n existed, and we do not see why the
remedy should not in some respect correspond.

Looking back then, we find that there was in Egypt in the year 1,500
B.C. a submerged tenth, consisting of 600,000 able-bodied men with their
wives and families and numbering therefore at least two and a half
million souls. They constituted a distinct caste, or nation, which had
been grafted into the original Egyptian stock 430 years previously.
Owing to hereditary customs, race distinctions and religious differences
they had preserved their identity and had never become assimulated with
the Egyptians. It was a famine that had driven them to take refuge in
Egypt at a time when their numbers were so few that their presence
caused no particular inconvenience to the original inhabitants, while
the services of the King's Vazir, to whose caste they belonged secured
them a suitable reception.

At the time however when we take up their history a change had taken
place. Their numbers had immensely increased. The labor market was
deluged with them. The rulers, capitalists and landowners began to
tremble for their very existence. Enormous public works were planned and
the enslaved caste were compelled to carry out their allotted labour
under rigorous taskmasters, who made their lives a burden to them. Still
their numbers continued to increase. Alarmed at the prospect of an
impending revolution, the King gave orders that every male child of the
Hebrews should be drowned, thinking thus to stamp out the nation. It is
easy to imagine therefore that affairs must have come to a desperate
pass, when from the palace of Pharaoh and yet from among their own caste
a deliverer was raised up to organise and carry out the wholesale
emigration of the entire nation.

Looked at in this light it was certainly the boldest venture and
greatest scheme of the kind that had ever been conceived, and without
the aid of remarkable miraculous displays of Divine power Moses could
never have carried out so magnificent a project.

Everything appeared to be against him. The people whom he had come to
deliver were an undisciplined mob of cowardly slaves, whose spirit had
been crushed by years of cruel tyranny. They were unarmed and
unaccustomed to war. They were the subjects of the most powerful
military monarchy of those times. For them to dream of emigrating must
have seemed the wildest folly. On the one hand the Egyptians would not
hear of it, and their way would be barre