•\ %■ s> -«'_ .ft ^ \ IP V ./• aV - W > t o^ IN •$< *.**■ : > ^ % % v° \ .'0" V >. w V ^ %** ' q5 -n«. ^ -% *r ' - ^ ^ <n the mass of the European people by the French revolution, through the distorting medium of the opinions and prejudices of his own country, class, or social position as an individual, and reasons and prophesies only upon the shapes and colours which he sees through this false medium. Am I in a condition to see with clearer eyes ? I doubt it. I do not profess it. FRANCE. FACE OF THE COUNTRY. ' 23 The traveller in France finds much to observe, but little to describe. The landscape is a wearisome expanse of tillage land, unvaried by hill and dale, stream and lake, rock and wood land. The towns and villages are squatting in the plains, like stranger beggar women tired of wandering in an unknown land. No suburbs of connected rows of houses and gardens, and of lanes dotted with buildings, trees, and brick walls, stretch, as in England, like feelers into the country, fastening the towns to it by so many lines, that the traveller is in doubt where country ends, and town begins. Here, the towns and villages are distinct, round, inhabited patches upon the face of the land, just as they are represented upon a map : and the flat monotonous surface of the map is no uncharacteristic sketch of the appear- ance of the country. La belle France, in truth, is a Calinuc beauty ; her flat pancake of a face destitute of feature, of projection or dimple, and not even tattooed with lines and cross lines of hedges, walls, and ditches. This wide unhedged expanse of corn-land on either hand, without divisions, or enclosures, or pasture fields, or old trees, single or in groups, is supremely tiresome. The traveller at once admits that France has a natural claim to the word which all other countries have borrowed from her — ennui. The green network of hedges spread over the face of England, that peculiar charm of English land, must have been formed at some very peculiar period in the history of the English people. It must have been the work of a nation of small proprietors long employed upon it. We view it as an embellishment only, and frequently as an incumbrance, rather than a convenience in husbandry \ but it is a memorial of an extinct social condition, different from the present, which has prevailed in some former and distant age in England. This subdivision of the land into small portions by permanent hedges and mounds of earth, is almost peculiar to England. In Scotland, in France, in Ger- many, in all European countries in which the feudal system gave the original law and tenure of land, no small properties fenced all round from each other have existed of old, unless, it may be, in a few small localities. In England, the history of society and property is written upon the face of the country. This immense work, unexampled in extent in any other country, must have been executed in the 600 years between the final departure of the Romans and the Norman conquest. The open unenclosed surface of those districts of France which belonged to 24 ENGLAND. — FACE OF THE COUNTRY. the earlier kings of our Norman line, shows that in the state of the possession of landed property in those provinces in their time, no subdivisions by numerous small permanent enclosures had ever been required or formed. The small enclosures in England must have been made in a different state of society, before the Norman conquest, yet probably after the Romans left the country. No country occupied by the Romans shows any such traces of subdivision among a small proprietary. The Roman occupation of Britain was altogether military ; and such a body of small proprietary would have been adverse in a civil view, and their separate strong enclosures upon the face of the country obstructive in a military view, to the Roman power. The Saxons and Danes — one people in the principles of their laws, institutions, and languages, although in different states of civilisation — must have woven this immense veil over the face of the land during the six centuries they possessed England, under a social arrangement altogether different from the present ; one in which their law of partition of property, among all the children, excluding the feudal principle of primogeniture, would produce this subdivision of the land into small distinct fields. France is now, by the abolition of the feudal tenure of land and of the law of primogeniture, recommencing a state of society which was extinguished in England by the Norman conquest, and the laws of succession adopted from that period. France is in the midst of a great social experiment. Its results upon civilisation can only be guessed at now, and will only be distinctly seen, perhaps, after the lapse of ages. The opinions of all our political economists are adverse to it. Listen to the groans of the most acute observers of our days, on the appalling con- sequences of this division of landed property. Says Arthur Young, in 1789 (consequently before the sale of the national domains, crown and church estates, and confiscated estates of the noblesse, and before the law of the partition of property among all the children became obligatory on all classes of the community,) " Small properties, much divided, prove the greatest source of misery that can possibly be conceived, and has operated to such a degree and extent in France, that a law ought certainly to be made to render all division below a certain number of arpens illegal." Arthur Young wrote this just about fifty years ago, and a few months only before a law was passed directly opposed to the principle he recommends — the law abolishing the rights of primogeniture, and making the division. DIVISION OF LAND. 25 of property among all the children obligatory ; and which law- has been ever since, that is, for nearly half a century, in general and uninterrupted operation. Listen, again, to Mr, Birbeck, a traveller of no ordinary sagacity. " Poor," says he, of the French people under this law, "from generation to generation, and growing continually poorer as they increase in numbers, — in the country, by the incessant division and subdivision of property ; in the towns, by the division and subdivision of trades and professions ; such a 'people, instead of proceeding from the necessaries to the comforts of life, and then to the luxuries, as is the condition of things in England, are rather retrograde than progressive. There is no advancement in French society, no improvement, no hope of it/' Hear, too, the chirp of Mr. Peter Paul Cobbet, in his ride through France. M Here, in Normandy, great lamentation on account of this revolutionary law. They tell me it has dispersed thousands upon thousands of families who had been upon the same spot for centuries." Listen, too, to the thunders of the Edinburgh Review. i; In no country of Europe is there such a vast body of proprietors (one half of the population of France is stated in the preceding paragraph to be proprietors,) and in no civilised European country, with the exception of Ireland, is there so large a pro- portion of the population (stated to be two-thirds) engaged directly in the cultivation, or rather, we should say, in the torture of the soil. And yet the system is but in its infancy. Should it be supported for another half century, la grande nation will certainly be the greatest pauper warren in Europe, and will, along with Ireland, have the honour of furnishing hewers of wood, and drawers of water, for all other countries in the world." Alas, for human wisdom ! Alas, for the predictions of Arthur Young, Mr. Birbeck, and the Edinburgh Review I But who can be a prophet at home ? Not that their prophecies were under- valued at home ; but their home-made prophecies were of no value — were framed upon narrow local views, and prejudices. When new social arrangements, diametrically opposed in principle and spirit to the feudal, grew up, and unfolded them- selves, first in America and afterwards in France, and gradually spread from thence over great part of the present Prussia, the feudalised minds of our Scotch political economists were lavish in their predictions of the degradation, misery, and barbarism which must inevitably ensue among that portion of the human race who were so unfortunate as to adopt the dictates of nature 26 DR. CHALMERS ON THE DIVISION OF LAND. and reason in their legislation on property and social rank, instead of adhering to conventional and barbarous laws, and institutions, derived from the darkest period of the middle ages. If natural affection, humanity, reason, religion — if all that distinguishes man from the brute creation — speak more clearly in the human breast on the obligation of one duty than of another, it is on that of the parent providing equally according to his means for all the beings he has brought into existence and added to society ; leaving none of them to want and dis- tress if he can help it, or to chance for a precarious subsistence, or to be supported by his neighbours out of their alms, as paupers, or out of their taxes, as useless functionaries, or by uncertain dependence upon employment and bread from others. Is not this a moral and religious duty ? Is it not the clearest duty of the parent, not only to the offspring he has brought into existence, but to the social body of which he and they are members 1 Can any argument of expediency, drawn from our artificial state of society under the feudal system and feudal law of succession to property, and of the advantages of that system, J;n m away the natural sentiments of men from this great moral duty to their own offspring 1 from this great moral duty to the rest of society ? Yet listen to the morality and political economy taught lately in no obscure corner, and to no train fluential pupils, but from the Divinity chair of the University of Edinburgh, to the young men who were to go forth, and are now, the religious and moral instructors of the people in the established church of Scotland. "We know," says Dr. Chalmers, in his Political Economy in connection icith the Moral State and Moral Prospects of Society, being the sub- stance of a course of lectures delivered to the students of the Theological Hall in Edinburgh,—"' We know," says this distin- guished philosopher, " that there is a mighty force of sentiment and natural affection arrayed against the law of primogeniture. But here is the way in which we would appease these feelings, and make compensation for the violence done to them. We would make no inroad on the integrity of estates, or, for the sake of a second brother, take off to the extent of a thousand a year from that domain of ten thousand a year which devolved by succession on the eldest son of the family. We should think it vastly better, if, by means of a liberal provision in. all the branches of the public service, a place of a thousand a year lay FEUDAL SUCCESSION BY PRIMOGENITURE. 27 open to the younger son, whether in the law, or in the church, or in colleges, or in any other well-appointed establishment kept up for the good and interest of the nation." Will the teachers, or the taught, of this new school of morality and political economy in the Theological Hall of Edinburgh, explain the moral principle on which they recommend the getting rid of " a mighty force of sentiment and natural affec- tion," and " the appeasing those feelings, and making compen- sation for the violence done to them, by places of a thousand a year," or by any other pecuniary compensation in the public service? The "mighty force of sentiment and natural affection," the " feelings to be appeased and compensated for the violence done them " by places in the church, or the law, or in colleges, or some other well-appointed establishment, are nothing less sacred, or of less moral value, than the paternal affection and the moral sentiment of justice to others, urging on the feelings of the parent to provide equally for each of his children to the utmost of his means ; and dictating to him, as a man, the moral duty to his fellow-men of not imposing upon them the burden of maintaining his progeny, either as parsers, or as superfluous public functionaries, if he has property to maintain them him- self. Will the teachers, or the taught, of this new school of moral and political philosophy in the University of Edin- burgh explain the moral, religious, or philosophical principle of this " appeasing and compensating " for the sacrifice of natural affection, moral feeling, and sentiment of duty, by places in the church, or the law, or in any other well-appointed establishments '? They are not in the position of ordinary men speaking or writing speculatively on morals, and responsible only as idle and uninfluential philosophers, or political writers, for the errors of their speculations. The men who are the profes- sional teachers of the people in morals and religion, are bound to hold none but the clearest and purest doctrines — to teach, and to be taught, nothing obscure or doubtful in political, moral, or religious science. The feudal system with its corner-stone, the law of primogeniture, may be a very good or very expedient system; but it is admitted by themselves to be an artificial arrangement of society and property, not established or upheld in the human mind by nature or religion, but, on the contrary, one against which " there is a mighty force of