human beings ever brought together upon the earth: what is around you is hardly more the capital of England than of the world. Strange is it to find yourself in the midst of such an incomprehensible mass of humanity, and yet at the same time in the midst of a most ornate scene of natural objects—water, trees, turf. Just as in the Egyptian scenes, where the interests of its history are brought to a focus, the preponderant objects presented to the eye are graves and temples in the desert, which tell us of how religious and sombre a cast was the thought of the Egyptians, who could see nothing in the world but God, and could regard life only in connexion with death; so here, too, we find, as we take our stand in the midst of this English world-capital, that we can see nothing of it; that it is hid from our eyes by the country enclosed within it. This alone tells us something about the people. It intimates to us that those who have built this world-wonder have not their heart in it; that it is against the grain for them to be here: they do not love it: they do not care to make it beautiful: that, unlike their Latin neighbours, they are not a city-loving people; that the first and strongest of their affections are for the green fields, the wavy trees, and the running streams; and that they have, therefore, reproduced them, as far as they could, in the midst of the central home of their political life, to remind them of what they regard as the pleasanter and the better life. But it is strange that this very fondness for rural life is one of the causes that have contributed to the greatness of this city. It has been the love of Nature, and the hardihood of mind and body the people have acquired in their country life, which have disposed them to go forth to occupy the great waste places of the earth; and so have helped in enabling the Nature-and-country-loving English race to build up an Empire, out of which has grown this vast, but from the spot where we are standing in the midst of it invisible, city.

Each also of the two great buildings, whose towers are seen above the trees, has much to tell us about ourselves. There is the old Abbey, reminding us of the power religion has had and will ever have over us, though not now in the Egyptian fashion of something that has been imposed upon us, but rather of something that is accepted by us; and of our determination that it shall not be constructed out of the ideas and fixed for ever in the forms which belong to ages that, in comparison with our own really older and riper times, had something to learn, and not everything to teach. It is precisely the attempt to invest Christianity with Egyptian aims and claims, fixity and forms, which is arraying men’s minds and hearts against it; and, in some parts of Christendom, making the action of society itself hostile to it. It is this attempt which is in a great measure depriving it of the attractiveness and power it possessed in its early days when it was rightly understood: though then it was, necessarily, not only a private care, but one that had also to strive hard to maintain its existence against the fierce and contemptuous antagonism of the collective force of the old pagan form and order of society. If men are now turning away from what they once gladly received, it can only be because what is now offered to them has ceased to be what it was then—the interpretation, and expression, and the right ordering, of all that they knew, and of the aspirations of their better nature. The phenomenon is explained, if we have reason for believing that men then regarded Christianity as an honest organization of knowledge, thought, and morality, for the single purpose of raising and bettering human life, but now regard it as, in some measure, their priestly organization for the purpose, primarily, of maintaining priestly domination, through the maintenance of a system which was the growth of widely different times and circumstances.

It cannot be seen too clearly, or repeated too often, that Christianity did not originate in any sense in priestly thought, but was, on the contrary, a double protest against it, first in its own actual inception, which included a protest against priest-perverted Judaism, and antecedently in the primary conception of the previous dispensation, which included a protest against priestly Egyptianism; so that neither in itself, nor in its main historical source, could it originally have had any priestly or ecclesiastical, but only broadly human and honestly moral aims.

This will, by the way, assist us in forming a right estimate of the character of that argumentum ad ignorantiam we have heard so much of lately, that Protestantism is only a negation of truth, and an inspiration of the Principle of Mischief. Looking back along the line of our own religion, we find that Moses, speaking historically, was the first Protestant; and that the Saviour of the World was, in this respect also, like unto him. As, indeed, have been, and will be, more or less, in the corrupt, but though corrupt, yet still, on the whole, advancing currents of this world, all who are wise and good, and who have the courage of their wisdom and goodness. It will also assist us to understand that religion does not mean systematic Theology and organized priestly domination, which are its degeneration, and into which the ignorance and carelessness of the mass of mankind, and the short-sightedness of some, and self-seeking of others, of its constituted expounders are tending always to corrupt it; but that it means, above all things, the ideal theory of perfect morality and virtue, combined with the attempt to work it out practically in human life, so far as is possible, under the difficulties and hindrances of this world, supported by the good hope of its actual complete realization in a better world to come.

The history of old Egypt is very much the history of the character, working, and fate of the priestly perversion (as we must regard it now) of religion, even when the attempt is made, as it was in that case, honestly, and without any violation or contradiction of the original principles and aims of the religion. As respects the modern world, the lamentable and dangerous consequences of this perversion of religion are to be traced, in some form or other, in the actual moral and intellectual condition of perhaps every part of Christendom. We see indications of them amongst ourselves in individuals, and even in classes. The legitimate action of religion has been in many cases not merely neutralized and lost, but directly reversed. It ought to generate the instincts that contribute to the order, the unity, the building up of society; whereas, by aiming at ecclesiasticism, and endeavouring to retain what is at variance with its own true purpose, it has given rise to unavowed repugnances, to fierce antagonisms, to repulsion of class from class, and even among some of hatred to the very order of Society; that is to say, it has produced instincts that contribute, and that most energetically, to disorder, disunion, and the overthrow of Society; proving the truth of the saying that nothing is so bad as the corruption of that which is best. Religion is the summa philosophia which interprets, harmonizes, systematizes, and directs to the right ordering of Society, and of the individual, all knowledge from whatever source derived, all true and honest thought, all noble aspirations, all good affections. Development and growth ever have been, and ever must be, a law of its existence: nothing else can maintain its continuity. And as, notwithstanding this necessity of development, its end and aim must all the while, and for ever, be one and the same, development and growth do not and cannot mean the overthrow of religion, as some have told us, and will continue to tell us, but, on the contrary, the enlargement and strengthening of its foundations, and the better ordering and furnishing of the superstructure.

