that to the building of any one of the
great pyramids went the enforced labor of upwards of a million men for
many years, who were literally driven by the lash of the whip. There is
no ground for supposing that the feel of the whip, when the back of an
Egyptian slave began to bleed, was different from what we should suffer
if the stroke fell now on us: nor that cries of pain were any the less
natural then. And we must remember that, according to the unanimous
opinion of anthropologists, the organization of enforced labor is one
of the essentials of civilization. Picturesque and vivid, but not
exaggerated, is the saying of the author of that able book, _The
Nemesis of Nations_: "Civilization begins with the crack of the whip."
Lord Cromer quotes this dictum in his work on Egypt as giving an
epitome of the kind of power behind the civilizing process as it has
always manifested itself in the land of the Nile; and then, lest those
of his readers who live in the glass house of English history should
commit the ridiculous sin of unconscious hypocrisy, he gently but
firmly reminds us that many inhumanities of a similar spirit,
especially towards offenders against the laws of property, were not
suppressed in England till the beginning of the nineteenth century.

In these comments of mine upon Egypt, I may seem to have appealed to
your sentiment of humanity; but I have never for a moment forgotten
that no instance from history can prove civilization a disease except
to those who are intuitively on the side of the man instead of the
microbe, of the people instead of the pyramid. Such instances, however,
are of value in bringing those who listen to them to a clear
self-consciousness of their own primal preference--and that is a
distinct gain, even when the preference is for the pyramid.

It cannot be denied that the masses of Egypt were a sacrifice--and not
willingly--to civilization. In the preceding periods of savagery and
barbarism, there had been no such enslavement; the organization of
enforced labor had not proceeded so far. The crack of the whip was
still as yet intermittent. According to Lewis Morgan, civilization is
the progress of man from beast to citizen. Well, until ten thousand
years ago, man was more beast than citizen; but, happily for him, among
the beasts of the field there is nothing parallel to this organization
of labor through the will of one by means of the stroke of the courbash
upon the backs of the many