Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé

by F. Barham Zincke

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.