sentiment and natural affection arrayed." Will they explain the moral principle of their doctrine, that the most virtuous feelings in our nature — the 2S MORALITY SACRIFICED TO THE FEUDAL SUCCESSION. mighty force of natural affection for our children, and the mighty force of the sentiment of justice to our fellow-men — should be sacrificed to support an artificial system or arrangement of society, be that system or arrangement ever so expedient or beneficial? Will they explain the moral principle upon which they recommend u the appeasing those natural feelings of affec- tion and moral duty, and the compensating for the violence done to them," by an appointment of a thousand a year, or by any other pecuniary compensation 1 Will they explain the moral difference between the conduct of the owner of a domain of ten thousand a year, who leaves it all to his eldest son, and leaves his younger son to be provided for by his neighbours out of their taxes, in some appointment of a thousand a year in the church, or the law, or in any other public establishment — which is the case propounded and recommended by them — and the conduct of the wretched female who exposes her new-born babe on her neighbour's door-step to be provided for out of his means ] The moral guilt of the latter, driven by want and misery to abandon the infant she is unable to maintain, appears to all men whose moral sense has not been cultivated at the Theological Hall of the University of Edinburgh, infinitely less than that of the man of ten thousand a year, who abandons his younger children to the support of the public, in order to leave ail his estate to the eldest son. Will they explain the moral grounds of their teaching, that the abandonment of his parental and social duties to his offspring, and to his fellow-men, is a laudable act in the case of the rich domain owner, and the same abandon- ment an immoral and criminal act in the case of the wretched strumpet 1 They are the teachers of the people of Scotland, whose principles of moral and political philosophy, as laid down in their own text-book, are here arraigned, and they ought to satisfy every doubt that is suggested to the public mind, either of the moral purity or of the philosophical correctness of their speculations. Will they explain the principle and justice of their political economy on this subject, and also its working and effects on society 1 If the owner of a domain of ten thousand a year is morally, and for the general benefit of society, entitled to a provision of a thousand a year for his younger son from the rest of the community — for they, the rest, pay with their taxes the appointments in the law, the church, and all other branches of public service, which it is proposed and recommended to establish for the benefit of the younger sons of those rich pau- IRISH SMALL TENANTRY. 29 pers, and as a compensation to the latter for having stifled their natural affections as parents, and their sense of duty to thtir fellow-men — that younger son must be equally entitled to a provision for his younger son; for he too has natural affection and a moral sense to stifle, and to be compensated for. How long, to what extent, and with what effect on the wellbeing of society is this clerical system of political economy to work, by which the property of all is to be devoted to the subsistence, in highly paid offices, of a part of the community 1 AVill they also explain if all those younger sons of domain owners, thus to be provided for ad infinitum at the public expense, in order to enable and encourage wealthy parents to stifle the feelings of natural affection and social duty, and leave undiminished their domains often thousand a year to their eldest sons, are all to be born with the necessary qualifications for those liberal appoint- ments in the church, or in the law, or in the public service, which it is proposed to establish for their subsistence ? Are they, for instance, to be born clergymen of the church of Scot- land, with all the talents and acquirements needful, or are they only to bring into the world with them all the learning and divinity necessary, but are to acquire their principles of moral philosophy and political economy at the Theological Hall of the University of Edinburgh 1 It is the duty of every inquirer into political and social economy to raise his voice against such attempts to educate a people into the support of any social or political system founded on mere expediency, not upon moral principle ; and which is not the only social arrangement among civilised men, nor proved by reasoning, or experience, to be incontrovertibly the best for the general wellbeing of a community. This is perverting education to the most despicable end — the support of a political system. Other social arrangements than the feudal do exist in civilised countries. Religion, morality, and social wellbeing flourish in those countries, as well as in the countries feudally constituted. To enlist the passions or prejudices of mankind by education into a partisanship for one or the other constitution of society, to inculcate the sacrifice of moral duty, of natural sentiment, of the highest affections and feelings of human beings, for the support of one or the other social arrangement on account of its real or supposed expediency, is unsound doctrine. The condition of Ireland, divided and subdivided among a small tenantry, whose savings, be it remembered,, by wretched 30 DIFFERENT CONDITION OF SMALL PROPRIETORS. diet, lodging, and raiment, and the privation of every comfort of civilised life, is a saving which -goes in the shape of high rent into the pockets of another class, the landowners, not into their own pockets, as the gains of their frugality, to be added to their property, or means of expenditure, was, and still is, the grand bugbear of our Scotch political economists, and still furnishes the main argument against the distribution of landed property through the social body, by the natural and moral law of succes- sion. They did not, and do not at present consider the some- what important difference of people being the owners or not the owners of the land divided. The belly is too faithful a counsellor to the head, to allow a man to sit down to live upon a piece of land of his own, if it be not large enough to support him in the way he has been accustomed to live. He turns his pro- perty into another shape — into money, and makes a living out of it as a tradesman. Between the condition of such a landowner, and an Irish cottar-tenant, there is the important difference, that the former has a capital which he may keep in land, or invest in leather or sugar ; he may be a peasant, or a shoemaker, or a grocer, according to his judgment, and if he lives merely upon potatoes and water, what he spares is increasing his capital, and means of gratification in some other shape. The Irish cottar-tenant has no property to [begin with, in the land or in anything else. He is, and his whole class, in consequence of the working of the law of primogeniture in society, pauper ah initio ; and all that is spared by his inferior condition, in respect of the comforts and necessaries of life, goes into his landlord's pocket, in the shape of rent, not into his own as the savings of his own prudence and fru- gality. He is also placed in a false position by the landholders of Ireland, even as compared to the cottar-tenantry which existed formerly, all over Scotland, and still continue in the northern counties. The latter were generally charged a rent in kind, that is, in a proportion of the crops produced, or with a reference to the average crops of the land. The peasant could understand the simple data before him. knew at once whether the land could produce enough to feed his family and. leave a surplus such as was demanded for rent, and, if not, he sought a living in some other employment. His standard of living was not deteriorated by his rent in kind, because he had a clearly seen surplus of the best as well as of the worst of the products of his farm for family consumption, after paying the portion of these products that were his rent. The Irish small tenantry, on MOSEY REST. REST IN PECEUCE. 31 the contrary, have to pay for their land in money. It would be just as reasonable to make them pay for their land in French wines for the squire, or Parisian dresses for the lady. Their land produces neither gold, nor silver, nor Irish bank-notes. It is not reasonable to make the peasant, the ignorant man, pay in those commodities — they are but commodities like wines and silks — and to make men, simple, inexperienced in trade, and a prey to market-jobbers, to run the double mercantile risk of selling their own commodities, and buying those in which their landlords choose to be paid their rents. The great capitalist-farmer may choose to add the trade of the corn-merchant to that of the agriculturist, and to take the mercantile as well as the agricultural risks and profits upon himself ; but even the shrewdest of this class, the great farmers of the south of Scotland, are dropping, as fast as they can, this mercantile branch of farming business, and coming back to the natural principle of farming, that of paying for their land a pro- portion of what the land produces, so many bolls of grain per acre — throwing upon the laird the risk which, in reason and common- sense, ought to devolve upon him, that of turning his share of the produce raised by the farmer's labour, skill, and capital, out of his acres, into gold or bank-bills. Money rent deteriorates the condition of a small tenant in two ways. The more honestly he is inclined, the more poorly and meanly he must live. He must sell all his best produce, his grain, his butter, his flax, his pig, and subsist upon the meanest of food, his worst potatoes and water, to make sure of money for his rent. It thus deteriorates his standard of living. He is also tempted by money-rent out of the path of certainty into that of chance. It thus deteriorates his moral condition. Ask him six barrels of oats, or barley, or six stones of butter, or flax, for a piece of land which never produced four, and his common-sense and experience guides him. He sees and comprehends the simple data before him, knows from his experience that such a crop cannot be raised, such a rent cannot be afforded, and he is off to England or America to seek a living. But ask him six guineas per acre for a piece of land, proportionably as much over-rented as the other, and he trusts to chance, to accident, to high market prices, to odd jobs of work turning up, to summer or harvest labour out of the country — in short, he does not know to what ; for he is placed in a false position, made to depend upon chance of markets, and on mercantile success and profits, as much as upon industry and skill in working his little farm. 32 FALSE AXIOMS IN POLITICAL ECONOMY. In all those respects the condition of the small tenant, an J that of the small proprietor, are so totally different, that our political economists reason upon false data, when they conclude that a country divided among small proprietors must necessarily present, or fall into, the same evils in the social condition of the people, as a country occupied by a small over-rented tenantry. They set out, also, in their speculations, with a false axiom. They admit that a certainty of subsistence — food, fuel, clothing, and lodging, being all comprehended under this term, subsis- tence — is the first and greatest good in the physical condition of an individual or of a society; and they assume it as an axiom, that those parts of a social body, those individuals or classes, who are employed in producing articles of general use or desire among men — to put the case in the strongest light, say black- smiths, tailors, shoemakers, and such classes as produce articles which every individual in the community requires and uses, — ■ are as near to this first and greatest good of a certain subsistence by their work, as those immediately employed in its production by husbandry. Now this may be true, where husbandry is a manufacture, as with us in Britain, for producing by hired labourers the greatest quantity possible of grain, meat, and other products out of the soil, to be exchanged against the products of other branches of industry. It may be true that the hired labourers of the manufacturer of corn from land are no nearer to a certainty of subsistence than the hired labourers of the manufacturer of cloth or leather. But it is not true, where husbandry is followed as in France, and in the countries divided among a small proprietary, for the sake of subsisting the husbandman himself, the actual labourer on the land, as its first object ; and where the exchanging its products for other articles, even of general use and necessity, is but a secondary object. A man will not give up his needful food, fuel, clothing, or lodging, to gratify even his real and most pressing wants of iron- work, leather- work, or cloth- work. His surplus only will be applied to acquiring those secondary necessaries of life ; and those who live by making them are, consequently, far from being go near to that first good in social condition, a certain subsistence, as he is. But if two-thirds of the population of a country be in the situation of this individual, who has his certain subsistence out of his own land, by his own labour, and depends upon no man's surplus for his own needful food, fuel, clothing, and lodging, I take that to be a good state of society, a better arrangement of the SMALL FARMS. AGRICULTURE. 