The very name of the building before us—The Abbey—reminds us that, as far as we ourselves are concerned, we have accepted and acted on the principle of development, adaptation, and correction in our religion. The old name, belonging to a past order of things, is evidence that this principle has once been applied; and so it supplies us with a ground for hope that it will be applied again, whenever a similar necessity may arise. History, indeed, assures us that this must be done always, sooner or later, for in all ages and places the religion of any people has ever been, in the end, what the knowledge of the people made it; but it makes a great difference whether what has to be done be done soon, or whether it be done late. If the former, then the continuity of growth and development is not interrupted. If the latter, then there intervenes a long period of intellectual and moral anarchy, of religious and irreligious conflict. The consequences and the scars of the conflict are seen in what is established eventually. It is found that some things that were good have perished; and that some that are not good have become inevitable.

By the side of the old Abbey rise the towers of the Palace of Westminster—a new structure on an old site. That which first occurs to the beholder, who has old Egypt in his thoughts, is its inferiority in artistic effect to the stupendous but simple grandeur of the Egyptian Priests’ House of Parliament in the hypostyle Hall of Karnak, with its entourage of awe-inspiring temples, its vast outer court, and its lofty propylons. In that hall he had felt that its great characteristic was not so much its grandeur as its truthfulness to its purpose, of which there is not one trace to be found in the home of our great National Council, which one might survey carefully, both internally and externally, without obtaining the slightest clue for enabling him to guess for what purpose it was designed. But how grand, I hesitate to say how much grander, is the history which the site, at all events, of the building we are looking at brings into our thoughts. It has not indeed numbered the years of the Egyptian Panegyries. They might have counted theirs by thousands, while our Assembly counts its by hundreds. And we must also remember that they assisted at the birth, and watched by the cradle, of political wisdom. True they swathed the infant in the bands of a fixed religious system; but, then, they could not have done otherwise; and what they did, under the restrictions and limitations which times and circumstances imposed upon them, was, notwithstanding, good and precious work; and we comparing that work of theirs with much that has since been done, and is now doing, see that, though it was crippled and distorted at every step by their evil necessities, it was done wisely, and well, by men who clearly understood what they wanted to do, and how it was to be done. Our Parliament had to do its work under very different and even opposite conditions. This island—indeed, this part of the world—was not an Egypt where none but corporations of priests and despotic rulers could be strong. We could not, on the contrary, be without chieftains’ strongholds, and strong towns, too. While, therefore, with us the armed possessors of these strong places accepted religion, they could resist and forbid ecclesiastical encroachments, and could thus save Society, through saving the State, from ecclesiastical domination. They were strong and free, and so could nurture freedom, instead of standing by and looking on while it was strangled and buried out of sight. They were, too, the heirs of Israelite, Greek, Roman, and German traditions; and these they could keep alive, even without quite understanding them, until the day came when they might be carried out more fully and harmoniously; and more might be made of them than had been possible even in the days, and in the countries, which had given them birth. That has been the slow but glorious rôle in human history of these English Parliaments, of which that Palace of Westminster at which you are looking is the shrine: a spot most sacred in human history, and which will be closely interesting to the generations that are to come when time shall have forgot the great Hall of the Panegyries of Egypt; for the History of the freedom of Religion, of Speech, and of the Press, of Commerce, and of political and almost of human freedom itself, is the History of these English Parliaments.

The History, then, of these two buildings throws much useful light on the history of the later phases of the progressive relations to each other of the State and of the Church; and of the rights, the duties, the proper field, and the legitimate work of each. The questions involved in these points have been answered very differently at different times, in accordance with the varying conditions of society: but the answers given have, on the whole, been such as to assist us in understanding two particulars of importance: first, that the character of the relation of the two to each other among any given people, and at any given time, is dependent on the conditions of society, then and there; on the point knowledge has reached; the degree to which it has been disseminated; and on the course antecedent events have taken. (The relation, at any time established, does, of course, re-act on the conditions which gave rise to it, and so has some effect in shaping, and colouring, their character in the proximate future.) And, in the second place, that there is observable, throughout History, if its whole range be included in our view, a regular evolution and ever-growing solution of the great question itself.

All the peculiarities, and particulars of the history, of these two buildings, such, for instance, as that they stand side by side, and yet are quite distinct from one another; that the Ecclesiastical building is very old, very ornate, and imposing, and was very costly; and that the Civil building is modern, but on an old site; that it too was costly, and is very ornate and imposing, and in its ornamentation and aspects affects somewhat the Ecclesiastical style; that they are in the hands of distinct orders of men belonging to the same community; that the work carried on in them is quite distinct, and yet that ultimately their respective work is meant to contribute, by different paths, and with different sanctions, to the same end, that is to say, the bettering of man’s estate—all this symbolizes with sufficient exactness the history and character of the conflicts, and of the relations, past and present, of the Church and of the State amongst ourselves.

