The women of Egypt are as much slaves as ever were the negroes of our South. They are petted and fattened and given a home, but they must look at life through barriers--barriers across their boxes at the opera, and barriers across the windows of their broughams when they drive abroad, and barriers across their very faces. As long as one-half of the Egyptian people are enslaved and held in bondage and classed as animals without souls, so long will an Army of Occupation ride over the land, and insult by its presence the khedival power. No country in these days can be truly great in which the women have no voice, no influence, and no respect. There are worse things in Egypt than bad irrigation, and the harem is the worst of them. If the Egyptians want to be free themselves, they should first free their daughters and their mothers. The educated Egyptian is ashamed of his national costume; but let him feel shame for some of his national customs. A frock-coat and a harem will not go together. The English, who have done so many fine things for Egypt's good, and who keep an army there to emphasize the fact, have arranged that any slave who comes to the office of the Consul-General and claims his protection can have it; but these slaves of the married men are not granted even this chance of escape. And so they live like birds in a cage. They eat and dress and undress, and expose their youth and beauty, and hide their age and ugliness, until they die. The cry along the Nile a few years ago was, "Egypt for the Egyptians," and a very good cry it was, although the wrong man first started it. But there was another cry raised in the land of Egypt many hundreds of years before of "Let my people go," and the woman who can raise that again to-day, and who can set free her sisters of the East, will be doing a greater work than any woman is doing at the present time or has ever done.