33 social structure, than where needful subsistence is not certain to the great majority of its numbers. It carries, moreover, within itself, a check upon over-population, and the consequent deterio- ration of the social condition, and which is totally wanting in the other social system. In even the most useful and necessary arts and manufactures, the demand for labourers is not a seen, known, steady, and appreciable demand • but it is so in hus- bandry under this social construction. The labour to be done, the subsistence that labour will produce out of his portion of land, are seen and known elements in a man's calculation upon his means of subsistence. Can his square of land, or can it not, subsist a family ? Can he marry, or not ? are questions which every man can answer without delay, doubt, or speculation. It is the depending on chance, where judgment has nothing clearly set before it, that causes reckless, improvident marriages in the lower, as in the higher classes, and produces among us the evils of over-population : and chance necessarily enters into every man's calculations, when certainty is removed altogether ; as it is, where certain subsistence is, by our distribution of property, the lot of but a small portion, instead of about two-thirds of the people. Another axiom taken up as granted, and as quite undeniable, by our agriculturists and political economists, is, that small farms are incompatible with a high or perfect state of cultivation in a country. In the same breath they recommend a garden-like cultivation of the land. Pray what is a garden but a small farm] and what do they recommend, but that a large farm should be, as nearly as possible, brought into the state of cultivation and productiveness of a garden or small farm ? This can only be done, they tell us, by the application of large capitals, such as small farmers cannot command, to agriculture : let us reduce these grand words to their proper value. Capital signifies the means of purchasing labour ; the application of capital to agriculture means the application of labour to land. A man's own labour, as far as it goes, is as good as any he can buy, nay, a great deal better, because it is attended by a per- petual overseer — his self-interest — watching that it is not wasted or misapplied. If this labour be applied to a suitable, not too large, nor too small area of soil, it is capital applied to land, and the best kind of capital, and applied in the best w T ay to a garden-like cultivation. A garden is better dug, and manured, and weeded, and drained, and is proportionably far more pro- C 34 SMALL FARMS. — PRODUCTIVENESS. ductive than a large farm, because more toil and labour, that is, more capital is bestowed upon it, in proportion to its area. A small farm, held not by the temporary right of a tenant, and under the burden of a heavy rent, but by the owner of the soil, and cultivated by the labour of his family, is precisely the principle of gardening applied to farming \ and in the countries in which land has long been occupied and cultivated in small farms by the owners — in Tuscany, Switzerland, and Flanders — the garden-like cultivation and productiveness of the soil are cried up by those very agriculturists and political economists, who cry down the means, the only means, by which it can be attained universally in a country — the division of the land into small, garden-like estates, farmed by the proprietors. It is possible that the family of the small proprietor-farmer consume almost all that they produce, and have very little surplus to send to market \ but that merely affects the proportions of the population engaged in producing food, and in producing objects to be exchanged for food. The produce supports the same number of human beings — every potatoe finds a mouth — whether the whole of it belongs to one man, who sells it for the labour and productions of the rest of the number, or belongs in small portions to the whole. The traveller who considers the prices, supplies, and varieties of agricultural food in the market towns in Flanders, France, Switzerland, and the liberal use, or, more correctly, the abundance and waste in the cooking and housekeeping of all classes in those countries, w^ill scarcely admit even, that in proportion to the number of the whole community not engaged in husbandry, a smaller surplus for their consumpt is sent to market by the small farmers. It cannot be denied that a minute division of the land into small, free, garden -like properties, seems, a priori, more favourable to a garden -like cultivation of a country than its division into vast baronial estates, and the sub-division of these into extensive farms, on which the actual husbandmen, as a class, are but hired labourers, having no interest in the productions of the soil, and no-object in their work but to get the day over. How stand the statistical facts that bear upon this important question ? It is stated by Dupin, that the amount of arable land at present in France is but little more than it was in 1789, but that the population is increased by about' eight millions ; and inconsequence of the division of property by the law of succession, that one-half of the whole population are proprietors, EFFECTS IN FRANCE OF THE PARTITION OF LAND. c5 and, counting their families, two-thirds of the whole are engaged - in the direct cultivation of the soil. It will not be said by the iaost strenuous advocate of those feudal arrangements of society which the French revolution annihilated in France, that the French people now are worse fed, worse clothed, worse lodged, or less generally provided with the necessaries, comforts, and luxuries of life, than they were before 1789, before the revolu- tion, when Arthur Young described the wretched condition of the people. The imports and consumpt of the tropical products in France prove how superior, beyond all comparison, is the present state of the people. Now, how is this additional popu- lation of eight millions of individuals fed frcm the same extent of arable land, if not by their superior cultivation of that land '? The same extent of arable land is supporting about one-third more people — for the population of France was then reckoned about 25 millions, and now about 33 millions — and in greater abundance and comfort. How is this, if the land is not in a inore productive cultivation, under the present division into small properties 1 It is evident from the statistical facts, that without any noticeable improvement in the modes, rotations, or utensils of husbandry, the mere subdivision of the area to which labour is applied into small-property-farms, cultivated in a garden-like way, and the converting the labour formerly applied to the same area, from hired labour, or perhaps unpaid labour of serfs, into the labour of proprietors working on their own land, are sufficient to account for a more garden-like cultivation and productiveness of the same extent of arable land. Two genera- tions of adults, or fifty years, have passed away under the deteriorating effects of the partition of land, denounced by Arthur Young, in 1789, as even then, "the greatest source of. misery that can be conceived." This greatest conceivable source of misery has not diminished the population, nor made it more miserable. This partition and repartition of land has not reduced all estates to one minimum size, like an Irish cottar's acre. Estates of all sizes and values, from £500 to £50,000 in price, re to be found on sale in France, as in England. The aggre- gation of land by deaths of co-relatives, balances the partition of land by deaths of parents. The application even of great capitals, and scientific skill to objects of husbandry, has not been impeded by this partition of land. The capital, for example, laid out in France in establishments for making beet- root sugar, is greater, perhaps, than has been laid out in Britain' 36 EFFECTS IN FRANCE OF THE PARTITION OF LAND. during the same period, on any one agricultural object. The thing itself, the making sugar from beet-root, as an agricultural operation in modern husbandry, may be impolitic, if such sugar can only be made under protecting duties, and if sugar can be got cheaper, and without slave labour, from the West Indies — -a point not at all ascertained ; but the value of the fact for our argument remains the same. A beet-root sugar work requires science, skill, expensive machinery, and very considerable capital. Hydraulic presses of the best construction to express the juice, and steam engines to pump it up, are not rare in beet-root sugar works. I have visited one in the Pas de Calais, in which the presses and engines had been made in London for the work, at a time when we scarcely knew that such an agricultural object existed, and was carried on so near us. At present, that is, in 184 i, France has 389 beet-root sugar works in activity, although no longer favoured or protected by any unequal duty on colonial sugar ; and from January 1840 to the- end of May 1841, these have delivered to the consumpt of the country 26,174,547 kilogrammes, or 5,234,909 cwt., which have paid in duty to the revenue 3,205,783 francs. The total consumpt of France yearly appears to be about 16,518,840 cwt. of sugar. , : It may perhaps be a question whether in all England, south of Trent, there can be found so many threshing machines of the best and most ex- pensive construction — such as cost from £800 to £1200, in the best agricultural districts of Northumberland, Roxburghshire, and the Lothian s — as France, under her partition law of suc- cession, can produce of these complicated, and far more expensive establ ishmen t s. The social effects of the partition of property upon the con- dition of the people, as well as the economical effects on their agriculture, are very wide of those preconceived and predicted. What has been the march of society under this law since 1816, when France first began to enjoy it in a settled state of peace ? In the first seven or eight years after 1816, all society had still a martial air and habit. The soldier was everything and every- where. Boys would strut about, and have you believe that they had seen fire at Montmartre, or, at the least, had been with the army of the Loire. For the first three or four years, France was one great camp of disbanded soldiers, swaggering and idling about, in town and country. The small proprietors had noc .confidence in the security of their portions of confiscated domains of the church, or of the emigrant noblesse, and had not EFFECTS IN FRANCE OF THE PARTITION OF LAND. 37 the means or courage to improve them. The predictions of our political economists, seemed hastening to fulfilment. But in the next period of six or eight years, a change came over the spirit of the land. The military mania abated. On se lasse de tout, especially in France. The soldier was in the back-ground. The vieux militaire was voted a tiresome, old, stupid bore. Idlers of the middle and lower classes were evidently diminish- ing in numbers and importance. The young men you met with in the diligence, or at the table d'hote, were no longer billiard- table loungers and half-pay officers, but sons of proprietors from the south, selling their wines in the northern departments, or of merchants and manufacturers from the north, extending their business in the south. Industry was evidently on the move. Houses were in building in every village. The small land- owners had acquired means and confidence, and were beginning to lodge themselves on their little estates. Prices, profits, speculations, undertakings, establishments in business, engrossed all conversation among all classes. Now, in the last period of seven or eight years, the French are passing from a military to an industrious people, as rapidly as such a change in the spirit of so vast a mass of population so lately military can be expected. This change in the spirit of a nation cannot be rapid, because there is at first an under supply of commercial and manufacturing means, and objects, to employ the activity and restlessness of mind reared in military habits ; and the government, un- fortunately, agitates for military pre-eminence in Europe, instead of favouring the advance of peaceful habits in the population; but the change evidently is in progress, is advancing, is far ad- vanced, and all France is undoubtedly alive with an industry, and a commercial manufacturing spirit, unknown at any former period of her history. The condition of the French people as to food, clothing, and the comforts of life, compared to their condition before 1789, is undoubtedly better. What is the condition of their labouring class at present, compared to that of our own 1 The only means of comparison is to take one class of men, whose condition is in all countries the same, relatively to that of the common labourer, the military — and to compare the condition of the common labourer in each country, with that of the common soldier. Now in England, since 1816, no bounty, or very trifling bounty, is required to obtain recruits for the army ; and none but men of the best description as to age, health, and stature, are received. 