e lord's virtues betrays
how precarious was the condition of his subjects. There was nothing to
hinder the unjust prince or the prevaricating officer from ruining and
ill-treating as he chose the people who were under his authority. He
had only to give an order, and the corvee fell upon the proprietors of a
village, carried off their slaves and obliged them to leave their lands
uncultivated; should they declare that they were incapable of paying
the contributions laid on them, the prison opened for them and their
families. If a dyke were cut, or the course of a channel altered, the
nome was deprived of water: prompt and inevitable ruin came upon the
unfortunate inhabitants, and their property, confiscated by the treasury
in payment of the tax, passed for a small consideration into the hands
of the scribe or of the dishonest administrator. Two or three years of
neglect were almost enough to destroy a system of irrigation: the canals
became filled with mud, the banks crumbled, the inundation either failed
to reach the ground, or spread over it too quickly and lay upon it
too long. Famine soon followed with its attendant sicknesses: men and
animals died by the hundred, and it was the work of nearly a whole
generation to restore prosperity to the district.

The lot of the fellah of old was, as we have seen, as hard as that
of the fellah of to-day. He himself felt the bitterness of it, and
complained at times, or rather the scribes complained for him, when with
selfish complacency they contrasted their calling with his. He had to
toil the whole year round,--digging, sowing, working the shadouf from
morning to night for weeks, hastening at the first requisition to the
corvee, paying a heavy and cruel tax,--all without even the certainty
of enjoying what remained to him in peace, or of seeing his wife and
children profit by it. So great, however, was the elasticity of his
temperament that his misery was not sufficient to depress him: those
monuments upon which his life is portrayed in all its minutias,
represent him as animated with inexhaustible cheerfulness. The summer
months ended, the ground again becomes visible, the river retires into
its bed, the time of sowing is at hand: the peasant takes his team and
his implements with him and goes off to the fields. In many places, the
soil, softened by the water, offers no resistance, and the hoe easily
turns it up; elsewhere it is hard, and only yields to the plough. While
one of