“The services employing the greatest number, and the most able men, were those of the public works, the army, and the administration of the revenues of the kingdom. Coined money was unknown,[32] all the taxes were collected in kind. There were three divisions on the land according to the nature of the rents: the canal (maou) paid its tribute in fish, the arable land (ouou) in cereals, and the marshes (pehou) in heads of cattle. A register was carefully kept, with an account of the changes, a statement of all the kinds of land in each district, and the names of the owners. “... Many contracts of sales and rents of land and houses, drawn up 76 on papyrus, have been found among the family papers of the dead. They show with what guarantees and careful formalities property was protected in ancient Egypt.”[33] By this sketch, however incomplete, of the laws and institutions of ancient Egypt, we see they were, as Bossuet says,[34] “simple, full of justice, and of a kind to unite the nation. The best thing among all these excellent laws was--that every one was trained to observe them. A new custom was a wonder in Egypt. Everything was done in the same manner, and their exactness in little things made them exact in great ones. Therefore, there never was a people that preserved its laws and customs a longer time.” V. A SUMMARY OF PRINCIPAL FEATURES OF THE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION. We shall now give a brief review of the social and political institutions of ancient Egypt. The priesthood, the guardian of religion and the laws, and the promoter of morality, was rendered perpetual by hereditary transmission in the sacerdotal families. The army, the guardian of civil and political life, and the maintainer of order, was rendered perpetual by hereditary transmission in the military families. Labor, the source of national and individual vigor, was rendered perpetual by the hereditary transmission of the agricultural or industrial pursuits in the families of the agriculturists and artisans. Authority, the organ of the national will, was maintained in its unity and perpetuity, by hereditary transmission in the royal family. And all these classes, all these families, were guaranteed in their independence by the unchangeableness of their members, and the proprietorship of the soil and the trades. Such were the foundations of the social constitution of Egypt. With such fine order, to borrow the language of Bossuet, there was no place for anarchy or oppression. In fact, society was preserved from the abuse of power by the fundamental law of hereditary professions, which, ensuring to each family a fixed employment and an independent existence, prevented the arbitrary changes of men and property, so that opposition was not, as M. de Bonald happily says, in men, but in the institutions.[35]