38 EFFECTS OF THE PARTITION OF LAND IN FRANCE. The inference to be made is, that the condition of our common soldier is so much better than, or so equal to, the condition of our common labourer, that little or no inducement of bounty is required to make able-bodied men enlist in sufficient numbers. But the condition of our soldier has not been altered for the better since the peace, since 1816. It is the condition of our labouring class that has altered for the worse. In England, as in France, the soldier is fed, paid, lodged, and clothed, precisely as he was five-and-twenty years ago. But in France, although the term of service is only for six years, so far are the labouring class from such a condition as to enlist without the inducement of bounty, that from 1800 to 2000 francs, or £80 sterling, is usually offered for a recruit to serve as a substitute for one who is drawn by ballot for the army. Clubs and assurance companies are es- tablished all over France for providing substitutes for the mem- bers who may happen to be drawn for service. The inference to be made is, that here the condition of the common labourer is too good to be exchanged for that of the common soldier without the inducement of a premium ; his labour too valuable to be given for the mere living and pay of the soldier, although the soldier's pay and living are as good, in proportion to the habits of the people and price of provisions as in England. How ludicrous, as one sits on the deck of a fine steam-vessel going down the Saone, or the Rhone, or the Seine, passing every half hour other steam -vessels, and every five or six miles under iron suspension bridges, and past canals, short factory railroads even, and new-built factories — how laughable, now, to read the lugubrious predictions of Arthur Young half a century ago, of Birbeck quarter of a century ago, of the Edinburgh Keview some twenty years ago, about the inevitable conse- quences of the French law of succession ! " A pauper warren !* Look up from the page and laugh. Look around upon the actual prosperity, and well-being, and rising industry of this people, under their system. Look at the activity on their rivers, at the new factory chimneys against the horizon, at the steam-boats, canals, roads, coal works, wherever nature gives any opening to enterprise. France owes her present prosperity, and rising industry, to this very system of subdivision of property, which allows no man to live in idleness, and lio capital to be employed without, a view to its reproduction, and places that great instrument of industry and wellbeing, property, in the hands of all classes. The same area of arable land, according to FRENCH CHARACTER. 39 Dupin, feeds now a population greater by eight millions, and certainly in greater abundance and comfort^ than under the former system of succession ; because now its produce is applied to feeding reproductive labourers, who, either in husbandry on their own little estates, or in manufactures, or trade, are produ- cing, while they are consuming, what brings back either con- sumable produce, or the value of what they consume in due time. But the produce applied to the feeding of soldiery, of labourers employed by a splendid court in works of mere osten- tation and grandeur, in building palaces, or constructing magni- ficent public works of no utility equivalent to the labour expended, and, to a certain extent, even in the fine arts, and, above all, in supporting a numerous idle aristocracy, gentry, and clergy, with their dependent followers, was a waste of means, a consumpt without any corresponding return of con- sumable or saleable produce from the labour or industry of the consumers. In this view, the comparison between the old feudal construction of society in France, and the new under the present law of succession, resolves itself into this result, — that one-third more people are supported under the new, in greater abundance and comfort, from the same extent of arable land, in consequence of the law of succession having swept off the non- productive classes, forced them into active industry, and obliged all consumers, generally speaking, to be producers also, while they consume. In this view, the cost of supporting the old court, aristocracy, gentry, clergy, and all the system and arrange- ments of society in France, under the ancient regime, has been equivalent to the cost of supporting one-third more inhabitants m France, and in greater comfort and wellbeing ; and this is the gain France has realized by her revolution, and by the abolition of the law of primogeniture, its most important measure. Let us do justice to the French character. Their self-com- mand, their upon-honour principle, is very remarkable, and much more generally diffused than among our own population. They are, I believe, a more honest people than the British. The beggar, who is evidently hungry, respects the fruit upon the road-side within his reach, although there is nobody to protect it. Property is much respected in France ; and in bringing up children, this fidelity towards the property of others seems much more carefully inculcated by parents in the lowest class, in the home education of their children, than with us. This respect for 40 HONESTY. — EDUCATION. — MANNERS. the property is closely connected with that respect for the feel- ings of our neighbours, which constitutes what is called good manners. This is carefully inculcated in children of all ranks in France. They are taught to do what is pleasing and agreeable to others. We are too apt to undervalue this spirit, as tending merely to superficial accomplishments, to empty compliment in words, and unmeaning appearance in acts. But, in reality, this reference to the feelings of others in all we do, is a moral habit of great value where it is generally diffused, and enters into the home training of every family. It is an education both of the parent and child in morals, carried on through the medium of external manners. Our lower and middle classes are deficient in this kind of family education; and there is some danger that the parents in those classes may come to rely too much with us, for all education, upon the parish and Sunday schools. It is but reading, writing, reckoning, and the catechism, after all, that can be taught a people by the most perfect system of national school education ; and those acquire- ments would be dearly bought if they interfere with, or supersede family instruction and parental example, and admonition in the right and wrong, in conduct, morals, and manners. It is a fine distinction of the French national character, and social economy, that practical morality is more generally taught through manners, among and by the people themselves, than in any country in Europe. One or two striking instances of this general respect for property have occurred to me in travelling in France. I once forgot my umbrella in a diligence going to Bordeaux, in which I travelled as far as Tours. My umbrella went on to Bordeaux, and returned to Tours in the corner of the coach, without being appropriated by any of the numerous passengers, or work people, who must have passed through it on so long a journey, and have had this stray unowned article before them. I once travelled from Paris to Boulogne with a gentleman who had come up the same road a few r days before. We were con- versing on this very subject, the honesty of the people in general, and he recollected having left on the table of one of the inns half a basket of grapes, w^orth about 12 sous, which, he said, he was sure he would find safe. On arriving, he asked the waiter if he had seen the grapes, and they were instantly produced, as a mat- ter of course, out of a press in which they had been carefully put away as property not belonging to the house. It is the great diffusion and exposure of property in small things, among a natiou SOCIETY EDUCATES ITSELF IN MORALS. 41 of small proprietors, that produce this regard for its safety even in trifles, this practical morality. It is not the value lost, but the injury to the feeling of ownership, which constitutes the criminality, or rather the injury, in many petty aggressions on property; and respect for the feelings of others enters into the manners and morals of the French. Society left; to itself will, probably, always work itself up to its moral wants. The moral condition of France, from 1794 to 1816, had certainly no aid from the clerical, educational, civil, or military establishments of its government, or from the wars and tumults in which the country was engaged ; yet countries blessed, during all that period, with the fullest, most powerful, and best endowed church establishments, as part of their government, may envy the moral condition of the great mass of the French people. The social economist, w T ho looks at France, and at the United States of America, will pause before he admits in its fullest extent the usual clerical assumption, that a powerful church establish- ment, and an union of church and state, are essential to the mo- rality, piety, or education of a people. Pie will be apt to conclude, that society left to itself will provide according to its wants, and to its recipient capabilities, for education, morals, and religion — that these must grow naturally out of social circumstances, and cannot be forced by establishments, clerical or educational, into any wholesome existence — and that a people will no more fall into barbarism, or retrograde in civilisation, from the want of establishments suitable to their social condition, than a family will turn cannibals from wanting a butcher's shop or a cook. It is nearly half a century since the decimal division of money, weights, and measures was adopted by the French Convention, and by every succeeding government it has been adhered to, and enforced by law. The learned in all other countries, as well as in France, are unanimous in recommending its adoption, on ac- count of the greater practical facility in operations and accounts, of the decimal than the duodecimal division of weights, measures, and money; yet, in spite of law and science, the French people continue to use the duodecimal division. They persist in thinking duo decimally, even when by law they must express themselves decimally. Is this obstinate adherence to the least perfect and most difficult mode of reckoning quantity, or value, in the or- dinary affairs of life, the effect of mere prejudice, of blind custom, of the perversity, in short, of the public mind ? I suspect the cause lies deeper. Prejudice, custom, or perversity, will not make 42 DECIMAL DIVISION OF WEIGHTS AND MEASURES. people forego a clear advantage. Men of science and legislators, in recommending and adopting the decimal division, have considered only the arithmetical operations to be performed with numerals ; but not the nature of the subjects to which those operations with numerals are applied. Weights, measures of capacity or of ex- tension, and money, are measures applied to the products of nature, or of human industry, and to their value in exchange with other products through the medium of money. Now the value of the products either of nature, or of art, is the time and labour involved in them. The value of the most valuable of natural products, the diamond, has the same base as the value of a pin, — it is the value of scarcity; that is to say, of the time and labour it would cost to find such another diamond, or to make such another pin. The value of those two elements — time and labour — is what we buy, and sell, and record in our accounts, and to which all measure- ment of quantity with a reference to value, and all reckoning in the ordinary transactions of life, refer. One of these two elements — time — regulates, in a considerable degree, the value of the other —labour — and is the usual measure of it. It is the time em- ployed by which we measure the work done, and estimate its value in ordinary affairs. But time is divided by nature duodeci- mally not decimally. The four seasons, the twelve months of a year, the four weeks in a month, the twenty-four hours in a day, the twelve working hours, the hours of light and darkness, the six working days in a week, are partly natural divisions of time connected with changes in our planetary position, and partly con- ventional, such as the number of working hours in a day, or of working days in a week, but derived from the natural divisions, and all are duodecimally divided. Labour being estimated by time, and time divided duodecimally, the products of time and labour — that is to say, all that men buy, sell, use, or estimate in reckoning — are necessarily and properly measured by weights, measures, or money, also duodecimally divided ; so that parts of the one correspond to parts of the other. To measure or pay in decimals what is delivered in duodecimals, is not an easy or natural process; although, apart from all consideration of what numerals are applied to, and in more abstra'ct operations with them, the decimal system is unquestionably the most easy and perfect to reckon by. To pay one hour's work, or two hours' work, of a day divided into twelve working hours, out of money divided duodecimally, is an easy process — or to measure the pro- duct of time and work by measures of quantity also duodecimally DECIMAL DIVISION OF WEIGHTS AND_ MEASURES. 