Such a state of society had, of course, certain easily-seen disadvantages, but it also had certain very considerable advantages. The chief of these was that just adverted to, that society, having paid the penalty of the restrictions and losses the system imposed, advanced with internal peace and order. These, when the system had once been disturbed, could never again be attained till society had arrived at the opposite, that is the Chinese or American, extreme, in which there is abolished, as far as possible, every vestige of the old system, even what might be called the natural and uninstituted caste of the ignorant. Caste throughout from top to bottom, or caste nowhere, equally ensures domestic quiet. All between, every form of the partial application of the system, carries within itself the germs of social disquiet, dissatisfaction, and disorder. The history of all countries has been hitherto very much a history of caste. This is a point which has not been sufficiently kept in sight. The picture of social order maintained in ancient Egypt for several thousand years, as in India, astonishes us. Universal caste explain the phenomenon. There was nothing in the bosom of those great communities to suggest recourse to arms, except the occasional occurrence of religious innovations, or of dynastic rivalries. CHAPTER XXXIV. PERSISTENCY OF CUSTOM IN THE EAST. Meddle not with them that are given to change.—_Book of Proverbs._ Every traveller in the East is struck with the obstinate persistency of forms of expression even, as well as of customs, he meets with. In bargaining in the Khan Khaleel Bazaar, at Cairo, for an amber mouthpiece for a pipe, I had to go through the very dialogue which passed between Ephron and Abraham. I objected to the price. ‘Nay, then,’ replied the modern Hittite, ‘I give it thee. Take it, I give it thee.’ At last the price was agreed upon, and he took his money. Some time afterwards, at Jaffa, I noticed that a roguish hanger-on for odd jobs at the hotel was using precisely the same words, in an attempt he was making to get a friend I was with to give him for a box of oranges ten times the price they were selling at in the market, only a couple of hundred yards off. I was struck with the coincidence, and, on mentioning the matter to one familiar with the ways of the East, I learnt that this pretended gratuitous offer of the article represented a regular recognized stage in the form of bargaining. For three thousand years, at all events, it has been in stereotype. Marriages are arranged now, as was that of Isaac and Rebekah, without the principals having seen each other. Women in the East to-day wear the veil just as they did in the time of the Patriarchs. The shoes are still taken off on entering holy places. The worshipper, in praying, still turns his face in the direction of the great sanctuary of his religion.