CIVILIZATION IN EGYPT.

CIVILIZATION and Taxation have long been considered as proceeding hand in hand. The virtues of a simple people, we are every day told, are not to be expected in our complicated state. That complication which we consider as a portion of civilization, those who have seen and studied the East, in its present state of transition, feel to be an unhappy aberration of the Western mind, which is now spreading to the East, and is there attended with all the worst symptoms which we consider as incident to civilization. There these symptoms are now making progress enormously rapid, in consequence of the fiscal regulations not taking two or three centuries for their establishment, as they have done in Europe, but being the growth of a month or year, and enforced by the great instrument of despotism hitherto unknown in the East, and now imported from the West, viz. standing armies.

The dependence of the Arab on the date-tree

has been the theme of every traveller in Egypt, Africa, and Arabia.

In Egypt,

The soil upon which the date-tree stands is taxed.

The tree is taxed.

The fruit is taxed.

The branch which holds the fruit is taxed.

The Lift made from it is taxed.

The branches are taxed.

The fibre of the trunk is taxed.

The cutting of the branches is an excise.

The leaves of the branches are taxed.

The makers of Lift are taxed.

The makers of Couffan are taxed.

The makers of the date rope are taxed.

The makers of date-baskets are taxed.

The baskets, ropes, &c. on exportation pay duty.

REPLY TO THE FRANKFURT JOURNAL.

THE Frankfurt Journal, of May the 9th, contains a communication of a very extraordinary nature, dated Pera, Constantinople, May the 8th; an atmosphere where it is certainly most natural to feel extreme surprise at the journals of Europe entertaining their readers with "projects of Russia against the Ottoman Empire." "They even assure us," continues the single-minded writer, "that the Emperor Nicholas had thought of profiting by the victories gained over the Turks in 1828, to take and to keep Constantinople; but that the menaces of some Ambassadors, addressed to Count Diebitsch, have sufficed to stop the Russian army at Adrianople, and to oblige that general to make peace.

"Accustomed as I have long been to place full confidence in the assertions of the journals, especially when the ambition of the Russians was the subject, I should perhaps have hesitated this time to believe them implicitly, if I had not found the same assertions in various works,

the authors of which being highly respectable men, could not be suspected of having wished to mislead the public."

The writer consequently expects, with much impatience, "that the Portfolio' would favour the world with some documents which would show, in all its lustre, this splendid episode of the diplomacy of Pera. But their hopes had been disappointed, and the disclosures of the 'Portfolio' have told them nothing on a subject so interesting."

The disclosures of the "Portfolio" not proving satisfactory, the archives of the Russian Mission are ransacked for documents, which are, of course, to expose to ridicule the diplomacy of England. Is the time then really come when Russia ventures to answer the exposure of her duplicity and fraud by the confirmatory exposure of our ignorance and weakness? The circumstances of 1828 and 1829 we have repeatedly alluded to, not merely in connection with the secret documents of Russia referring to that period, but also in connection with a far more important question on the real state of the Russian army at Adrianople.

It would be ridiculous, now-a-days, to call forth any testimony to prove the views of Russia, especially after the publication of the memorable despatch of Count Pozzo di Borgo, in our seventh number, which revealed the object of Russia in that war, namely, to repress the ameliorations which were effecting in the Turkish Empire; the opportunity of doing which was afforded her by that deplorable treaty, through which, to use the words of the Quarterly Review," we not only lost the power of preventing a rupture, but found ourselves contributing to the aggrandizement of our rival, and hastening the subjugation of our ally." In the quotation above given, it is implied that menaces were made by France and England, while the Russian manifesto from Pera publishes the letter of the Ambassador of England and France,* in * Constantinople, Sept. 9, 1829.

Monsieur le Comte,-In the present circumstances there is an imperative duty which we cannot dispense ourselves from fulfilling; it is to inform your Excellency of the infallible consequences which would ensue from the march of the Imperial armies against Constantinople.

The Sublime Porte has formerly declared to us, and we do not hesitate to confirm the truth of its declaration, that in this case it would cease to exist, and that the most terrible anarchy, destroying its power, will give up indiscriminately, and without defence, to