I am here taking the word Church in its widest, most intelligible, and only useful sense—and which is the interpretation history puts on the phenomena the word stands for—that of the conscious organization of the moral and intellectual forces and resources of humanity for a higher life than that which the State requires and enforces. It is untrue, and as mischievous as untrue, to talk of Religion—that is, the effect on men’s lives of the doctrine which the Church has elaborated—as if it were something apart, something outside the natural order of things, something up in the air, something of yesterday, which has no root in man’s nature, and the history of which is, therefore, not coincident with the history of man. Like every thing else of which we have any knowledge, it is the result of certain causes. And in the case of this effect, of which the Church is the personal embodiment, the affiliation is distinct and palpable. Poetry and Philosophy are as much manifestations of it, as what we call Religion, when we are employing the word in its popular, restricted signification. They do, indeed, so entirely belong to it that there could be no advance in Religion, I might almost say no Religion at all, without them. And, conversely, Religion supplies to the bulk of mankind all the Poetry and Philosophy that will ever be within their reach. Poetry (which uses Art as one of its instruments of expression), dealing with things both objectively, as they appear to address themselves to us, and subjectively, as they are seen through the medium of our own sentiments; and Philosophy, dealing with the ensemble of things as they are in themselves—the two, working in these ways, and endeavouring to organize sentiment and knowledge, or, in other words, human thought and the world of external facts, for the sovereign purpose of nurturing and developing our moral being, if they do not give rise to Religion, yet have, at all events, largely contributed towards expanding, purifying, and shaping it. Every one can see how Philosophy and Poetry contributed each its part to the construction of the Old Dispensation. It is equally plain that Christianity originally rested on a profoundly philosophical view of the Old Dispensation, considered in connexion with the then new conditions of the world. And it was, precisely, because the view taken was so profound, because it went so completely to the bottom of all that then and there had to be dealt with, that it was felt and seen to be thoroughly true. For the same reason it was as simple as it was true. And it was because it was so entirely in accord with man’s nature and history, and with the conditions on which the world had then entered, that it was understood to be, and received as, a Revelation from God. This was the internal evidence. And in the old Classic world, which we can now contemplate ab extra, and without prepossession, we see that the only teachers of Religion were first Poetry, and then Philosophy: at first mainly the former, and afterwards mainly the latter. And thus were they the means by which the outer world, at all events, was prepared for Christianity.

If, then, we take the word Church in the sense I am now proposing (and I am concerned here only with the interpretation History gives of the phenomenon), it will help us to understand how it happens that every Church, at certain stages in its career, comes into conflict with the State, or the State with the Church; and, too, how it happens that, at certain conjunctures, the action of the State, as it is, is to restrict and to thwart the action of the Church, as it should be; and why it is that, in the end, the latter must always carry the day. It will also lead us to think that in the future the Clergy will not have the entire decision of religious questions; but that, strange as it may sound to us, the Poet, the Historian, and the Philosopher will, sooner or later, be able to make their ideas felt in the discussion and shaping of these matters. It has been so in the past; and we may suppose that it will be so again in the future. Even now the lay Prophet has no insignificant auditory, and it is one that it is growing rapidly in every element of influence. We have no reason for believing that the world will be content to leave, for ever, its own highest affair in the hands of those only whose function, as understood and interpreted, at present, by the majority of themselves, is to witness to what were the thoughts of their own order, in an age when that order thought for mankind; and did so, sometimes, not in complete accordance with the common heart, conscience, and aspirations of mankind, certainly not with what they are now, but rather with what the Church supposed would complete and strengthen its own system; at all events, always in accordance with the insufficient knowledge, sometimes even with the mistaken ideas, of times when the materials supplied by the then existing conditions of society, and by the then state of knowledge, for the solution of the problem, were not the same as those supplied by our own day.

In old Egypt—under the circumstances it could not possibly have been otherwise—the Church administered, and was, the State: the State was contained within it. The distinction between things civil and things religious had not emerged yet. This fact deeply modified the whole being of the Church. Its resultant colour thus came to be compounded of its own natural colour and of that of the State. This primæval phase can never again recur. The increase and dissemination of knowledge; the idea and the fact of civil as opposed to ecclesiastical, we may almost say of human as opposed to divine legislation, and the now thoroughly well ascertained advantage of the maintenance of civil order by civil legislation, have made the primæval phase, henceforth, impossible among Europeans, and all people of European descent. We may add, that it has, furthermore, become impossible now on account of the higher conception that has been formed of the duty and of the work of the Church itself.

The Middle Ages present to our contemplation the curious and instructive picture of a long-sustained effort, made under circumstances in many respects favourable to the attempt, and which was attended by a very considerable amount of success, to revert to and to re-establish the old Egyptian unspecialized identity of the two. This effort was in direct contradiction to the relation in which the early Christian Church had placed itself to the State; though, of course, it was countenanced, apparently, by the early history of the Hebrew Church, which, like that of Egypt, had necessarily embraced, and contained within itself, the State, in the form and fashion that had belonged to the requirements of those times. That it had been so with it, however, only shows, when we regard the fact, as we can now, historically, that society, there and then, was in so rudimentary a condition, that its two great organs of order, progress, and life had not yet been specialized; the ideas and means requisite for this advance not having been at that time, among the Hebrews, in existence.

