Two of the most terrific famines that are recorded in the history of the world occurred in Egypt--a country where there is greater production, with less labour, than is probably exhibited in any other region. The principal labourer in Egypt is the river Nile, whose periodical overflowings impart fertility to the thirsty soil, and produce in a few weeks that abundance which the labour of the husbandman might not hope to command if employed during the whole year. But the Nile is a workman that cannot be controlled and directed, even by capital, the great controller and director of all work. The influences of heat, and light, and air, are pretty equal in the same places. Where the climate is most genial, the cultivators have least labour to perform in winning the earth; where it is least genial, the cultivators have most labour. The increased labour balances the small natural productiveness. But the inundation of a great river cannot be depended upon like the light and heat of the sun. For two seasons the Nile refused to rise, and labour was not prepared to compensate for this refusal; the ground refused to produce; the people were starved. We mention these famines of Egypt to show that _certainty_ is the most encouraging stimulus to every operation of human industry. We know that production as invariably follows a right direction of labour, as day succeeds to night. We believe that it will be dark to-night and light again to-morrow, because we know the general laws which govern light and darkness, and because our experience shows us that those laws are constant and uniform. We know that if we plough, and manure, and sow the ground, a crop will come in due time, varying indeed in quantity according to the season, but still so constant upon an average of years, that we are justified in applying large accumulations and considerable labour to the production of this crop. It is this certainty that we have such a command of the productive powers of nature as will abundantly compensate us for the incessant labour of directing those forces, which has during a long course of industry heaped up our manifold accumulations, and which enables production annually to go forward to an extent which even half a century ago would have been thought impossible. The long succession of labour, which has covered this country with wealth, has been applied to the encouragement of the productive forces of nature, and the restraint of the destroying. No one can doubt that, the instant the labour of man ceases to direct those productive natural forces, the destroying forces immediately come into action. Take the most familiar instance--a cottage whose neat thatch was never broken, whose latticed windows were always entire, whose whitewashed walls were ever clean, round whose porch the honeysuckle was trained in regulated luxuriance, whose garden bore nothing but what the owner planted. Remove that owner. Shut up the cottage for a year, and leave the garden to itself.