Until the still distant day when Ionia, Greece, and Italy should also have their populous cities, Egypt and Chaldæa found themselves in a very favourable situation compared with the peoples, or rather tribes, who dwelt on the shores of the Mediterranean. Among the latter none but those simple industries that could be carried on under the family roof, and in which the women and children could take their part, were understood. In the basins of the Nile and the Euphrates there were real manufactures. Artizans were specially trained and grouped into corporations; they did not work only in the hours they could spare from agriculture; they laboured at their trade without interruption from one end of the year to the other, producing objects which commerce would afterwards “place” where the demand was brisk. In fact they had a real, we might almost say a great industry. Beside the machine-fed industry of modern Europe its output was no doubt small; neither Egypt nor Chaldæa had steam, nor electricity, nor the “spinning-jenny;” but their organization and division of labour gave them a superiority over their contemporaries no less crushing than that by which modern Europe is enabled to flood the whole surface of this planet with her manufactures, and to substitute them for the local industries. In every little village of Anatolia I found the cottons of Manchester and the blue plates of Creil; they could be bought cheaper than native pottery and textiles. It was the same in antiquity. In the islands and on the coasts of the Ægæan, there was no competition to be feared by the faïence, the vessels of terra-cotta or metal, the textiles, the arms, the ivories, the glass, the utensils of every shape and kind sent out in such inexhaustible quantities from the workshops of Egypt and Chaldæa.