The State, here, amongst ourselves, had, throughout the whole of this middle period, been asserting that it had a domain in which it was supreme; that the Church had usurped a great part of this domain, and was still endeavouring to extend its usurpations; and that there could be no peace till the whole of this usurped ground had been recovered. At last the State became sufficiently enlightened and strong to establish its supremacy in the domain it claimed; and to estop the Church from its usurpations. This was a great gain. The work, however, was very far from having been completed. What was done, though much, was in truth only a beginning. What further was required was that the State should forthwith address itself to the discharge of the high and fruitful duties that belonged to the position it had assumed. But the fact was that it did not yet fully and clearly perceive either what had become its own sphere, rights, and duties, or what had become the sphere, rights, and duties of the Church. Some, indeed, of the conceptions it formed on these points were entirely erroneous, as both the teaching of History—now better understood—and the inconveniences, the evils, and the necessities of our present condition have since demonstrated. The correction of these errors is a very important part of the task of the present generation. The unsettled character of the actual relation of the State and of the Church to each other, and the resultant uneasiness and tenderness felt by each, and the way in which, by these causes, each is at present crippled for much good it might be doing, are to be attributed to these errors. These are matters in which History is our only guide and interpreter. A knowledge of the origin, nature, aims, and fortunes of this long conflict in past times, enables us to understand its present position, and to foresee its future course. We are at a certain point in a chain of events: and nothing throws light on the events that are coming except the events that have been now evolved.

When ideas, through their having been traditional for many generations, have got a strong hold on men’s thoughts and feelings, it is impossible to break away from them, and in some matters to face in the very opposite direction, at a moment. Ideas grow, and decay: they are not subject to instantaneous transformations, like the figures in a kaleidoscope. This explains the partial acquiescence by the State in the theory that the Church was only the State acting in another capacity: as it were a committee of the whole House for some politically necessary objects; and with an authority that must be maintained. There was merely a colourable amount of truth in this. Practically, and relatively to the condition society had reached, it was a mistake; and one that was unworkable in every particular. The Church, whatever might have been the case in the early stages of society, is not now the State in another capacity. It has ceased to have now any directly political objects. It has no authority in the sense in which the State has: the authority of the State being such as can be enforced by pains and penalties, and by physical constraints; whereas the authority of the Church is only that of moral and of intellectual truth—as much as, and no more than, it claimed eighteen hundred years ago. In this matter its present advantages are that it has not to contend for existence against hostile established religions, and a consequently hostile tone of morality and of society; for what is now generally recognized, in the moral order, is precisely its own principles.

The logical and practical issue of this mistake was the mischievous conclusion that the teaching of all morality, including that which is necessary for the order and well-being of modern societies, must be left exclusively to the Church; and that the State must confine its own action to the repression of crime, and to the protection of person and of property; and this only by the way of punishment. Now each of these two propositions has, in a certain sense, and from a certain point of view, though not those belonging to these times, enough plausibility to enable a kind of defence of it to be set up; but, at the same time, each contains such an amount of real falsity to the existing circumstances and conditions of society, as to issue in incalculable mischief both to the State and to the Church; both in what it has caused, and is causing, to be done, and in what it has hindered, and is hindering, from being done.

This was a mistake which assigned to the Church work, which what have now become its constitution, its real objects, and the means and forces at its disposal, incapacitate it from doing; and which led the State to abdicate what is now its highest, and really paramount, function. It put both the Church and the State in a wrong position, and on a wrong path. It enfeebled, depraved, and shackled both. It brought them into inevitable conflict with each other. It made them both aim at what could never be more than very imperfectly attained by the means they were respectively endeavouring to employ. Its results were confusion, anarchy, and failure. Hence came about the neglect by the State of national education. And hence the claims of the Church to educate the nation. Hence the fierce contradictions to these claims, expressed in a blind demand, as if that were the only way of effectually contradicting them, for secular education, that is to say, for the exclusion of morality from education, and its limitation to an acquaintance with the instruments of knowledge, plus a little physical instruction. This would make things far worse than they are at present. It would be prohibiting the acquisition, by those who are now the depositories of power, of the knowledge and sentiments requisite for its right use. It would be creating, and setting at work, in the midst of us, the most efficient machinery imaginable for the general demoralization of the community. It would be going some way towards transforming the commonwealth into an aggregation of wild beasts, but of wild beasts possessed of knowledge and reason. The concession of this by the State would be the renunciation of its first and most imperative duty. Hence, in short, all the imbroglio and the evils of the present situation of this great question; and all the misunderstandings and hot conflicts between those on the one hand, whom logic, working with wrong data, has made secularists, but to the exclusion of secular morality, the chief point of all, and, on the other hand, those whose fealty to what is highest and best, and should be supreme in man’s nature, even when regarded only as a political animal, has obliged them to enrol themselves as supporters of (I am afraid we must say internecine) denominational teaching in the education of the people. It is obvious that, as it is the duty of the State to regard the community as a single family, and to endeavour to bring its members to act harmoniously together, it would be better, both theoretically and practically, to exclude the inculcation of these differences from the Schools of the State: that, if it must come, would come with less evil from the denominations themselves.

But truth, reason, right, and History must in the end triumph. It is the duty of the State, and we rigidly exact from it the performance of it, to punish and repress crime: it must, therefore, be its duty, but this we will not allow it to perform, to teach that kind of morality which manifestly has a tendency to prevent the commission of crime. The evil is done when the crime has been committed: à fortiori, then, it is better to prevent than to punish it. It is the duty of the State, and we energetically insist on its being discharged effectually, to protect person and property: à fortiori, then, it must be its duty to teach that morality which shall dispose men to respect the rights of person and of property. It is the duty of the State to do what it can, within its own sphere, to promote the well-being of its members; we may presume, then, that it is its duty to teach that morality which shall have a tendency, above every thing else the State can do, to secure this great object. How can it be argued that the State does rightly and wisely in neglecting the one means which stands first in the order of nature, and which is emphatically the most efficient, for bringing about its great paramount object? To deny that the means for doing this duty are within its sphere, is to deny that it has any duty at all, except that of punishing. Possibly such means may not be within the sphere, as some define it, of the political Economist. But, though a Statesman ought to be a political Economist, he ought to be something besides. And it may be very bad political Economy to allow in these days the mass of the people to be vicious. This may, in the highest degree, be destructive of wealth. But, at all events, what the Statesman has to lay his measures for is the well-being of the community, of which wealth is only one ingredient; and which, too, may be so distributed, and so used, and productive of such effects and influences, looking at the community generally, as on the whole not to promote its well-being. At all events, man, even when regarded in his social capacity exclusively, does not live either by, or for, bread alone.

