Nor was this the sum of their grievances. The increase of summer irrigation made the months immediately preceding the flood a very busy instead of a very slack time of year. The value of the cotton crop made everyone most anxious to secure it, so the larger proprietors kept their tenants at home for that purpose. The numbers of the corvée decreased, and the burden of it fell more and more upon the poor fellaheen. Ministers and high officials from the Khedive downwards employed the corvée to work on their own private estates. Other persons, influential by station or by bribery, secured the like advantage, and robbed their humble neighbours of their labour, their last remaining possession. Under Said Pasha the corvée dug the Suez Canal. Under Ismail they dug the Ibrahimiyah Canal, the sole object of which was to benefit his private estates in Upper Egypt. Even the splendid carriage-road that runs from Cairo to the Pyramids of Gizeh was raised on the same foundations that the Empress Eugénie might travel there in comfort after the opening of the Suez Canal. Only a nation inured to slavery could have endured it. Many, indeed, labouring under the burning sun, unpaid, unfed, and unclothed, succumbed. But what did that matter when other human beasts of burden were there to take their place? The activity of the survivors was kept up by the whip, the traditional motive-power in Egypt. Nominally, all between the ages of fifteen and fifty were liable to serve, but there were a multitude of exceptions, including teachers, holy men, students, certain classes of tradesmen, and others. The law of 1881 laid down that anyone might exempt himself by providing a substitute or by paying a cash ransom. But as there was no penalty imposed for not paying, every man of any position freed himself from the obligation without paying the tax, and the whole burden of the corvée fell more than ever on the poorer classes. The régime of the kurbash, or whip, and the grosser abuses of the system, vanished immediately upon the English occupation, but all the earthwork maintenance was still performed by this unpaid labour.