EGYPT THE JAPAN OF THE OLD WORLD.
Nec vero terræ ferre omnes omnia possunt.—VIRGIL.
Egypt was the Japan of the old world. While nature had separated it from
other countries, she had given it within its own borders the means for
satisfying all the wants felt by its inhabitants. They acted on the hint.
Their general policy was to seclude themselves, to which, however, their
history contains some conspicuous exceptions; and to exclude foreigners;
which policy, however, they, ultimately, completely reversed in the reign
of Psammetichus, as the Japanese have done in our own day; and from the
same motives. They carried the mechanical arts, and all that ministers to
material well-being, to a high degree of perfection. Like the Japanese,
they did this with what they could win from nature within the boundaries
of their own country, and under what we are disposed to regard as
very crippling disadvantages. Though, indeed, in respect of absolute
independence in the origination of characteristic trains of thought,
and of inventions, Japan, on account of the connexion of its early
civilization with that of China, is estopped from entering the lists
against Egypt. The moral sentiments of the Egyptians, and their social
and domestic life, were entirely their own: the results of the working of
their own ideas. It is this originality that makes them so interesting
and instructive a study of human development. All their customs, and all
that they did, were devised by themselves to meet their own especial
wants. They were self-contained, and confident in themselves that they
would always be able to find out both what would be best for them to do,
and what would be the best way of doing it.
Their success justified this self-reliance. All the ordinary, and many
of the more refined wants of man, were supplied so abundantly, and in so
regular and well-ordered a fashion among them, that a modern traveller
would find no discomfort, and much to wonder at and admire, in a year
or two spent in such a country as was the Egypt of Rameses the Great.
He would, indeed, be a very great gainer if he could find the Egypt of
to-day just what Egypt was three thousand years ago.
There are no other moderately-sized countries in the world so well
prepared by nature for a system of isolation, and self-dependence, as
Japan and Egypt. On a large scale China and the United States possess the
same advantage.
The action of free trade is to place all countries—even those that may be
able to produce but one commodity the world wants, be it wool or labour,
gold or iron, or even the power of becoming carriers for others—on the
same footing of abundance as the most bountifully supplied, but at the
cost of self-dependence, which, in its highest degree, means complete
isolation. Free trade equalizes advantages, making the advantage of each
the advantage of all. It does for the world on a large scale what the
free interchange of no inconsiderable variety of domestic products did
on a small scale for old Japan of the modern, and for old Egypt of the
ancient, world.
With respect to the common arts of everyday life, I think general opinion
is somewhat in error, in the direction of being unduly disparaging, as
to the state in which they were throughout the East, and on the northern
shores of the Mediterranean, at the period which precedes the first
glimmerings of history. I believe that the knowledge of these arts
was throughout that large area spread very generally. Man has no real
tradition of the discovery of these arts any more than he has of the
acquisition of the domestic animals, and of the most useful of the kinds
of grain[3] and of fruits he cultivates. What is to the credit of the
Egyptians is, that they carried the practice of them to a high degree of
perfection, and rendered them singularly fruitful, and that they added to
them much which circumstances made it impossible they could have borrowed
from any other people. Everything done in Egypt was invested with an
Egyptian, just as everything done in Japan has been with a Japanese,
character.