EMPIRE OF ETHIOPIA. 37 



painted, physic as they physicked, pray as they prayed. 

 The separation of classes which they had made must 

 be rendered rigid and eternal. 



And so the arts and sciences were ordered to stand 

 still, and society was divided and subdivided into func- 

 tions and professions, trades and crafts. Every man 

 was doomed to follow the occupation of his father ; to 

 marry within his own class ; to die as he was born. 

 Hope was torn out of human life. Egypt was no 

 longer a nation, but an assemblage of torpid castes 

 isolated from one another, breeding in and in. It was 

 no longer a body animated by the same heart, fed by 

 the same blood, but an automaton neatly pieced to- 

 gether, of which the head was the priesthood, the arms 

 the army, and the feet the working-class. In quies- 

 cence it was a perfect image of the living form, but a 

 touch came from without and the arms broke asunder 

 at the joints and fell upon the ground. 



The colony founded in Soudan by the exiled Pha- 

 raohs became, after the Restoration, an important 

 province. When the new empire began to decline, a 

 governor-general rebelled and the kingdom of Ethiopia 

 was established. It was a medley dominion composed 

 of brown men and black men, shepherds and savages, 

 half-caste Egyptians, Arabs, Berbers, and negroes, ruled 

 over by a king and a college of priests. It was enriched 

 by annual slave hunts into the Black Country, and by 

 the caravan trade in ivory, gold dust, and gum. It 

 also received East India goods and Arabian produce 

 through its ports on the Red Sea. Meroe, its capital, 

 attained the reputation of a great city; it possessed its 

 temples and its pyramids like those of Egypt, only on 

 a smaller scale. The Ethiopian empire, in its best days, 

 might have comprised the modern Egyptian provinces 



