Page:On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt.djvu/159

 the humblest was secured his little home-lot, so that, however poor, he would still feel that he was on the same plane with his neighbors, working in the same fields, performing the same labor, and entitled to the same respect.

But this simplicity and equality could not long have remained, since large estates would begin to swallow up the smaller, but for another law, that the land was inalienable. In Egypt the soil belonged to the king, of whom the people received it as tenants. So the Divine Ruler reserved to himself the title to the new country which the Israelites were to enter: "The land shall not be sold forever; for the land is mine, for ye are strangers and sojourners with me." A man could sell the produce of his farm, or make over the income of an estate for a term of years; but the land itself was the gift of God to his-family, and remained in it from generation to generation.

Political writers may object to this as an agrarian law. But its effect was most happy. It prevented the accumulation of great estates. It checked the ambition of the chiefs. It formed a barrier to the influx of foreign luxury, and to those civil discords which always spring from great Inequalities of social condition. The disregard of this law at a later period was one of the causes which hastened the ruin of the state. "Woe unto them," said the prophet, "that lay field to field till there be no place, that they may be left alone in the midst of the earth!"

But at the beginning the Hebrew state presented the remarkable spectacle of two millions and a half of people, all equal in rank, and very nearly so in condition. This fact is the more surprising when contrasted with the monstrous mequalities which prevailed in other Oriental countries. Indeed, a parallel to this it would not be possible to find in the most democratic modern state.