Doubtless the amount of forced labour varied from time to time, according to the ambition or the caprice of the rulers of the country. But the annual necessity for watching the dykes during the flood, and repairing them when it was over, never permitted the custom to fall into disuse, and the knowledge that this great instrument was always ready to hand must have been a powerful incentive to any King or Caliph who wished to send his name down to history as the author of a mighty work. No wonder that after so many centuries of practice the Egyptians are the most patient and efficient spade-workers in the world. The wretched peasantry of Egypt must have blessed the accession of the undistinguished Sovereigns who had no desire to add to their fame either by building at home or by conquest abroad. To them the glories of a Rameses or an Amenemhat must have been small compensation for their ‘anguish of spirit and cruel bondage.’ So long as basin irrigation continued to be universal, there was much to be said on behalf of the corvée, if the system was justly and impartially administered. During the months of the flood, and those preceding it, when the land was lying dry and baked, there was little or nothing for the agricultural population to do except to clear the shallow flood canals, repair the dykes, and protect the river-banks. If the labour was compulsory, it was, at any rate, everybody’s interest to perform it. The work lay at their own door; they were not dragged away to a distant province. There must always have been abuses in practice. The humbler folk did more than their share, and so on, but in theory it was not bad. All this was changed with the introduction of perennial irrigation and the digging of the summer canals. Owing to their depth, and sometimes, also, to their faulty construction, the silt deposits in them were very great, and the whole corvée was called out to clear them, though very few were interested in them. More than that, a man’s own home was no longer the scene of his labours. The labourers of one province were called in to work in another. Each year the corvée worked from January 15 to July 15, clearing the canals and repairing the banks. From August 1 to November 1 they guarded the Nile banks in the flood. Every year an extensive programme of work was sketched out, but before it was finished they had to hurry off to flood-protection duty. Not only unpaid, they had to find their own tools, and provide their own commissariat, a double hardship on men out of their own neighbourhood. During the flood, when they lived in booths built for themselves on the Nile banks, they had to find their own lanterns, and even, like the Israelites of old, their own straw and brushwood, to save the dykes from the action of the waves. New works were carried out in the same fashion.