The present condition of society is never to be lost sight of. And the two most prominent elements of its present condition are the general diffusion, throughout all classes, of political power, which almost means that the decision of political questions has been entrusted to the most ignorant and uninstructed, because they are the most numerous, part of the community; and the fact that every member of the community is now required to think, and to act, and to take charge of, and to provide for himself. Here are two reasons, which have made it as much the duty of the State to teach, as to repress, and to punish; for knowledge, and this means pre-eminently moral knowledge, has become quite as necessary to it for self-preservation. Though, indeed, punishment is a mode of teaching, and the policeman and the magistrate are a kind of teachers; but it is as unreasonable, as suicidal, to have recourse to no other mode of teaching, and to no other kind of teachers.

I think, then, that none but unstatesmanlike Economists will deny that it is the duty of the State to see to the education of the whole people. The Egyptian Priest, and the Hebrew Prophet, never made, nor could have made, a mistake of this kind; to their apprehension the right training of the people was the paramount duty of a Government—the very purpose and object for which it existed. This must, amongst ourselves, be given mainly in schools established everywhere. We have now at last got so far as to attempt their general establishment. The schools, however, are only machinery; and the great question is, what kind of work this machinery is to do? and the State will not discharge properly its duty in this all-important matter, if it does not take care that the schools shall teach the morality indispensably required, under existing conditions, for the well-being of society. This morality means the principles of Justice, Truth, Temperance, Honesty, Manliness, Forbearance, Considerate Kindliness, Industry, Thrift, Foresight, Responsibility. These are political and social, and perhaps also economical, necessities of modern communities. They are now the first great wants of society. Speaking generally, they can be taught to the masses of the people, and to the whole people, best, and, in fact, only by the State. Every one, I think, must be ready to acknowledge, that if the State, during the last fifty years, had seen to their having been taught, so far as schools and early training could have taught them, to the population of this country, we should be in a widely different position—all the difference being on the right side—from that in which we are at this day.

It is just because the State has made, at best, only half-hearted attempts to do any part of this work, and has even at times loudly proclaimed that it saw that it was not its duty to undertake it, that is to say that it was its duty to renounce its most important duty, that that part of the community in which the moral instinct predominates, has turned to Church organizations, and called upon them to undertake it. And this is a reason why many of this class have been attracted to that particular branch of the Church which advances, most loudly, the most unqualified claims to the superintendence of the whole domain of morality, not making any distinction between that which is social, civil, and political, and that which belongs to the higher sphere of the spiritual life. Had the State seen its duty in this great matter, and endeavoured to act up to it, nothing of this kind would, or could, have occurred. On the contrary: the wisest and best part of the community would have supported it in carrying out what it had undertaken, with their whole heart and soul.

Of course it is a mistake to look to the Church for this kind of work. Neither the Church of Rome, nor any other Church, either in this, or in any other, country, has the means necessary for enforcing this kind of teaching, or even for bringing it home, generally, to the bulk of the population, that is to say to the very part of it which most needs it. Nor under any conjuncture of circumstances, which can be imagined as possible, will they have the means for doing it. And even further, if the powers necessary for the purpose could be conferred upon them, it would be putting them in a false position to call upon them to undertake this mundane, political work. Besides that, the false positions into which events and circumstances have already, more or less, brought all Churches, have so damaged their credit with large proportions of the population, in all the foremost nations of the world, as that their teaching of this kind would not, generally, be received, would even be strenuously resisted; and it would still further weaken them, were they to attempt to teach these things for these purposes. It would bring them before the world as mere instruments of national police—a position that is now so utterly and glaringly at discord with the purpose and idea of a Church, that its assumption would go a long way towards obscuring altogether in men’s minds that purpose, and that idea; far too much in that direction having been done already. We know how disastrous an effect the assumption, to some extent, of this position has had, in this and other countries, on some branches of the Church. This is true now, and will continue to be so, till the Church shall have become an organization in which all of us, laity as well as clergy, women as well as men, who shall be animated by the desire for the higher moral and spiritual life, shall find ready for us places and work; and until, in this matter, the first effort amongst us shall not be to secure this-world power, and social and political position, which must always be accompanied by separations and antagonisms, and is demoralizing, and destructive of the very idea of a Church; but to reform and improve, and to lift above the world; an effort which is actively and fruitfully moral, and of the very essence of the work of a Church. This is truly spiritual work.

