trustee and guardian of the public property. But these cases have always been rare, and are in point of fact the exceptions that prove the rule. The circumstances of the country, as well as the traditions of the people, doubtless forbade the system from being otherwise than uncommon. The Amlâk, moreover, were in general, sooner or later, absorbed in the property of the mosques and charitable institutions. It was the prevailing custom, itself the consequence of a sense of insecurity, to transfer the ownership to such establishments, the donor reserving only the use to himself and his descendants.

Numerous villages are scattered over the face of the country. The entire soil is divided among them, and each has its tract of land, comprised within strictly defined limits. It is at once the duty and the right of each village community to cultivate the soil assigned to it. The village-land is divided among its several members, and the produce belongs to the person by whom each plot is tilled; but the land itself is neither his property nor that of any individual member of the community. As a matter of legal right, each one is entitled to a portion, in severalty or in partnership with others, subject only to his possessing the means of cultivating it, and to his paying the Kharaj, or annual assessment. A person who becomes hopelessly insolvent, and is unable to pay the assessment, forfeits the right to his holding, which reverts to the community, and neither he himself nor his creditors were allowed, until recent innovations, any legal claim for compensation on account of its loss. He held, in short, the position simply of a tenant, the Government assessment being his rent.

Within certain limits the peasants possessed in their villages a prescriptive right of occupation which they were in general allowed to receive and transmit by inheritance, as well as to acquire by purchase and convey by sale. But on the extinction of the family the land was resumed by the community.

The Arabs seem to have made no change in the system they found in existence when they conquered the country in the seventh century. Its Christian inhabitants, by payment of the capitation tax, became Ahl ez Zimmah, the protected people. As such, they retained the right, and continued subject to the duty, of cultivating the soil and of paying the conquerors its revenue. After a time the Arabs themselves began to settle upon the land, and to engage in agriculture. Large and increasing numbers of Christians embraced Mohammedanism, separating themselves from the people of their own race, and intermarrying with their conquerors. A court was then opened, which sat at stated periods of the year in the Mosque of Amru, and at which persons attended from the cities as well as from the villages, and received from the Government grants of occupation, termed Kabáleh. which were awarded at a fixed annual payment. The successfv.

bidder contracted to remain in occupation for four years. At the end of thirty years, the land was re-surveyed, and a re-adjustment was made of the assessment. The court was removed by Ahmad ibn Tulun to the mosque he built in A.D. 879, and the Khaliphs of the Fâtimi dynasty transferred it to their own place of residence, which became in course of time the nucleus of the city of Cairo.

Another denomination of grants was, however, in existence under Arab rule, and continued to prevail until the dissolution of the Fâtimi dynasty in A.D. 1250. These were concessions of villages made to Court favourites under the designation of Ikta'át. The practice was exceptional and necessarily restricted within comparatively narrow limits, all expenses of Government, military as well as civil, being defrayed by direct payments from the public treasury, which was chiefly dependent upon the land revenue for the means of making them. Saladin, on his accession to the sovereignty of Egypt, converted the practice into a system for the maintenance of the civil and military chiefs under his rule. A large proportion of the country was henceforward held as military fiefs for the support of the great leaders of his army, generally Kurds and Turks, and of their dependents and followers. The system, as may readily be imagined, became under Saladin's successors a source of tyranny and abuse. The legal rights of the peasantry to their lands was not disputed, since their labour was indispensable to their masters, but every means of extortion, legal or illegal, was put into operation against them. Complaints could not safely be indulged in, but they were not entirely suppressed, and a contemporary native writer indignantly denounces the degrading system, which, under the Kurdish dynasty, had superseded that of the Kabâleh, and which, he says, reduced the peasantry to a condition worse than slavery, since they could neither be enfranchised, nor even claim the right to be sold.

The system, however, took root, and was carried so far that the whole country is stated to have been eventually held as Ikta'ât by the Egyptian Sultans and their Amîrs.

At various periods measures were adopted to correct and abate the abuses to which it gave rise. One of the most celebrated was that introduced by the Sultan en Nâsir Muhammad, son of Kalaûn, who ordered a complete cadastral survey of the country, executed in A.D. 1315. One of its results was the resumption by the Sultan of large numbers of grants, in consequence of which he was enabled to abolish a multitude of taxes that weighed oppressively upon the trade and agriculture of the country. No new cadastre was afterwards attempted until the days of Mohammed Ali. That of the Malik en Nâsir is to all intents and purposes forgotten. But the particulars then collected have fortunately not been entirely lost. Copies, corrected to A.D. 1376, exist in some of the public libraries of Europe,

and a translation of the roll was published by De Sacy. It forms an appendix to his French version of Abd el Latif's description of Egypt, and contains a list of the villages under the headings of the separate provinces, with the extent of land attached to each, and the amounts of the assessments. The total of the latter is stated at 9,584,264 dinars Jeyshi. Reckoning the latter at eight shillings, the sum would be equal to about £3,833,700.

The conquest of Egypt by the Ottoman Turks, in the sixteenth century, led to a re-organization of the Government, commenced by Sultan Selim, and completed by his son Suleyman. The principle that the land was the property of the State was formally re-asserted. For the purpose, principally, of facilitating the collection of the revenue, villages were conceded to intermediate tenants of the State, styled Multazim. They were answerable for payment of the assessment, in compensation for which they were allowed to levy a stated amount for their own benefit. The traditional rights of occupation of the villagers were maintained, but the Multazim had the power himself to occupy a portion of the village lands, and his holding was designated Wasich. The Government was entitled to resume direct possession at its pleasure, but the power was seldom exercised, and the Multazim was allowed to bequeath or even to sell his rights. The land in the occupation of the villagers was designated Atar. Each was permitted to transmit his holding to his family, but he did not possess the power of sale, nor could he abandon his land. If he died without heirs, it reverted to the Multazim, who was bound to confer it upon another member of the community. The general administration of the land revenue throughout the country was committed to a high official styled the Defterdár. With the speedy decay of Turkish authority over the internal affairs of Egypt, many of Sultan Suleyman's regulations became little more than a dead letter, and the Mcmluk chiefs, in their treatment of the entire population, obeyed no other law but that of their own will.

