A third reason is the dependence of the agriculture of Egypt on irrigation. The people, therefore, in any neighbourhood cannot intermit their attention to their shadoofs and canals for the purpose of insurrection, or for any other purpose whatsoever. Were they to do so starvation would ensue. The Government also, being in possession of the river, could at any moment stop the irrigation, by destroying the shadoofs and canals, of a malcontent district. Here, then, are three reasons, any one of which would, singly, be sufficient to make the Government in Egypt omnipotent. What conceivable chance, then, can the people have, when all the three are, at all times, combined against them? This explains much in the past and present history of the country. Nature had decided that in it there should be no strongholds for petty potentates, no castles for freebooters, no mountain fastnesses for untameable tribes, no difficult districts to harbour insurgent bands; no possibility of getting away from the bank of the river; no possibility of withdrawing attention, for a time, from the most artificial of all forms of agriculture. For long ages the wandering Arab of the desert was the only possible disturber of the peace of this exceptional country. Nature first gave to it, in its singular endowments, the means of union; and then eliminated those physical obstacles to its realization which, elsewhere, for long ages proved insurmountable. The point to be particularly noted here is, that these circumstances have ever given to the Government for the time being every natural facility for uniting the whole country into a single State, and ruling it despotically. The Delta is no exception, for the branches of the river, and the canals by which this whole district is permeated, and the absence of defensible positions, reduce it, in respect to the points I have been speaking of, to the same condition as that of the long narrow valley above it.