The motives for interference are strong. How saddening is it to the traveller to see the poor good-natured Fellah, his naked limbs scorched by the blazing sun, baling up the water from the river, during the livelong day, for his little plot of ground; and to think that all that will be left to him of its produce will be barely enough to keep himself, and his little ones, in millet-bread and onions; all the rest having been cruelly swept away to support at Cairo unused, and unuseable, palaces and regiments, and to make a Suez Canal for the furtherance of the policy of France, but for the naval and commercial benefit of England, and to build sugar-factories for a trading Khedivé. Of what benefit to the wretched cultivator are all the bounties of Egyptian nature, and all his own heavy moil and toil? This is one of the remorseless, and purposeless oppressions done under the sun, which it would be well that some modern Hercules should arise in his might, and in his hatred of such heartless and stupid injustice, to beat down, and make a full end of. An Egypt, in which every man might reap securely the fruit of his labour, would be a new thing in the world, and a very pleasant thing to look upon. At present, the riches of Egypt mean wealth without measure for one man, and poverty without measure for all the rest of the world. The case of the poor Fellah is very hard: so also is that of his palm-tree. It came into existence, and grew up to maturity under great difficulties. It was hardly worth while to give it space and water, and to fence it round in its early days; for so soon as it could bear a bunch of fruit, it was to be taxed. Why, then, should the oppressed villager go to the cost of rearing it? He would be only toiling for a domestic despot, or foreign bond-holder. How many a palm-tree that might now be helping to shade a village, and beneath which the children might be playing, and the elders sitting, has by this hard and irrational impost, been prevented from coming into being. And of all the gifts of nature to Egypt, this palm-tree is one of the most characteristic, and of the most useful: its trunk supplies the people with beams; its sap is made into a spirit; its fruit is in some districts a most useful article of food, and everywhere a humble luxury; baskets are made of the flag of its leaf, and from the stem of the leaf beds, chairs, and boxes; its fibres supply materials for ropes and cordage, nets and mats; it has, too, its history in Egypt, for its shaft and crown, first suggested to the dwellers on the banks of the Nile, in some remote age, the pillar and its capital. A wise ruler, whether his wisdom was that of the head, or of the heart, would do everything in his power to induce his people to multiply, throughout the land, what is so highly useful, and in so many ways. But the plan despotic wisdom adopts is to kill the bird that lays the golden egg, and by a process which shall at the same time cause as few as possible of the