43 divided ; but to measure the same by decimal weights or measures, or pay for the work in decimally divided money, is not a simple operation. It is time, in reality, which is the element bought and sold between man and man, if we resolve the value of pro- ductions to its base: and unless time is divided decimally, which natural arrangement renders impracticable, the decimal division cannot be generally adopted in ordinary affairs. It would be a retrograde step to measure all production in which time is the main element of value, by one scale, and to measure time itself by another. It may be arithmetically right, looking only to the abstract operations with the numerals, to adopt the decimal di- vision; but it would be philosophically wrong, looking at the nature of the things to which the numerals are to be applied. A great proportion of the food of mankind, also, is divided by nature duodecimally. The beasts of the field and birds of the air happen to have generally four, not five limbs; and the butcher, in spite of decimals, will divide, cut, and weigh his beef and mutton by quarters and halves, not by five-tenths or five-twen- tieths of the carcass. In many of the most necessary and perpe- tually recurring aj^plications of weight, measure, time, labour, and money value, to natural objects duodecimally divided by nature, the decimal division is inconvenient, and therefore never will come into general use in France, or any where else. , , SOCIAL ECONOMY — • CHAPTER III. SOCIAL ECONOMY WHY NOT TREATED AS A DISTINCT SCIENCE. ARISTOCRACY REPLACED BY FUNCTIONARISM IN FRANCE IN GERMANY. INTERFERENCE OF GOVERNMENT WITH FREE AGENCY. AMOUNT OF FUNCTIONARISM IN A FRENCH DEPARTMENT INDRE ET LOIRE AMOUNT IN A SCOTCH COUNTY SHIRE OF AYR. EFFECTS OF FUNCTIONARISM ON INDUSTRY ON NATIONAL CHARACTER ON MORALS ON CIVIL AND POLITICAL LIBERTY. CHANGE IN THE STATE OF PROPERTY IN PRUSSIA. TWO ANTAGONISTIC PRINCIPLES IN THE SOCIAL ECONOMY OF PRUSSIA. Social economy — the construction of the social body of a country, the proportions in numbers and influence of the elements of which it is composed, the arrangements and institutions for the administration of its laws, police, and public business, civil, mili- tary, and ecclesiastical, and the principles on which all this social machinery should be constructed for working beneficially on the physical and moral condition of the people — is a science distinct from the sciences of government, legislation, jurispru- dence, or political economy. These are but branches of social economy in its most extended meaning. It embraces all that affects social prosperity, and the wellbeing, moral and physical, of the individuals composing the social body of the country. Although its subjects are well defined, and its objects important, this science is rarely touched upon by philosophers. What we know of the social economy of any foreign country w^e must gather from travels and statistical works. These give the ma- terials, but not the principles; the facts, but not the conclusions upon their causes or consequences. The political philosopher has never taken up these materials, or facts, and deduced from them the principles on which society ought to foe constructed for attaining the highest moral and physical wellbeing of all its mem- bers. The cause of this neglect may be that in Germany, the prolific mother of theory and speculation, it might not be very safe to write or to lecture upon this science; for a good social economy would imply social arrangements altogether adverse, both in principle and in operation, to the political power of the state over private free agency, which is the basis of all social institutions in Germany. The mind, too, bred amidst these WHY NOT TREATED AS A DISTINCT SCIENCE. 45 slavish institutions of Germany, is itself slavish. The political conceptions of the German mind, as expressed at least in writings or conversation, are, in general, either abject to the last degree, or extravagant to the last degree — the conceptions of slaves, or of slaves run mad ; both equally distant from the sober, rational speculations and conclusions of free men, on the subject of their political and civil liberties. In England, no sudden overwhelm- ing revolution in property and government, since the Norman conquest, has forced upon the country a total reconstruction of her social arrangements. The power of her legislature also to alter, amend, or enact laws, according to exigence, or public opinion, and still more the nature of her jurisprudence, by which cases are decided and become land-marks in law, by the common sense of the age influencing courts and juries, and not, as in feudally constructed countries, by the rigid application of the principles of a code belonging to a different age and social con- dition, have removed the necessity of the English mind occupying itself with speculations upon the principles of the social arrange- ments of the country so generally, as upon the principles of its national wealth, of population, of pauperism, and of other branches of its political economy. The wants of society, as of the individual, are less felt, or less thought of, when the remedy is ready, and its application, is at all times in our own power, and is even going on of itself in amending obvious defects in social arrangemeuts. "We are only beginning slowly, and piece- meal, to alter and improve our social arrangements for the administration and execution of law and public business, for police, for relief of destitution, for the health and education of the people; and we advance from exigence to exigence as the occasion for interference arises, and not by a reference to, and a sudden change in, any general principles or established practices. In France new social arrangements were suddenly forced upon the country by the revolution. The people were enthusiastic for changes in the old system ; and the new arrangements were formed suddenly, and induced suddenly over the face of the coun- try, at a moment when military invasion or aggression, and civil disorder and anarchy, were to be apprehended and provided against. The principle of military power, and of the hand of government being applied to everything, entered of necessity, at this crisis, into all the new social arrangements. Although these were sown and reared in the hotbed of the warmest enthusiasm for liberty, equality, and the rights of man, and in the wildest 46 AEISTOCRACY ON THE CONTINENT moments of the revolution, they have been found so veil adapted .to all the purposes of despotic government, that they have been transplanted from France into all the other continental states. It is not the least curious of the anomalies of modern times, that the whole internal social arrangements of La Republique Fran- chise for the administration of law, police, and civil and military affairs among her free citoyens, have been adopted by all the monarchical and arbitrary states of Europe, as the most suitable machinery for their governments. The cause is the same. The abolition of an hereditary aristocracy in France, as an influential power in the social structure, threw each successive government, under whatever power or name, republican, consu- lar, imperial, or monarchical, upon one principle for support — the influence of an extensive government patronage. It is the characteristic of the French mind to systematise, to carry out every principle to the utmost extreme of minuteness and subdivision. The new social arrangements for the administration of law, police, and public business, were carried at once to a minuteness of efficiency and perfection, altogether inconsistent wuth the civil liberty or public spirit of a people. The extreme spirit of sys- tem, of interference in all things, of surveillance over all things, required a vast body of functionarism, a civil army of public officials among the people ; and this influence both directly ef- fective, and indirectly by the beneficial employments it affords acting as bribes to the active, and educated in every class, has been the basis of the social support of every government in France since the revolution. In Germany the same cause has produced the same effect. The decline of aristocracy as an influential element in society, partly by the direct working of the Code ^Napoleon, and the par- tition or sale of the estates of the nobility, where the French occupied the country, partly and chiefly by the general advance of the middle class in wealth, intelligence, independence, and influence over public opinion, has thrown all the continental go- vernments upon a similar support. Aristocracy is succeeded by functionarism as a state power, as a binding influence between the people and their governments in the social structure of Europe. This mechanisation of all social duties in the bands of govern- ment is a demoralising influence incompatible with the develop- ment of industry, free agency, or public spirit. England reduced at the peace her civil army of tax-gatherers and government REPLACED BY FUNCTIONARISM. 47 functionaries as well as her military. France kept up her machinery of civil establishments. The arrangements adopted at an early period of the revolution by the Directory have con- tinued augmenting rather than diminishing, under eachsuccessive government, and have silently spread over all the continent ; less, perhaps, from direct imitation or approval, than from the wants of all the continental governments during the war and since, having been the same — men and money; and the same arrangements which were seen to be effective in France for rais- ing men and money were adopted by her neighbours. The conscription, the passport system, the division of the country into departments, circles, cantons, and communes — each with its functionaries for civil, financial, and military affairs, — and the military organisation of all classes of government functiona- ries, and the system of government interference and sur- veillance in all matters, are transferred from republican France to monarchical or despotic Germany, and appear to have been equally suitable to both. It is in France this system should be studied, as in France it arose. It is a shoot from her tree of liberty, which seems to find something very congenial to its nature in despotic soils. France is divided into eighty-six departments, containing no less than 38,061 communes or civil parishes, in each of which there is a local government functionary. Taking the population of France in 1838 at 33,540,908 individuals, each group of 176 families, or 881 souls, has one public functionary, exclusive of policemen, tax-gatherers, .. Officers of weights and measures... Officers of affairs of the mint Officers of the national lottery Officers of the post-office 3 3 6 2 6 6 3 3 2 26 61 Being 15 paid functionaries for general government, and ' 46 paid functionaries for different branches of public busi- ness which government chooses to centralize in its own management. The grand total of functionarism in a district of about double of the population of the county of Ayr is :. — Paid functionaries connected with the administration of law 165 Paid functionaries connected with receipt of taxes 152 Paid functionaries for general government ... ... ... ... 15 Paid functionaries for other government business 46 Paid functionaries in all, for a population of 290,160 souls J*" 8 and this is exclusive of the establishment of the douane or cus- tom-house, which in the frontier provinces has very numerous establishments, and even forms a regular military cordon on duty night and day, and exclusive of the whole executive police or gendarmerie who patrol the roads, and have posts all over the country, and exclusive of the whole establishments for the con- script system, and its necessary accompaniment the passport system, which give employment to an army of clerks and func- SCOTCH COUNTY OF AYR. 51 tionaries in the bureaux in every town, and exclusive also of the whole educational establishment, of which the patronage is in the hands of government. Monsieur de Tocqueville reckons the total amount of functionarism in France — that is, of civil appoint- ments under government, at 138,000 offices, costing yearly 200 millions of francs. Taking the population of 1830 at 31,851,455 souls, this gives one paid functionary to every 230 per- sons. But this does not give a just view of the influence and ex- tent of the principle of functionarism in the social economy of France. The functionary is an adult male, with fixed income, and is, therefore, either head of a family or in a social position equivalent to the head of a family; and the figures of the popu- lation represent the infants, aged, infirm, and females, as well as the effective adult male members of the community. In a just view of the proportion of functionarism in the social economy of France, one family in every 46 lives by functionarism, and at the public expense ; there is one functionary family for every 4 6 families of the people. Now let us reckon the amount of functionarism in the Scotch county of Ayr, containing, as nearly as possible, one-half of the population of the French department of the Indre et Loire. A Scotch county is selected in preference to an English, because, in Scotland, the feudal law, and feudal arrangements of society, are similar in principle to those which prevailed on the Conti- nent before the changes in social economy