Our translation, Gen. xlvii. 20, 21. says, “So the land became Pharaoh’s; and as for the people, he removed them to cities from one end of the borders of Egypt, even to the other end thereof.” In the Septuagint it is, “and the land became Pharaoh’s, and he subjected the people to be servants to him from one end of Egypt to the other.” It is to the same purport in the Samaritan copy. This reads better, and is more probable, than that Joseph should have made the whole nation, as Mr. Harris affirms, change settlements in such a manner as if the people of Kent were sent to the Orkneys, and those of the Orkneys were brought to Kent. This would be such a trifling with peoples lives and feelings, such a waste of property, such a perversion of all experience, and particular knowledge of the agriculture proper in each district, as is only applicable to the Leverpool slave-trade; but cannot, on such slight grounds as this general expression is, be imagined in a man of Joseph’s character, with a pretended view to prevent rebellion. Or the expression in our translation may bear, that the people were distributed so as to be near the respective store-houses, on which their maintenance was assigned. Therefore “the change made, p. 25, 26, in the happy condition of the Ægyptians, the transportation of 7 or 8 millions of every age, sex, condition, rank; infants, children, decrepit, infirm, delicate, through the scorching sands of a parched up country,” is the mere fiction of imagination, to palliate the still more shocking conduct of the writer’s patrons of Leverpool. The Ægyptians offered themselves for servants, to save themselves from starving. His patrons force the Africans to be slaves, not as he says, from “a state of absolute indigence,” but reduced from plenty and ease to famine, nakedness, and want, by stripes, fetters, cruelty and oppression. Page 28. It is said, “Joseph, when able to relieve them, took advantage of the extreme indigence of the Ægyptians, to reduce them into the condition of slaves, and in this acted by the immediate direction of God, who made this work to prosper.” Supposing all this true, yet there is nothing common between this transaction and the Leverpool African commerce; but the author’s having given them one common name, “slave-trade.” The Ægyptians, after a fair transfer of themselves and goods, are left in full possession of their lands and property, on paying such a rent as would act as a spur to industry, while it checked that luxury which the author describes, p. 25, as prevailing in Ægypt. The Leverpool slaves are reduced from freedom to a base, helpless, unprofitable, wretched state. When this writer, p. 27, considers the four-fifths of the produce left with the Ægyptian farmer, as only equivalent to the keep of a West-Indian slave, he must raise a blush on the sugar planter’s cheek; who willingly would leave but one fifth, (the rum) both to support his plantation stock, and maintain his slaves.