Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/235

 person among them. I gave to the widow the same amount as I gave to the married woman, and I made no distinction between the great and little in all that I gave. And, behold, when the inundation was great and the owners of the land became rich thereby I laid no additional tax on the fields."

Here is a lesson from the ages on the question of "unearned increment." Has any modern controller of taxation, Imperial or local, so clear a record as this? It is a short inscription, but it is worth a whole wall full of the vapourings of Rameses II. over his famous battle with the Hittites—a piece of almost ludicrously vainglorious writing which the great conqueror has repeated in more than one of the mural records left behind by him in the temples of his construction, and the style of which was not approached in "general orders," so far as one knows, until the days of Napoleon Bonaparte. The sculptured representation of this eternal victory over the Hittites becomes at last a