produced by the French revolution ; but to the social economy of England, in which the administration of law, the police of the country, the roads, the public business of every kind, are under the manage- ment of the people themselves, and not of the general govern- ment of the country, nothing analogous exists or ever existed on the Continent, — no social arrangements whatsoever similar in principle. In the English county of Suffolk, for instance, containing 296,317 souls, being 6857 more than the population of the French department of the Indre et Loire, excepting in the post-office department, and those of the excise, customs, and stamps, no public functionaries, or very few — not perhaps in all half-a-dozen — could be pointed out, who live by paid offices, to which they are appointed by the government. The unpaid magistracy, the unpaid constables, the unpaid sheriffs, lord- lieutenants, &c, do all the duties which the host of functionaries in France, living upon the public in the proportion of one family in every 46, do in this French department. Person and 52 AMOUNT OF FCJX0TIONAUI8M. property are not less safe, criminal offence not more common in Suffolk, than in this French department of equal population. The moral effects, therefore, of each system on the habits and minds of the people must be compared, before judgment is given for, or against either system : that of interference, centralisation, and surveillance by government as in the French system ; and that of non-interference, and leaving all to be done by the peo- ple, as well as for the people, in social business, as in the English. But to return to the shire of Ayr. For the administration of law in civil and criminal affairs there are of paid functionaries : — The sheriff depute, the equivalent to the prefet, as an organ of the executive government, and with his resident substitute, the procurator fiscal, and the sheriff clerk with 3 deputies, the equivalent of the 165 functionaries living by the administration of law in the French department ; being 7 persons in judi- cial functions. In the collection of taxes in this county, the amount of functionarism appears to be : — Collector of taxes, surveyor, collector of county rates ... ... 3 Distributor of stamps ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 1 Collector and comptroller of customs ... 2 Excise officers, collector, clerk, and supervisors ... ... ... 8 Postmasters living entirely on salary of office, suppose one in each town or village, in which sheriff or justice of peace courts are held 7 ~2l The whole functionaries living by offices under government in the collection of taxes do not certainly exceed from 21 to 25 persons, and this number is the equivalent for 152 functionaries in a department of only double the popu- lation. Instead of 21 persons, the Scotch county would, on the French system of functionarism, have 76 persons living by public employment in the financial department of its business. To cover all possible omissions in this list of 21 public functionaries in a Scotch county, as from the mixed nature of their means of living, it would be difficult to determine exactly, who live entirely by public employment, and who live principally by the exercise of other trades or professions, but having some office, as postmasters, also, we shall .state them at from '30 to 35 individuals ; and this number certainly does cover all persons having their livings in a Scotch county by public function in the administration of law, finance, and SOCIAL EFFECTS OF FUXCTIONARISM. 53 civil government, which in a French department gives offices and livings to 278 paid functionaries. In the ratio of the population 189 paid functionaries in France live upon the public, by doing the duties which, at the utmost, from 30 to 35 paid functionaries live by doing in Scotland. ^ The effects upon the social condition of a people of the two distinct principles — that of doing every thing for the people by- paid functionaries and government management, in a system of perfect centralisation — and that of doing every thing for the people by the people themselves, and with as little as possible of government agency — have never been satisfactorily examined b by our political philosophers. We have tirades enough against the abuse of power in the hands of the unpaid magistracy of England, and examples enough of the abuse ; but we have no impartial judgment given on the advantages and disadvantages of the system, compared to that of a paid body of judicial func- tionaries. Lord Brougham has frequently insisted on the great social benefit of bringing cheap law and justice home to every man's fireside ; but that great political philosopher has never stated what this cheap law and justice would cost. The financial cost is not the principal or important cost in a system of extensive func- tionarism, but the moral cost, the deteriorating influence of the system on the industry, habits, and moral condition of the peo- ple. We see a tendency in our most enlightened and liberal statesmen — which is only held in check by the financial cost of indulging it — to centralize in the hands of government much of the public business, the local magistracy and police, the prosecu tion of offences, the care of the poor, the support of high roads, the education of the people, instead of leaving these duties to be, as heretofore, performed by the people for themselves. A few of the effects of the function a rism, which necessarily overspreads these countries in which governments do what it should be left to the public spirit or the necessity of the people to do for themselves, are sufficiently visible, and may assist in solving the question All this subsistence in the field of government employment, paralyses exertion in the field of private industry. This is an effect which the most unobserving traveller on the Continent remarks. The young, the aspiring, the clever, and the small capitalists in particular, look for success in life to government employment, to public function, not to their own activity and 54 EFFECTS OF FUNCTIONARISM Otf industry in productive pursuits. With us, civil or military em- ployment under government is scarcely seen, is nothing in the vast field of employment which professional, commercial, or manufacturing industry throws open to all. Abroad, all other employments are as nothing in extent, advantage, social impor- tance, and influence, compared to employment under government. Functionarism has, in its effects on the industry and wealth of nations, replaced the monastic and overgrown clerical establish- ments of the middle ages. It was not the vast wealth of the Roman Catholic Church, and of its convents, monasteries, and other establishments, that was detrimental to the national wealth and prosperity of a country. These were but an additional wheel in the social machine. All that was received was again expended ; and whether a bishop or a duke, an abbot or an earl received and expended the income derived from the same acres, could make no difference in national wealth. As receivers and ex- penders the clerical were perhaps better than the aristocratical landowners, because they understood husbandry better, and expended their revenues in peace, in their own fixed localities, by which a middle class beneath them was enabled to grow up. Still less was it, as Voltaire and the political economists of his days imagined, the celibacy of so many idle monks, and nuns, and clergy, and the want of population by their celibacy, that was K injurious to the prosperity of catholic countries. The celi- bacy of the Popish clergy is in no other way injurious to a nation than that a single man can live upon less than a man with a family, and that, consequently, many more individuals can obtain a living in an unproductive profession as the clerical (considered economically) is, from the same amount of church revenue, than if all in the profession were married. Our church extensionists ought, in consistency, to advocate the celibacy of the clerical order amongst us, because the same revenues of the church — either of the church of England, or of the church of Scotland — would thereby support three times the number of effective clergy and in equal comfort ; the expense of a family being at least three times greater on an average than that of a single man, and it is church endowments, and not the mere dead stone and lime work of buildings, that are necessary in true and effective church extension. But it was neither the wealth, nor the numbers, nor the celibacy of the Popish clergy, that made them in the middle ages, and make them at this day in all ca- tholic lands, detrimental to national wealth and prosperity. It INDUSTRY AND NATIONAL WEALTH. 55 was, and is, the amount of easy living, of social importance and influence, which the clerical employment offered, and which na- turally turned, exactly as functionarism on the Continent does at present, all the youth of abilities, and with small capitals to defray the expense of education, to a clerical living, instead of fco industrial pursuits. We see even in Scotland, in remote parts, that the ease with which, during the last war, clerical stu- dents could accomplish the little that country presbyteries required in studies at the university, and could slip into a kirk, turned away from the broad paths of worldly industry many who ought to have been sitting behind the loom, or the desk, and whose talent extended just to finding out and securing a good pulpit livelihood. Abroad the employment under government, in the pre- sent age, attracts to it, as the church of Home did in the middle ages, all the mind, industry, and capital of the middle classes, on whom the wealth and prosperity of a country are founded. The little capitals stored up in those classes are saved, not to put out their young men as with us, into various industrial pursuits, and with suitable means to cany them on, or to extend the original branch of business in which the family capital was acquired.but, to support their sons while study ingand waiting for a living by pub- lic function, in some of the numerous departments of government employment. It may be reasonably doubted if the Popish church, in the darkest period of the middle ages, abstracted so many people, and so much capital from the paths and employ- ments of productive industry, as the civil and military establish- ments of the Continental governments do at the present day in France and Germany. The means also of obtaining a livelihood in monkish or clerical function were less demoralising to the public mind and spirit ; for some kind of intellectual superiority, or self-denial or sacrifice, was required, and not merely as in functionarism — barefaced patronage. National character partakes of the spirit which the main ob- ject of pursuit among a people produces in individuals. It is at the hand of government, by favour and patronage, and through subservience to those in higher function, that the youth of the Continent look for bread and future advancement. All inde- pendence of mind is crushed, all independent action and public spirit buried under the mass of subsistence, social influence, and honours, to be obtained in the civil and military functions under government on the Continent. It is to be observed, that, in time 5$ EFFECTS OF FUNCTIONAIiISM Otf CIVIL LIBERTY. of peace, the military service in most foreign countries is scarcely different from the civil. Having no distant colonies to garrison, no posts in unwholesome climates to occupy, no perpetual rotation at home from one quarter to another, but being generally sta- tioned for many years in the same towns, the military act upon the industry of the country in the same way, and with the same effects, as the body of civil functionaries. Both together form a mass of subsistence, influence, and distinction, to be attained by other means than productive industry, and which smothers all exertion and spirit of independence in the industrial classes. The sturdy-minded English industrialist toils and slaves at his trade, to become some day an independent man, to be beholden to no one, to be master of his own time and actions, to be a free agent individually, acting and thinking for himself, both in his private, and, if he has any, in his public capacity or business. To this end he brings up his sons, and puts them out in the world with a trade, and with capital, if he has any, to attain this end. The dependence upon others for a living, the subserviency and seeking for favour, inherent in a functionary career, do not come within his sphere of action. A living by productive industry is, generally speaking, far more certain, and more easily obtained in our social system, in which military, clerical, and legal functions under government patronage, and a living in either of those blanches of public employment, are rare, and altogether out of reach and out of sight of the middle classes in general, forming no object to the great mass of the industrialist-class to breed up their sons to. This is the great moral basis on which the na- tional wealth, industry, and character of the English people rest ; and is the only basis which can uphold real liberty in a country, or a social state, in which civil liberty, as well as political, free agency in private life, as well as free constitutional forms of government, can exist. The Germans and French never can be free people, nor very industrious, very wealthy nations, with their pre- sent social economy — with their armies of functionaries in civil employments, extending the desire and the means among the classes who ought to rely upon their own independent industry in the paths of trade and manufacture, of earning a living in public function by other means than their own productive in- dustry. This universal dependence upon public function smothers at the root the growth of independent feeling, action, and industry. Political liberty, the forms of a liberal legislative constitution, MORALS, AND NATIONAL CHARACTER. 