·

Mohammed Ali, on his accession to the sovereign rule at the beginning of the present century, and on the destruction of the Memlûks, abolished the system of Multazims, and became himself immediate and absolute landlord over the entire soil of the country. He was in many respects a man of wise and enlarged views, and if he had confined his energies to the government of the country, Egypt would probably have attained, under his rule, a degree of prosperity unknown to it for ages. Unhappily for his people, his mind became filled with views of a more brilliant career. Had he succeeded, and become a Mayor of the Palace at Constantinople, Egypt would have fallen into the condition of a Turkish province, governed by the supreme powers on the shores of the Bosphorus, with what result it would be useless to speculate.

In spite of military successes, his ambitious designs ended in failure, and he found himself at the head of a country exhausted and depopulated by the strain he had laid upon it, but still possessing in its fertile soil and in its industrious race the necessary elements for its recovery.

Large tracts of land had fallen out of cultivation, and in many cases, owing to the neglected condition of the irrigation canals and embankments, required an expenditure of capital which the villagers were unable to supply. Leases of these were granted to persons possessed of the requisite means, at a reduced annual assessment, or in certain cases free from it altogether, for a limited number of years. These are the lands known as Aba'dieh or 'Ushûri.

But in many instances entire villages had fallen into a state of destitution and of actual bankruptcy, frequently aggravated by the loss of their cattle, through one or other of the murrains that have scourged the country at frequent intervals. These were generally granted on terms very similar to those conceded to the old Multazims, to wealthy officials, or other persons of high position, who became sureties to the Government for payment of the revenue, and who undertook the cultivation of a portion of the village soil on their own account, giving the peasantry the requisite assistance for the tillage of the remainder. In a considerable number of other cases the Government-or the Viceroy, it was hardly possible to distinguish the one from the other-took the villages into its own hands for the same object, and on analogous conditions. In addition, however, to these grants, others were made by the Viceroy, principally to members of his own family, for the avowed object of providing for their maintenance. These concessions, doubtless, served to increase the security of other grants, but in no case, and least of all in the latter, were they regarded as conferring anything more than usufructuary rights, which the holder, it is true, might transmit to his heirs, but which the Government was fully empowered to resume at its pleasure. on such conditions as it might in each case be pleased to fix.

Each of Mohammed Ali's successors has followed his example in seeking to enrich his family by the same means as those adopted by the founder of the dynasty. Abbas Pasha, his virtual successor, though he did not live long enough to ensure the direct succession to the Viceroyalty for his own descendants, had time nevertheless to place his son Al Hami Pasha in possession of a large extent of land. But his successor Said Pasha absolutely refused to recognize, if not the legality of the grants themselves, at all events any doubt as to the absolute and legal right of the Government to resume at its pleasure the whole or whatever portion of the grants it might deem fit. If the reigning Viceroy, he argued, with unanswerable force from his point of view, were regarded as empowered to make perpetual grants

to his family and children, there would be nothing to prevent him from delivering the whole country into their possession, and with it all substantial power and authority over it, leaving little more than their shadow to his successor. He insisted, therefore, that the villages and their lands should be surrendered; but he allowed Al Hami Pasha to retain possession of all lands to which a title had been acquired by purchase, and such also, if I am not mistaken, as had been granted to his father by Mohammed Ali, whose acts were regarded as entitled to special respect.

We have here, doubtless, one of the earliest circumstances that led to the profound change in the Egyptian system of land tenure, which we have seen in progress in the present day. But other causes had come into existence likely to contribute towards the same result. The wonderful recuperative powers of the country had already commenced to give to the right of occupation of the soil a money value, which, a few years before, could hardly be said to exist. Little more than thirty-five years ago, the peasants were deserting their lands in crowds. They betook themselves to the towns, or wherever they could find subsistence by the carning of wages. The evil became one of such magnitude that the Government set about arresting the men wherever they could be found, and compelled them to return to their villages. There must be many persons able to remember the sight of long strings of these Musahabin, or deserters, generally secured to one another with chains, being led back to their villages. At an earlier period similar deserters had in large numbers sought refuge in Syria, and it will be remembered that it was the refusal of a demand for their extradition that supplied the reason or pretext for Mohammed Ali's attack upon the Pasha of Acre, the first scene in a war that led his armies almost to the very gates of Constantinople. It may, by the way, be remarked that the exodus from Egypt into Syria has probably been known from time immemorial, both before and since the celebrated one that took place under the leadership of the Prophet Moses.

Since the period of Said Pasha's accession, the land assessment has been repeatedly and heavily raised, but the value of produce. and facilities of credit, have undergone a more than proportionate increase. The effect has been to render the occupation of land an eagerly coveted object with all classes of the population. It is truc that, during the latter years of Ismail Pasha's reign, the crushing weight of taxation imposed upon the peasants, under an endless variety of denominations, and the extortions by which it was accompanied, were rapidly reducing the population, and more especially the poorer portion, to its former state of wretchedness. Ominous symptoms of a return to the old unhappy condition of the country were beginning to appear, when, at the eleventh hour, the