376 
It is more thickly populated than Belgium, the most crowded 
country in Europe, which contains 173 inhabitants to the square 
kilometre, while Egypt has 178. It is still a land of oppression. 
It is a sad sight, but a daily one, to see men, women and children 
employed in making a canal or raising the embankment of a 
railway or road, and obliged, for want of better tools, to carry 
all the earth in small baskets, or even in their own hands. 
Whole villages are transported to districts not their own, to 
construct, without mechanical aid, public works, the utility of 
which may be indisputable, but which will hardly result in 
more benefit to the unfortunate workers than did the Pyramids 
to those who made them. I take these statements from a 
leading organ of public opinion, whose present views on 
the Eastern question I am disposed to hail with satisfaction. 
I may add, from another source of information, that the power 
of the stick is still so much resorted to, that, in two instances, 
fellahs have been beaten to death in the endeavour to extort 
taxes which they were unwilling or unable to pay. 
It would be a good deed on the part of the Khedive to supply 
with tools those who are forced to labour on public works ; for 
they are too poor to buy them themselves. The average fellah's 
or labourer's hire in the country is about 5d. per day; but pay- 
ment is always delayed, sometimes paid in kind — sometimes, if 
report says true, not paid at all. The labourers in the Delta, 
however, where European enterprise has penetrated, make a 
higher wage, and the workman in the towns is a much more 
prosperous man. 
The annual number of vessels which visit the ports of Egypt 
has doubled within the last ten years, and the average exports 
from 1853 to 1863 increased from two and a half millions to 
twelve millions. The imports have doubled in the same time, 
and are nearly six millions sterling. 
Thus much for the rapid advance of Egypt towards that more 
prominent place amongst the nations of the earth, which we are 
entitled to expect she will maintain. But the medal has also its 
reverse side, on which I think it best not to look at present. 
The Future of Egypt. 
If we believe our own sacred books, there is surely a glorious 
future in reserve for Egypt. It is not like Babylon : doomed 
to fall and never to rise again. 
This is connected with an entire change in the religion of the 
country; for the prophet Isaiah (six.) tells us distinctly that 
the healing and restoration of Egypt shall be coincident with 
