cenaries. A detestable slave trade has
existed with this object, especially among the Circassians, since the
time of the Moguls; and of these for the most part this Egyptian force,
Mamlouks, as they are called, has consisted. After a time, these
Mamlouks took matters into their own hands, and became a self-elective
body, or sort of large corporation. They were masters of the country,
and of its nominal ruler, and they recruited their ranks continually,
and perpetuated their power, by means of the natives of the Caucasus,
slaves like themselves, and of their own race.

"During the 500 or 600 years," says Volney, "that there have been
Mamlouks in Egypt, not one of them has left subsisting issue; there does
not exist one single family of them in the second generation; all their
children perish in the first and second descent. The means therefore by
which they are perpetuated and multiplied were of necessity the same by
which they were first established." These troops have been massacred and
got rid of in the memory of the last generation; towards the end of last
century they formed a body of above 8,500 men. The writer I have just
been quoting adds the following remarks:--"Born for the most part in the
rites of the Greek Church, and circumcised the moment they are bought,
they are considered by the Turks themselves as renegades, void of faith
and of religion. Strangers to each other, they are not bound by those
natural ties which unite the rest of mankind. Without parents, without
children, the past has nothing to do for them, and they do nothing for
the future. Ignorant and superstitious from education, they become
ferocious from the murders they commit, and corrupted by the most
horrible debauchery." On the other hand, they had every sort of
incentive and teaching to prompt them to rapacity and lawlessness. "The
young peasant, sold in Mingrelia or Georgia, no sooner arrives in Egypt,
than his ideas undergo a total alteration. A new and extraordinary scene
opens before him, where everything conduces to awaken his audacity and
ambition. Though now a slave, he seems destined to become a master, and
already assumes the spirit of his future condition. No sooner is a slave
enfranchised, than he aspires to the principal employments; and who is
to oppose his pretensions? and he will be no less able than his betters
in the art of governing, which consists only in taking money, and giving
blows with the sabre."

In describing the