Now that the Egyptians had at this time no coined money, proves that their taxes—as is very much the case at this day with their chief tax, that on land—were paid in kind. In an age when silver was so scarce that the idea of coining it, for the purpose of giving to it easy and general circulation, had not occurred, and it was passing from hand to hand of the few who possessed it by weight, the actual tillers of the soil, always in the East, and not less so in Egypt than elsewhere, a poor and oppressed class, could not have had silver to pay their rents and taxes. The wealth, therefore, of Pharaoh must have consisted mainly of produce. The next point is, that no profitable investments for what silver, or precious things, a few might have possessed, were known, or possible then. It was not only that there were no Government stocks, and no shares paying dividends, but that there was nothing at all that could be resorted to for such purposes. If a man had invested money in anything he would have stood out before the world as a rich man, and so as a man to be squeezed. Doubtless there was less of this in Egypt than elsewhere in the East, but in those early and arbitrary days there must have been, at times, even in Egypt, somewhat of it. People, therefore, would not, as a general rule, have invested had it been possible. But it was utterly impossible, for the double reason that there was nothing to invest, and nothing to invest in. What people invest is capital. Capital is bottled-up labour, convertible again, at pleasure, into labour, or the produce of labour. But in those days labour could not be bottled up, except by a very few in the form of silver ingots. In these days every kitchen-maid can bottle up labour in the shape of coin, which is barren bottling-up, and invest it in a saving’s bank account, or in some other way, which is fruitful bottling-up. I ask permission to use these incongruous metaphors, one on the top of the other. Every grown-up person in the kingdom can bottle up labour, and invest it; and, as a matter of fact, there are few who, at one time or other of their lives, do not. Some have succeeded in doing it to such an enormous amount that they might with the accumulated store build a Pyramid greater than that of Cheops. It is, indeed, with the labour that has been bottled up by private individuals that we have constructed all our railways, docks, and gas works, and with which we carry out all our undertakings, great and small, in this country. There is no limit to our capacity for bottling up labour. It is one of our greatest exports; we send it all over the world, to Russia, to America, to India, and to Egypt itself. It is estimated that we store up somewhere about 150,000,000 pounds worth every year.