The greatest advance that has been made in the historic period was the implanting in the minds of men the idea, and in their hearts the sentiment, of the brotherhood of mankind. The idea and sentiment of responsibility dates back beyond the ken of history. Our observation, however, of what is passing in rude and simple communities, where social arrangements and forces are still in an almost embryonic condition, leads us to suppose that it is an instinct developed by the working, the necessities, and the life of society. To our own times belongs the scientific presentment of the idea of the cosmos, which, though a construction of the intellect, affects us also morally. Who can believe that even the oldest of these ideas is bearing all the fruit of which it is capable, and—that it will have no account to give of even better fruit in the future than it has ever produced in the past? How wide then is the field, in the most advanced communities, for moral and intellectual, the only truly human, progress! How impossible is it to foresee any termination of this progress! CHAPTER XXXII. EGYPTIAN LANDLORDISM. Is there anything whereof it may be said, See, this is new? It hath been already of old time which was before us.—ECCLES. Landlordism, or the territorial system, which gives, generally throughout a country, the ownership of the land to one class, and the cultivation of it to another, who pay rent for it, is often spoken of as something peculiarly English. We hear it said that this divorce of ownership from cultivation is unnatural. That it is bad economically, and worse politically. That attachment to the land, the great element of stability in political institutions, hardly exists under it. On the other side it is urged that it is a great advantage to a community to possess in its bosom a large class, far removed from the necessity of working for its support, which is, therefore, better able to set to other classes an example of refinement, and of honourable bearing; and of which many members will naturally desire to devote themselves to the service of the state, and of their respective neighbourhoods. We argue the point, as if the landlordism of England were almost something _sui generis_. This is a mistake. The same system was developed, only more designedly and methodically, throughout Egypt more than three thousand years ago. There the whole acreage of the country was divided into rectangular estates. One third of these was assigned to the king, and the remaining two thirds, in equal proportions, to the priestly, and to the military castes. These estates were generally cultivated by another order of men, who, for the use of the land, paid rent to the owners.