6 MR. braman's address. 



agine the h*eavy exactions to which the cultivators of the field 

 were subjected. On one of the roads which an ancient prince 

 caused to be made, of no public utility, the historian informs 

 us was expended the labor of a hundred thousand men for ten 

 years ; dragged from their homes and fields, doubtless, by the 

 iron mandate of the rulers, who employed them as so many 

 beasts of burden, to perform the task for which, like them, they 

 received just food and care enough to give them vigor for their 

 work. It is the general opinion that the immense pyramids, 

 and other works of correspondent magnitude, which distin- 

 guish that ancient land, are so many mighty monuments of 

 those crushing burdens, which, in the shape of labor and taxa- 

 tion, fell with their greatest weight on the agricultural class of 

 the people, These vast fabrics are at once the glory and shame 

 of the nation, and proclaim to this distant generation the 

 wrongs of oppressed humanity. 



With the condition of modern Egypt, travellers have made 

 us fully acquainted. The Nile pours out the same annual 

 bounty with which it has enriched the land for thousands of 

 years. The sun shines as brightly upon the fields, as at any 

 period since it began its circuit in the heavens, But no coun- 

 try presents a greater contrast between the beneficence of na- 

 ture, and the devastating cruelty of man. The peasantry, 

 we are told, are reduced to the lowest state of indigence and 

 misery, and characterized by indolence, inefiiciency, and im- 

 providence. They are so pressed down by the rigor of a ty- 

 rannical government, that they have no spirits left to attempt 

 more than the satisfaction of the merely animal necessities. In 

 Upper Egypt not a twentieth part of the produce comes into the 

 possession of the laborer. And in both parts of the country, 

 the demands of the government are so exorbitant, and rapacious, 

 their fields are so often ravaged by officers employed in collec- 

 tion of tribute, that the poor laborer is deprived of all resour- 

 ces and motives, to pursue any efficient cultivation of the 

 ground. IJiave alluded to the oppressed condition of ancient 

 Egypt before the kingdom came under the dominion of a foreign 

 power. Since the date of its conquest, Niebuhr says that "this 

 country," "whether under yoke of Persians, Greeks, Arabians, 