57 tie Continent may obtain ,- and France has, more than once, obtained such a constitution as opposed a considerable, and often a successful, check to the measures of the executive : yet with all this real political liberty, the French people have as yet no real civil liberty ; and, in consequence of the general diffusion of the spirit of functionarism through society, no idea of, or feeling for civil liberty. The private rights of individuals as members of the social union are every hour infringed upon by their social institutions, in a way which individuals, with any just feeling of independence and civil liberty, and with political liberty to give effect and reality to their sentiments, would never submit to. As an instance of the state of the public mind in France, and indeed all over the Continent, on the rights and civil liberty of the individual members of society, it is matter of leave and licence, of passport and police regulation, for the native Frenchman or German to move from place to place, or to exercise in many countries any kind of trade, profession, or means of living, within his own native land. The very elector going from Paxis to his own home, to exercise perhaps the highest privilege of political liberty— his elective franchise, in voting for a representative to the chamber of deputies, has so little civil liberty, and so little idea of it, that he must apply for, and travel with a passport asked from, and signed by a government functionary. This is a caricature of liberty. It is liberty in chains, her charter in her hand, her paper cap of liberty on her head, and manacles on her feet. The police of the country, the security of person and property, are, it is alleged, better provided for by this governmental surveillance over, and interference in all individual movement. The same argument would justify the locking up the population every night in public jails. Good police, and the security of person and property, however valuable in society, are far too dearly paid for by the sacrifice of private free agency involved in this ultra-precautionary social economy. The moral sense of right, and the individual independence of judgment in conduct, are superseded by this conventional duty of obedience to office. Men lose the sentiment of what is due to themselves by others, and to others by themselves ; and lose the sense of moral recti- tude, and the habit of applying it to actions. A Frenchman or German would not think himself entitled to act upon his own judgment and sense of right, and refuse obedience to an order of a superior, if it were morally wrong ; nor would the public 58 EFFECTS OF FUXCTIONAEIS^I ON 3IORALS, feeling, as in England, go along with, and justify the individual who, on his own sense of right and wrong, refused to be an instrument of, or party to, any act not approved of by his moral sense. The spirit of subordination and implicit obedience, which we isolate and confine entirely to military service, entei-s on the Continent into civil life. The scenes of bloodshed in France, under the revolutionary government, could never have taken place among a people bred up in habits of moral free agency, and of reflecting independence of individual judgment on action. The instruments would have been wanting in the tribunals. The general moral sense would have opposed the enactment or fulfilment of such decrees. . The non-interference of government in our social economy with individual free-agency, and the intense repugnance and opposition to every attempt at such interference with the individual's rights of thinking and acting, have developed a more independent movement of the moral sense among the English people than among the Continental. It is their dis- tinguished national characteristic. The individual Englishman, the most rude and uncivilised in manners, the most depraved in habits, the most ignorant in reading, writing, and religious knowledge ; standing but too often lower than the lowest of ether nations on all these points ; will yet be found a man wonderfully distinct, and far above the educated Continental man of a much higher class, in his moral discrimination of the right or wrong in human action, far more decidedly aware of his civil rights as a member of society, and judging far more acutely of what he terms fair play, or of what is due to himself, and by himself, in all public or private relations or actions. It is the total absence of government interference, by superinten- dence and functionaries, in the stream of private activity and industry, that has developed, in a remarkable degree, this spirit :>f self-government, and the influence of the moral sense on action among the English. It is their education. We may call them uneducated, because they cannot read and write so generally as the Scotch, the French, or the Prussian people; but as men and citizens they have received a practical education, from the nature of their social arrangements, of a far higher kind and value than the French, the Prussian, or even the Scotch can lay claim to. They are far more independent moral agents in public and private aflairs. In France and Prussia, the state, by the system of function- NATIONAL CHARACTER, CIVIL AND POLITICAL LIBERTY. 59 arism, stepped into the shoes of the feudal baron on the abolition of the feudal system ; and he who was the vassal and now calls himself the citizen, is, in fact, as much restrained in his civil liberty, and free-agency as a moral self-acting member of society, by state enactments, superfluous legislation, and the government-spirit of intermeddling by its functionaries in all things, as he was before by his feudal lords. The physical con- dition of the people of those countries has, beyond all doubt, been improved by the general diffusion of property through the social ^mass, and has advanced to a higher state of well-being and comfort than with us ; but their civil and moral condition has not kept pace and advanced with it. They have the property, but their governments endeavour to retain the privileges which belong to property, the rights of individual free-agency in the moral and industrial use of it. These are two antagonistic powers in the social economy of the Continent. An unseen power called the State is held now, as it was in the most stringent days of the feudal system, to be the owner of all the materials of human industry, of all occupations, trades, and professions, of human industry itself, oi all the deeds and thoughts of each individual, of his body and soul, it may be truly said ; for instead of being free to do what law does not prohibit, he can do nothing lawfully but what law permits. He cannot engage in the simplest act of a free-agent in civil society without leave and licence, and being in some shape or other under the eye and regulation of this unseen proprietor of all earthly. He may, as in France, enjoy a considerable share of political liberty, that is, of a constitutional voice in the enact- ment of laws ; but civil liberty, the uncontrolled freedom of action, and of the use of property, of body, and of mind, subject only to the most obvious and urgent necessity of interference by government to prevent evil to others — is as little enjoyed by him in the constitutional as in the despotic state ; as little in Belgium or France, as in Prussia or Austria. The same principle of intrusion on the civil liberty of the subject pervades the social economy of all these states — interference is the rule, non-interference the exception. Yet of what value is political liberty, or the representative legislature, but to give and secure to every man the full and free enjoyment of his civil liberty ? A free constitution is but a platform for political adventurers to declaim from, if it does not bring civil liberty into the social economy of a country. 60 CHANGE IN THE STATE OF PROPERTY. The just conclusion is, that mere changes in the forms of government, and in the machinery and forms of legislation, will not suddenly, and as a necessary consequence, change the spirit of the people, and that in genuine liberty, in practical civil liberty, in the individual freedom of action and of mind, and the influences of this freedom on moral, intellectual, and national character, the people of the Continent are but little more advanced now than they were under Frederic the Great, or Louis XIV., or ]STapoleon. They are still slaves in the spirit and principles of their social economy. What they understand by liberty, and are clamorous for, is political liberty, not civil liberty, the instrument of liberty without its use, the outward forms without the spirit in their social economy. But this is not always to be so. This is but the transition state of society just casting off the net- work of slavery in which the feudal system had for ages enveloped it. The vassal is now the proprietor, and in France at least more or less the legislator himself. It is his mind that is behind his social position. He is a proprietor without knowing the rights of property. The old feudal spirit still lingers in the regenerated governments and people ; but the seed is sown, the leaven is working. Property will gradually take its own place, and assume its own rights in social affairs. It has been widely diffused by the effects of the French revolution through all ranks and classes of the social body of France and Germany. It is not merely property in land, but also personal property, capital, that has been spread among the people, and a spirit of industry, a feeling of individual independer ce, has naturally accompanied this diffusion of property. But the rights inseparable from industry and property — free agency, the uncontrolled use and exercise of them, are retained by government as a basis for the support of kingly power. The principle of government when land was almost the only influential property in society, and that was in the hands of a small privileged class deeply interested in the support of the source from which they derived their property and privileges, and held them exclusively, is transferred to a social state, in which land is in the hands -of all, and no one class has any exclusive interests or rights derived from the crown and connected with land, to maintain. Owing to the natural and unextinguishable influences of property on the human mind, this can only do, either in France or Germany, until the public mind becomes educated and elevated up to its POWER OF PROPERTY* AND KINGLY POWER. 61 social position, and along with the physical enjoyment and possession of property, claims also all that morally and politically belongs to the enjoyment and possession of property, viz., free- agency as individuals, self-government by represen- tative constitutions as citizens. It is evident that one and the same principle as a support of uncontrolled kingly power, cannot be found equally effective in two such totally distinct combinations of society, as that of all land being concentrated in the hands of a small privileged class closely connected by every tie and motive with the crown, and that of the general diffusion of land among a population quite uncon- nected with it. The very fiction of law of the crown being the source from which the landed proprietor derives his rights, falls to the ground where the right is almost universal, and conveys no conventional privilege attached to such property, and where succession by primogeniture is abolished. The crown attempting to retain restrictions on the use and free enjoyment of property, after it has lost all connection with it, is in a false position. Two distinct powers in society — the power of property and the kingly power — have thus, by the great convulsion of the French Revolution, been placed in a state of incompatible co-existence. They are two antagonist powers in the social economy of France, Prussia, and Northern Germany, two powers in opposition to, not in unison with each other. The rights ot property, the free agency of the possessor in the use and applica- tion of it, the moral free agency of the individuals possessing it, their self-government and self-management of all that affects it, are natural prerogatives of the possessors of property which, where a whole nation are the proprietors, cannot be usurped to support, by dint of an unnatural system of functionarism ex- tending over the prerogatives of property and the private rights of proprietors, a royal or imperial autocratic power in the community that has no exclusive rights or privileges now to bestow upon any class of proprietors. Such an usurpation of the rights of property, and of the natural prerogatives of pro- prietors, by the intrusion of functionarism into all the social relations, affairs, duties, and