146 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



grimy white shirt girded about his loins, plows, sows, and reaps 

 to-day as his forefathers have done before him for thousands and 

 thousands of years, this tax meant that his houses, his cattle, and 

 his lands " were but so much food placed before the lips of our 

 lord (the Khedive) that he might eat thereof and have his fill." 



" The seed was often barely sown for the coming crop before 

 the tax-gatherer appeared with the usurer as his familiar spirit at 

 his heels, claiming not only heavy tithes of the treasury, but the 

 many tithes of those tithes which never reached the treasury, way- 

 laid on the road along the steep ascending gradients of a predatory 

 hierarchy. For what purposes or to what amount he could be 

 mulcted the fellah had no means of knowing. The only record he 

 kept was the number of strokes from the koorbash which had 

 wrung from him his last piastre. The only certainty he acquired 

 by long and bitter experience was that, let his harvest be good 

 or bad, only so much would be left to him as would barely suf- 

 fice to keep body and soul together. Every year brought fresh 

 imposts, and every new tax became in the hands of a corrupt ad- 

 ministration a fresh pretext for unlawful exactions. To satisfy 

 them the land was made to yield more frequent and more valuable 

 but also more exhausting crops, until the soil itself caught the 

 contagion of universal impoverishment. Still the arrears of taxa- 

 tion grew, and with them arrears of private indebtedness," until 

 at last whole villages not infrequently petitioned the pasha " to 

 accept the fee simple of their lands on condition merely that they 

 should be allowed to rent them from him at an annual rental 

 greater than the land tax itself, but still vastly less than the total 

 amount of illegitimate imposts grafted on to the land tax." 



Extortion for the purpose of obtaining revenue for the state, 

 and plunder for the officials intrusted with its collection, was not 

 the only form of oppression to which the miserable Egyptian peas- 

 antry were subjected. By an ancient Asiatic institution called 

 the corvee, the fellah was liable at any moment to be seized and 

 dragged perhaps off to some distant part of the country to work 

 under constant dread of the taskmaster's whip at any task sug- 

 gested by the caprice of the Khedive or some powerful pasha ; and 

 it was under this system of compulsory, unpaid, severe, unfed 

 labor, and with great attendant sacrifice of the lives of his sub- 

 jects, that the then Khedive, Ismail Pasha, mainly built the Suez 

 Canal. In addition there was a system of " military conscription 

 invested with the terrors of the press-gang ; there was the water 

 supply for irrigation, generally inadequate and often dependent 

 upon the caprice of some local magistrate or corrupt ofiicial ; there 

 was the greed of unjust judges ; there was the whole hungry 

 bureaucracy, feeding upon those beneath it in order that it might 

 in turn feed those above it." 



