112 A Letter from Cairo. 



the Pasha, from evangelizing, the rising generation. I found them super- 

 intending a mixed assemblage of Turkish, Greek, and Coptic children, who 

 were reading the Old Testament in their several tongues, and one class, 

 consisting of ten, in our own English ! The state of morals in this un- 

 happy country, as painted by these amiable men, and as even discoverable 

 by the passing glance of a traveller, is desperate, in an extreme unknown 

 to the most profligate part of Europe, and unimaginable to any one who 

 has not seen it. Honour and virtue have not a name, shame has no blush, 

 and vice of every horrid kind walks abroad unveiled and unabashed, and 

 finds none who are not equally her slaves. The whole mass of society lies 

 rotting in one broad level of homogeneous corruption. Yet, even in Egypt, 

 the seeds of change are S2)read around, and are germinating. The unwill- 

 ing eyes of the people were, in some degree, though by compulsion, opened, 

 at the French invasion, to the greater advance of Europeans in military 

 skill and in the arts of life; but when England came in, with her fleets and 

 armies, and overthrew the French usurpation, those eyes acknowledged 

 gladly the more auspicious superiority of the victor, and paid willing hom- 

 age to the salutary eminence by which they had been befriended. From 

 admiration, which might have passed away, the genius of the present ruler 

 went on to imitation, and fixed the fleeting impression. The blind, and 

 blinding, belief in oriental greatness was removed out of the way of im- 

 provement, and the people began to compare themselves with Europeans, 

 and to take shame at the contrast. They now interest themselves in 

 European news — they enquire — they even read ! My renegado friend de- 

 clares that he no longer knows the people, whom he found here twenty years 

 ago. If to know his ignorance be the first step to knowledge in man, that 

 step is certainly accomplished, and it is assuredly the most difficult one. 

 The next step is, however, the most painful. What loathings of the pre- 

 sent, what despairing of the future, must, by turns or together, attend the 

 first e&brts at emulation, immeasurably distant as they now appear behind us ! 

 what a host of obstacles within view — what a host yet beyond their horizon 

 to be apprehended. It were better perhaps that in "ignorance sedate" 

 they should "roll darkling down the torrent of their fate" than to un- 

 dertake a change, of which the only certain result is an aggravation of a 

 present, and nearly intojeral)le, misery. You will take these speculations, 

 written in confusion, in sickness, and in danger, for what they are worth. 

 I shall write to you no more from this Pandemonium. My next, if I escape 

 from it with life, will be dated from Palestine. A. A. 



