CONDITION OF TEE EGYPTIAN LABORER.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3200, 30 September 1881, Page 3

CONDITION OF TEE EGYPTIAN LABORER.

The condition of the fellahm, or _ agricultural laborers, has been already indicated to some extent in what has been said, in the chapter on Egyptian Agriculture, concerning the tenure of land and the manner in which it was cultivated. It is possible, however, that somewhat too favorable a view has been there taken. The number of peasants rich enough to rent farms and cultivate on their own account was probably small; and the great majority of the class had to content themselves with the position of hired laborers, and to work on the estates of others. These persons labored under overseers, who were generally severe taskmasters, and who, at their discretion, might punish the idle or refractory by blows. The peasant farmer was somewhat off; but even his position was scarcely enviable, and Egyptian authors not unfrequently hold him up to their readers as an object of pifcy. " Have you ever represented to yourself," writes Amenemun to Pentaour, " the estate of the rustic who tills the ground ? Before he has put the sickle to the crop, the locii-fcs have blasted a part of it; then comes the rats and the birds. If he is slack in housing his grain, the thieves are upon him. His horse dies of weariness as it drags the wain. Anon, the tax-gatherer arrives ; his agents are armed with clubs ; he has negroes with him, who carry whips of palm branches. They all cry, ' Give us your grain !' and he has no easy way of avoiding their extortionate demand. Next, the wretch is caught, bound, and sent off to work without wage at the canals; his wife is taken and chained ; his children are stripped and plundered." In the " Praise of Learning," by Tuaufsakhrat, a very similar description is given. " The little laborer having a field, he passes his life among rustics j he is worn down for vines and pigs, to make his kitchen of what his fields have ; his clothes are heavy with their weight ; he is hound as a forced labourer ; if he goes forth into the air, he suffers, having to quit his warm fireplace ; he is bastinadoed with a stick on his legs, and seeks to save himself ; shut against him is the hall of every house, locked are all the chambers." It appears from these passages that not only was the weight of taxation felt by the small cultivator to be oppressive, and the conduct of the taxgather to be brutal, but that forced labours were from time to time imposed on him, and the stick and cord employed if he resisted. Torn from his family and homestead, and compelled to work under the hot Egyptian sun at cleaning out or banking up tho canals, no wages paid him, and insufficient food supplied, he doubtless shared too fiequently the lot of the modern forced excavators, and perished under the hardships which a cruel government imposed on him. If a tough constitution enabled him to escape this fate and return home, he might find his family dispersed, his wife carried off, and his mud cabin a heap of ruins ! Add to all this, that at the best of times he was looked upon with contempt, not only by the privileged classes, but by their servants—perhaps even by their slaves —and it will be evident that to the cultivators of tbe soil Egypt under the Pharaohs was far from being an Arcadia. On the whole the difference would seem not to have been so very great between the condition of the children of the soil in the most flourishing period of the independent monarchy and in the Egypt of to-day.— "History of Ancient Egypt," by Canon Rawlinson.