by the name of the Ottoman Turks. The Mamelukes, purchased
as slaves and introduced as soldiers, soon usurped the power and
selected a leader. If their first establishment was a singular event,
their continuance is not less extraordinary; they are replaced by slaves
brought from their original country."[87] Says Gibbon: "A more unjust
and absurd constitution can not be devised than that which condemns the
natives of the country to perpetual servitude under the arbitrary
dominion of strangers and slaves. Yet such has been the state of Egypt
about five hundred years. The most illustrious sultans of the Baharite
and Beyite dynasties were themselves promoted from the Tartar and
Circassian bands; and the four and twenty beys, or military chiefs, have
ever been succeeded, not by their sons, but by their servants."[88]
Mehemet Ali cut off the Mamelukes, but still Egypt is ruled by the
Turks, and the present ruler (Ibrahim Pasha) is a foreigner. It is
needless to remind the reader that the idols are cut off. Neither the
nominal Christians of Egypt, nor the iconoclastic Moslem, allow images
to appear among them. The rivers, too, are drying up. In one day's
travel forty dry water-courses will be crossed in the Delta; and
water-skins are needed now around the ruined cities whose walls were
blockaded by Greek and Roman navies.

"_It shall be the basest of the kingdoms; neither shall it exalt itself
any more above the nations: for I will diminish them, that they shall no
more bear rule over the nations._"[89] Every traveler will attest the
truth of this prediction. The wretched peasantry are rejoiced to labor
for any who will pay them five cents a day, and eager to hide the
treasure in the ground from the rapacious tax-gatherer. I have seen
British horses refuse to eat the meal ground from the mixture of wheat,
barley, oats, lentiles, millet, and a hundred unknown seeds of weeds and
collections of filth, which forms the produce of their fields. For
poverty, vermin, and disease, Egypt is proverbial. Let us hear a
scoffer's testimony, however: "In Egypt there is no middle class,
neither nobility, clergy, merchants, nor landholders. A universal air of
misery in all the traveler meets points out to him the rapacity of
oppression, and the distrust attendant upon slavery. The profound
ignorance of the inhabitants equally prevents them from perceiving the
causes of their evils, or applying the necessary remedies. Ignorance,
diffused throu