Taking things, then, as they are, any Church would be but a bad and inefficient teacher of the political, we may even call it the secular, kind of morality we are now thinking about. While every one can see that, as it is an affair of the State, and comes within its sphere, and is useful for its purposes; and as it is the duty, and the interest, of the State to teach it; and as the State has, and alone has, the power of teaching it, it might be well and properly taught by the State. But it may also be remarked that no Church can afford to give to this work of the State the first place in its thoughts and efforts. Every branch of the Church, from the greatest down to the least, must be occupied, primarily, by its own necessities. Self-preservation is the first law of nature, in the case of Churches as well as of every thing else that has life. The first care, therefore, as things now are, of every Church must be to maintain and enforce its own system; and, as part of the same effort, to weaken those whose systems are opposed to its own. This, however disguised, must be a main object with all of them. That it is so, is very disastrous for Churches; still it is a necessity of their present position. And the efforts that arise out of this necessity can, at the best, be only non-moral: in truth, one cannot but think that they must generally be demoralizing, and even immoral: at all events, they can only be made at the expense of the higher morality, which is the true domain of the Church. But, however much this point may be controverted, the other is an obvious fact, and incontrovertible, that no Church has the power of teaching to the community, and this is especially true of the most numerous and least instructed part of the community, that morality which is now necessary for the well-being of political societies. In this matter there is a wide difference between past and present times. Formerly this teaching, however desirable it might have been, was not indispensable under the old restrictive and paternal systems of society. All that has now passed away. We have drifted from those moorings, and out of those harbours. Our population has been agglomerated into large masses; and these masses have been put into a position to exercise the power which resides in numbers. Every one, too, is now called upon, and this is a most important element in the consideration of what ought to be done, to take care of himself. No class is now put in charge of another class. The moral training, therefore, which these conditions require has become the paramount object and first duty of the State; and, one way or another, perhaps the highest personal mundane interest of every member of the community; and all would do well to demand from the State the discharge of this duty.

That the State should awake to a sense of its duty in this matter, and act up to that awakened sense, would be no encroachment on the domain of the Church. In so doing, indeed, it would set free, and strengthen, the Church for its own proper work. The State cannot do the work of the Church, any more than the Church can do the work of the State. Each has now, distinctly, marked out for it its own sphere, its own aims, its own rights, and its own duties. The world is rapidly advancing to a correct understanding of all this. Each should, properly, by attending to and doing its own work, help the other. Each is necessary to the other. The morality the State has charge of is that which, obviously, contributes to the right ordering and prosperity of the commonwealth generally, and of its members individually. It is such as can be expounded, and made intelligible to all and acceptable to many. Much of it too can be enforced on all. Not, of course, in the old Egyptian fashion, but in a fashion which is in accord with the conditions of modern societies.

There can be few things more mistaken and ridiculous than to urge that the Master of a School, because he is a layman, cannot teach such morality as the State requires for its own maintenance, and for the well-being of its members. He is just as capable as the Minister of Religion, or as any body else, of learning his own proper work. The point that really needs to be seen clearly is that the proper work of the State School Master, and of the Minister of Religion, so differ, as that each is incapable of teaching fully and rightly what ought to be taught by the other. The Minister of Religion puts himself quite in a false position, and contradicts the idea of his office, when he undertakes the work of the State; and the School Master goes out of his way, and passes beyond the work of the State, when he enters on the ground of the Minister of Religion. From the time that civil societies existed, or that men had come to act from a sense of duty, all well disposed Fathers of families, not excluding Masters of Schools, have deemed themselves qualified to teach, and have taught, with more or less success, to their children such ethics as they themselves had attained to a knowledge of, and thought desirable. Let any one refer to the duties I just now enumerated, as socially and politically necessary in these days; and, when he has considered what they are, will he be disposed to assert that a man of ordinary intelligence, the business of whose life it is to teach, whose attention has been particularly directed to this subject, and who has studied it with the knowledge that he must teach it, will, after all, be unable to teach it? Or would any teacher, with that list in his hand, say that it never would be in his power to give lessons on each of the heads it contains; and to see that the practice of the pupils corresponded with what he taught? If the Clergy could do this, why not the Masters of Schools? The fact, however, is that the Clergy cannot, and that the Masters of Schools can.

Nothing else that is taught in Schools can be taught so naturally, so easily, and so surely. Almost everything that occurs, or that is done, supplies ground for a lesson on the subject. In nothing else that we have to teach do we find a foundation laid for our teaching already, as it is here, in the instinctive moral sentiments which have, some how or other, come to be, or, if not, which may be made to be, a part of the pupil’s nature. The discipline, too, of life here again aids the teacher in a manner, which is not the case in anything else he has to teach. The Ethics the State requires may be taught, as the occasion in any, and each, case will suggest to the teacher, either practically, or dogmatically, or scientifically; either with a reference at the moment to the principle of utility, or to the voice of conscience, or to experience. Lessons of this kind may also be set forth in Parables, or illustrative stories: a large proportion of the reading lessons now used in Schools have this aim. Nor would there be many who would object to reference being made, in the teaching of the State School-Master, to the Religious ground, that is to say, to the future life: though of course it is manifest that this would belong rather to the teaching of the Church and of the Minister of Religion. Practically, however, that is with respect to the substance and form of the virtues taught, there would be no antagonism between the two: for even with respect to Charity, which Religion elevates above Justice, the layman would still have something to say in the same sense, for he would show that the kindliness, and consideration for others, he taught supplemented and went beyond Justice. Indeed, what antagonism could there be, seeing that our ideas of the several virtues, wherever they differ from what Aristotle or Cicero would have taught, are what our Religion has made them to all of us alike? The chief difference, indeed, I can make out would be a very small one, for it would be the importance the lay-teacher would have to assign to industry and thrift, secondary virtues of which popular Religion does not take much notice: an oversight which, of course, arises out of popular misapprehensions, such, for instance, as those we are all familiar with in respect of the purpose and character of the present life, of the meaning of faith, and of the teaching of Jesus Christ on the subject of Divine interposition in the current affairs of life.

