Cairo, I have said, contains about 240,000 inhabitants.[34] We should be greatly deceived if we judged of the population of this city from the crowds that we meet in the principal thoroughfare-streets and markets; in most of the bye-streets and quarters very few passengers are seen. Nor should we judge from the extent of the city and suburbs; for there are within the walls many vacant places, some of which, during the season of the inundation, are lakes (as the Birket el-Ezbekeeyeh, Birket el-Feel, etc.). The gardens, several burial-grounds, the courts of houses, and the mosques, also occupy a considerable space. Of the inhabitants of the metropolis, about 190,000 are Egyptian Muslims; about 10,000, Copts; 3,000 or 4,000, Jews; and the rest, strangers from various countries.[35] The population of Egypt in the times of the Pharaohs was probably about six or seven millions.[36] The produce of the soil in the present age would suffice, if none were exported, for the maintenance of a population amounting to 4,000,000; and if all the soil which is capable of cultivation were sown, the produce would be sufficient for the maintenance of 8,000,000. But this would be the utmost number that Egypt could maintain in years of plentiful inundation; I therefore compute the ancient population, at the time when agriculture was in a very flourishing state, to have amounted to what I first stated; and must suppose it to have been scarcely more than half as numerous in the times of the Ptolemies, and at later periods, when a great quantity of corn was annually exported.[37] This calculation agrees with what Diodorus Siculus says (in lib. i. cap. 31); namely, that Egypt contained, in the times of the ancient kings, 7,000,000 inhabitants, and in his own time not less than 3,000,000. How different now is the state of Egypt from what it might be, possessing a population of scarcely more than one quarter of the number that it might be rendered capable of supporting! How great a change might be effected in it by a truly enlightened government, by a prince who (instead of impoverishing the peasantry by depriving them of their lands, and by his monopolies of the most valuable productions of the soil; by employing the best portion of the population to prosecute his ambitious schemes of foreign conquest, and another large portion in the vain attempt to rival European manufactures) would give his people a greater interest in the cultivation of the fields, and make Egypt what nature designed it to be—almost exclusively an agricultural country! Its produce of cotton alone would more than suffice to procure all the articles of foreign manufacture, and all the natural productions of foreign countries, that the wants of its inhabitants demand.[38]