But, however, this little difference, though indeed it happens to be one that must ultimately disappear, for it arises out of a misconception, will help us to understand the difference between the morality the State requires and that which the Church presents to us. The former is limited to what is useful politically and socially, and for mundane purposes; while that of which the Church has charge (there being ultimately no real contradiction between the two) consists of the same principles, only purified, elevated, and rendered more fruitful by the action of higher motives. It is that which is in thought perfect; the morality of the kingdom of God, that is of those who have been brought to understand that they have a citizenship which is not of this world, and whose conversation is above. It is that morality which is cast in the mould of the ideas we endeavour to form of the moral attributes of the Deity; or rather the application of that to our own present condition: its members endeavour to form God within themselves. This cannot be enforced. The idea of constraint contradicts its nature. Its motives are found in men’s spontaneously engendered conceptions of moral perfection; and in the hope of a future life, which alone can supply a stage and conditions suitable for the complete realization of such conceptions. The rights of the Church are those of humanity to complete freedom in its effort to advance and purify its ideal of the moral and spiritual life. This has been its work from the beginning, though in the early stages of society it embraced the State, and has subsequently often, during the struggles of the State to establish its independence, been in conflict with it: sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes both having been in the wrong: all this History explains. Its true position is to be in advance of the State. It elaborates and diffuses that interpretation of man’s nature, and position, and of the knowledge man has attained to, those conceptions of virtue and that morality which the State, following in the wake of the Church, adopts in its own degree and fashion, and makes in such degree and fashion the aims and principles of its legislation. Every virtue, however elementary and indispensable, according to our ideas, might once have been beyond the power and the ken of the State. We can imagine such a condition of things, as that, during its continuance the State would have been unable to enforce and inculcate the principles of common honesty, and even of responsibility. It may once have been so here, just as it is still, to this day, in Dahomey. Scientifically, the condition of Dahomey is as much a part of the subject as the condition of England. The question is, what has brought about the difference? The answer is the Church—the Church that was in Egypt, that was in Israel, that was in Greece, that was in Rome, that was in the forests of Germany, that has been, and is, amongst ourselves. The Church has, all along, been going before and shaping, little by little and step by step, higher and clearer conceptions of right, and of duty, and of life; and the State has followed, little by little and step by step, accepting and adopting what the Church had made possible for it. Its position has generally been, and ex rerum naturâ it must be so, behind the Church. This is seen distinctly in the early days of Christianity. The Church was then working out, and diffusing, much that the State afterwards recognized and acted upon. This is their true relation to each other. It is not merely that the nation, organized for its immediate mundane wants, is the State, and that humanity, organized for the needs of its higher life, is the Church; but that, besides this, in the progress of society and of humanity, each is indispensable to the other. Universal History tells us this: and from universal History, in a matter of this kind, there is no appeal. And what universal History tells us the History, as far as it goes, of the two famous buildings before us confirms.

And now we must take off our thoughts from the two great organizations of society, whose action and interaction have all along been at work in shaping our political, social, and moral growth, and making us what we are, symbols of which, in the two buildings before us, we have been looking upon, and must turn our thoughts to the great million-peopled city itself, of the existence of which we are reminded, at the spot where we have taken our stand, chiefly by a few lordly mansions, glimpses of which we catch, here and there, through the trees. What variety of life is stirring within its widely differing regions! How much energy and power, and how much waste of power, and neglect of opportunity, are there! What principles are struggling into existence! What principles are dying out! What a conflict of principles is going on! We shall think not only of the lordly mansions environing the parks that are spread out before us, but equally of the commercial city on the banks of the river, and of the moiling and toiling, the rough and gin-drinking myriads of the manufacturing quarters of this world-capital. We shall, in our thoughts, set by the side of what is refined, and intellectual, and energetic, what is frivolous and enfeebled, what is rough, and degraded, and vicious. We shall become sensible of the uncertainties, as well as of the power, of the great intellectual and moral organism that is at work all around us.

How much is there that is good and hopeful in all classes, and how much in all that is evil, and evil enough almost to cause despondency! How vast and complex is the whole! Your thought enables you to understand that the railway and the telegraph have made the city in which you are standing the centre of English business and life, in a manner that was impossible formerly; and more than that, for the ocean steamers and electric cables have made it the centre of the business of the world. How does the imagination, when stirred by the suggestions of the scene, picture to itself the fashion in which are peopled the decks and saloons of the great steamships that are hurrying, outward and homeward, on all seas and oceans, to carry out the plans that have been originated and matured here! You think, too, of the countless messages that are flashing to and fro, beneath those seas and oceans, every moment, for the same purpose. Here is the heart of the world. The life-sustaining blood, in the form of human thought, and which carries along in itself the elements of construction as well as of life, is ever going forth from this heart, and coming back to it again. How many tens of thousands of steam-engines, in as many mines and factories, are throbbing and working to supply the wants, and maintain the wealth, of this manifold Babylon we have built. Of this wealth we see an exhibition here every day; for this is the spot for the daily parade of one of its braveries. How have the corn-fields and meadows of this island been solicited year by year to yield more and more, and how widely have Australian and African wildernesses been peopled with flocks and herds, for the enlargement of this wealth. This has on its surface only a material aspect. It is true that its first and most obvious result is to give wealth, and the enjoyment of wealth; and that neither of these are necessarily and in themselves good: for if wealth lead only to the self-bounded fruition of wealth it is deadening, corrupting, and degrading: and of this there is in the city around you much. But, however, this is not all its effect. It has given to many minds culture and leisure, which they have devoted to advancing the intellectual wealth of man; and it has produced many who have devoted themselves, according to the light that was within them, and prompted by the noblest impulses of our nature, to the improvement of the moral condition of those with whom they come in contact. Which of the two preponderate, the good or the bad effect of the sum of all that is going on, we need not attempt to estimate here. But to whichever side the balance may incline at the present moment, we believe that the bad will perish, as it has done in past times, and that the good only will survive—for only what is good and true is eternal.

And now we turn from the many who are wealthy to the greater many who are poor, and are carrying on a painful struggle for bare existence, in this vast assemblage of humanity: and here, too, we find mingled with what there is of good much that is evil. Here, as with the wealthy, are aims that are unwise, springing from misleading instincts which society has, carelessly and ignorantly, allowed to be formed in its bosom, and which tend in the individual to unhappiness and degradation, and in society itself to disorder and subversion.

All this must be taken in by the mind in order that the scene before us may be rightly understood. We could not interpret the scenes of old Egypt till we had formed some conception of what old Egypt was, and we must endeavour to do the same for our corresponding English scene. It is in this way only that the study and understanding of old Egypt can be of any use to us. It is only when we understand both that we are in a position to ask the question whether old Egypt has anything to teach us.

It tells us that the aims of society must be moral; and that the morality required can, within certain limits, be created and shaped, and made instinctive, where society itself honestly wishes and intelligently endeavours to do it. But as we look upon old Egypt we see that the morality we need is not precisely what they imagined and established, and that we are precluded from attempting to establish what we want in the fashion of old Egypt. Theirs was a system of constraint, ours must be a system of freedom. Theirs was a system that concentrated its highest advantages on a few, ours must be a system that opens its advantages to all. We must present what we have to offer in such a form that men will voluntarily accept it for themselves and for their children, and allow it to shape them. If we see distinctly what we have to do, and the conditions under which we have to do it, this will be in itself the achievement of half our work. Their method was to devise a system, in strict conformity to the conditions of the problem as it then stood, and place it as a yoke upon society. They could do that: we cannot. Our method must be accepted freely by society, and by the individual. We, too, must devise a system in strict conformity to the conditions of the problem as it now stands; and it must be such as approves itself to the understanding and the conscience of the men of these times. The successful fulfilment of the first requirement will, probably, include the second.

Egypt, Israel, Greece, Rome, each did the work that had been allotted to it. What we have to do is not to repeat what any one of them did. That, indeed, we could not do; and, if we could, it would be of no use to us. Imitations at all times, but more particularly when circumstances differ, are worthless and disorganizing. And yet what each of them did was necessary for us. The work we have to do now is a great advance upon theirs, and is to be done under very different conditions from theirs, but is so connected with theirs that we cannot dispense with their foundations, or with the principles they worked with. We need them all, but we must use them in the way our work requires. When men came to build with stone, they did not abandon all the principles of construction they had worked out for themselves during the time they had built with wood. Those principles were right as far as they went. They were not all bad, and worthless, and inapplicable to the new material and its grander possibilities. What had to be done was to incorporate the new principles that were needed with those from among the old that would still be serviceable. The purpose and object of building, whatever the materials might be, continued one and the same. And so, now that we have come to use glass and iron largely in architecture, the same process is again repeated. Some new principles may be introduced, but we do not discard all the old ones. Just so is it with the social fabric.

The great and governing differences in our case are that what we have to do is to be done for all, and that this is accompanied with the condition of not partial, but universal freedom. It never was so with any of the old peoples. And though our work is new in some of its conditions, and such as, in its reach and variety, was never dreamt of by the four great teacher nations of antiquity, there is no more reason for our failing in it than there was for their failing in theirs. That it is to be done is, in some sort, proof that it may be done. Indeed, there is apparently more reason for our success than there was for theirs. We have their experience; and in the principles of universal freedom, and universal justice, we have more to commend what ought to be done now to men’s hearts and understandings then they had. Freedom, knowledge, truth, justice, goodness; these must be our aims, our means, our statecraft, our religion. We do not go off the old tracks. They all converge into our path. And so we find that we are advancing, having history for guide, through new conditions, into a richer and better life, placed within the reach of an ever increasing proportion of the community.

The greatest, perhaps, of the advantages that will be found in our wealth is that it will enable us to confer on every member of the community such knowledge and such training as shall have an hopeful, perhaps a preponderant, tendency towards making instinctive, at all events in the minds of the greater number, a rational use of the freedom they already possess, and the love and practice of truth, justice, and goodness. Though, indeed, when we look at the educational efforts of Saxony, of Switzerland, and of New England, we are almost brought to fear that this great and necessary work will be undertaken more readily and intelligently, and done sooner and better, among people, who have less of the material means for carrying it out than ourselves. In saying this, I do not at all mean that we should confine our efforts merely to what they have done, for they have, to a great extent, omitted that morality which I consider the main point of all; but that we should be much better than we are, if we had done as much as they, with their very inferior means, have already accomplished.

In Egypt submission and order; in Israel, though labouring under most cruel disadvantage, during its better days belief in and devotion to right, and during its latter days the determination to maintain at any cost its morality and religion; at Athens the appreciation of intellectual culture; in the Roman Empire, by the mere working of its system, the idea of the supremacy of the law, and the sentiment of the brotherhood of mankind—were made instinctive. Why should we despair of doing as much for what we need? Our task, indeed, though so much grander, and promising so much more fruit than theirs, does not appear as hard as theirs. If it be beyond our powers, then modern society is but a fermenting mass of disorder and corruption. It cannot be so, however; for if it were, then the long course of History would now have to be reversed. All the progress of the Past, and all its hard-won achievements, would prove without purpose; and there would remain for us only to despair of truth, of right, of religion, and of humanity itself.