industrial movement of a people oi proprietors, can be no stable or very long endured arrangement of the social economy of a country. When this usurpation of the rights of property in the social economy of the Continent is removed, either by gradual steps or 20 LANDED PROPERTY BEFORE THE REVOLUTION. by sudden convulsion, on what lias kingly power to rest 1 A monarchical government and a democratical distribution of the landed and other property cannot exist together. They are antagonist elements in social economy. The French Revolution, considered as the beginning of a radical, inevitable, and beneficial change in the physical, moral, and political condition of the European people, must be re- garded by the social economist as a movement only in its commencement. It has left the Continental population in two very distinctly marked divisions. The one consists of the popu- lations in which, with a few modifications and reforms not affecting the grand principle of their social economy, the old feudal arrangements of property, and the aristocratic basis of kingly power raised upon feudality, are retained. Austria is undoubtedly at the head of this division. The other consists of the populations which have adopted a new social economy in which the two corner-stones of feudality, primogeniture and hereditary privilege, are taken away, and kingly power has only the temporary basis of functionarism and* military force for its support. France is at the head of this division. The diffusion of property, the abolition of privilege and primogeniture, and the introduction of functionarism as a substitute for aristocracy and a basis for the support of government, are all derived from the French Revolution ; and Prussia entered voluntarily into the circle of the new social economy of this division, under the administration of Prince Hardenberg, in 1809. It was found necessary, if Prussia was to preserve a national existence, to give the mass of the population that interest in the defence of the country which was totally wanting under the feudal distribution of the land into noble estates cultivated by the forced labour of serfs. The following sketch will explain imperfectly the amount of change in the state of landed property in Prussia produced by this measure. Previous to 1800 landed property was, on the greater part of the Continent, divided into noble or baronial, and peasant, roturier, or not noble holdings. The former class of estates could only be held by nobility, and had many unjust exemptions from public burdens, and many oppressive privileges attached to them. These baronial estates, by far the greatest in extent, had the peasantry who were born on the land adscripti glebce; had a right to their labour every day for the cultivation of the domain ; had civil and criminal jurisdiction over them in the LANDED PROPERTY IN EUROPE BEFORE THE REVOLUTION. 63 baronial court of the estate ; had a baronial judge, a baronial prison on the estate to incarcerate them, and a bailiff to flog them for neglect of work or other baronial offences. These slaves were allowed cottages with land upon the outskirts of the estate, and cultivated their own patches in the hoars or days when their labour was not required on the barony lands. They paid tithes and dues out of their crops to the minister, the surgeon, the schoolmaster, and the barony or local judge who resided on the estate, and was appointed by the proprietor as patron both of the church and of the court of the barony, but out of the number of examined jurists, or students of law, who were candidates for these local judgeships. This is, for the system is not abolished altogether, the great object of the numerous body of law students at the German universities. The local judge is, like the minister, with a fixed and comfortable salary not depending on the will of the patron, and he is a servant of the state revised by, and reporting to, the higher local judicatories, and with promotion opened to him from the local baronial to the higher courts of the country. If the serf deserted, he was brought back by the military, who patrolled the roads for the purpose of preventing the escape of peasants into the free towms, their only secure asylum, and were imprisoned, fed on bread and water in the black hole, which existed on every baronial estate, and flogged. The condition of these born serfs was very similar to that of the negro slaves on a ^Yest India estate during the apprenticeship term, before their final emancipation. This system was in full vigour up to the begin- ning of the present century, and not merely in remote and unfre- quented corners of the Continent, but in the centre of her civilisa- tion : all round Hamburgh and Lubeck for instance, in Holstein, Schleswig, Hanover, Brunswig, and over all Prussia. Besides these baronial estates with the born-serfs attached to them, there were Bauern Hofe, or peasant estates, which held generally of some baron, but were distinct properties, paying as feu duties or quit-rents so many days' labour in the week, with other feudal services and payments to the feudal superior. The acknowledg- ment of these as distinct legal properties not to be recalled so long as the peasant performed the services and payments est blished either by usage or by writings, was the first great step in Prussia towards the change in the condition of the peasantry. It was stretched so far as to include the serfs located on the outskirts of the barony, and paying daily 64: LANDED PROPERTY IN EUROPE BEFORE THE REVOLUTION. labour for their patches of land, and who oi'iginally were in- tended by the proprietor to be his servants and day labourers for cultivating his mains or home farmed land, but who, by long usage and occupations for generations, had become a kind of hereditary tenants, not to be distinguished from those occu- pants acknowledged to be proprietors, or what we would call copyholders. Prince Hardenberg's energetic administration made all these occupants the absolute proprietors of their several holdings, for the yearly payment of the quit rents they had been paying to the baronial proprietor, and had these quit rents, whether paid in labour or other services, or in grain, valued by commissioners at fixed moderate rates, and had them commuted and bought up from the dominant property, under inspection of the commissioners, by the surrender to it of a portion of the l&,nd of the servient property, if the peasant had no money for the purchase of the redemption. This great and good measure, which was projected and carried into effect by Stein and Har- denberg in a succession of edicts, from that of October 9, 1807, up to June 7, 1821, is the great and redeeming glory of the reign of Frederic William III., and, like all great and good measures, was accomplished with much less difficulty than was anticipated. Feudality had become effete. A strong and vigorous exertion was necessary to give the people something to defend — some material interest in the country. By this measure, Prussia was at once covered with a numerous body of small proprietors, instead of being-held by a small privileged class of nobility. This revolution in the state of property was almost as great as that which had taken place^ in France, and it is pregnant with the same results and tendencies. It gave comfort, well-being, property, to a population of serfs. It emancipated them from local oppression, raised their moral and physical condition, gave them a political, although as yet unacknowledged, existence, as the most important constituent element of the social body. But here the Prussian Revolution has stopped short of the French. It gave no political liberty or influence under any form, no representative constitution to those to whom it had given clear and distinct property, and consequently the feelings, influences on the human mind, and the requirements which the possession of property brings along with it. The people^ hold the property, and the crown, by its system of functionarism and military organisation, endeavours to hold all the rights and CHANGE OF THE STATE OF PROPERTY IN PRUSSIA. G5 prerogatives belonging to, and morally and socially essential to property, all the civil and political liberties of the proprietors of the count ly. As a necessary sequence of the emancipation of the country population from feudal services to the noble landowner, the town populations were emancipated from the restrictions and privileges of their feudal lords, viz., the incorporation of trades and burgesses. Every man became entitled to be admitted to the rights of burgess or citizen on paying a certain fixed sum (in Berlin it is thirty thalers) for his burgess ticket, and entitled, whether he has or has not served an apprenticeship, to exercise any calling or trade. This second step completed the change in the social economy of Prussia, and altogether obliterated its former character of feudality as far as regarded the people, although the government still clings to the feudal principle of autocracy, without any representation of the proprietors of the country. If these were small privileged classes of nobility, and incorporated bodies, interwoven with royalty, as under the old feudal arrange- ments of society, and kept by exclusive privileges and distinctions apart from the main body of a people, and closely united to each other and to the crown by every tie of interest and honour, this order of things might, although opposed to the spirit of the times, and to the gradual but great advance of society in an opposite direction, linger on, as in Austria and other feudally constituted countries, in a feeble existence, waiting the blast that is to overturn it. But in a whole nation of proprietors, it is a false social economy — an order of things too unnatural to be stable. In France, the body of proprietors possessing the land of the country obtained a portion at least of political liberty, a repre- sentation, by a part at least, of their own body in the legislature, and may, without any very violent convulsion, give themselves hereafter the civil liberty they still want, in proportion as the public mind becomes prepared to cast off the trammels on in- dividual liberty and free agency imposed by functionarism and government interference. Prussia has not taken this step, and is now in the false position of holding fast by a power which has no roots in the new social economy she has adopted. The government has cast loose the absolute kingly power -from its sheet-anchor, the feudal system, and is now clinging to the twig of functionarism to save itself from being hurried along with the stream of social improvement. E 66 ARISTOCRACY EXTINGUISHED. France and Prussia should be viewed by the social economist consecutively. They have the same two antagonistic principles in their social economy, although in France the ultimate predo- minance of the power of property over absolute kingly power will not long be doubtful. Functionarism in France, enormous as it is, will be broken down as a state element for the support of kingly power, by the element of popular power demanding a constitution, a Chamber of Deputies. But in Prussia the people have no feeling for legislative power, no demand for a representative chamber, and are abjectly patient under the total want of civil and political liberty. Property, and a prodigious social reform have been thrust upon them by their government in a kind of speculation on improvement, rather than attained by any invincible desire of their own, or by any national struggle for their ameliorated social condition. All has been done for them, not by them; and they enjoy the physical good this change has brought them, like a body of emancipated slaves who receive their own natural rights as gifts from their former masters, and sit down in grateful contentment. The kingly power, both in Prussia and France, seems aware of its false position, and anxious to reconstruct an order of hereditary aristocracy endowed with entailed landed property and privilege, as a social power for the support of monarchy. But in social economy, as in human life, the nulla pes retrorsum is the prin- ciple of nature. The abolition of primogeniture, and the consequent diffusion of landed property through society, have morally, as well as tern tori ally, done away with the class of privileged feudal aristocracy as an influential social element in both countries. It would be the show, not the reality, of a nobility that could be re-established now in Prussia or in France. The social position and importance of an hereditary aristocracy are, besides, filled up by the new social power — the body of func- tionaries in the social arrangements which have sprung up from the ashes of the French Revolution. PRUSSIA CONSIDERED AS A NATION. 67 CHAPTER IV. PRUSSIA. NOT CONSTITUTING ONE NATION. PRUSSIAN POLICY IN THI9 CEN- TURY. ATTEMPT TO FORM NATIONAL CHARACTER. WHY NOT SUCCESSFUL. ■ MILITARY ORGANISATION OF PRUSSIA. LIABILITY TO MILITARY SERVICE OF ALL PRUSSIANS. SERVICE IN THE LINE. IN THE ARMY OF RESERVE. FIRST DIVISION. SECOND. EFFECTS OF THE SYSTEM ON THE POLITICAL BALANCE OF EUROPE. ITS ADVANTAGES. ITS DISADVANTAGES COMPARED TO A STAND- ING ARMY. ITS GREAT PRESSURE ON TIME AND INDUSTRY. — ITS INFERIORITY AS A MILITARY FORCE. AMOUNT OF MILITARY FORCE OF PRUSSIA. DEFECT IN THE CONTINENTAL ARMIES.— NON-COMMISSIONED OFFICERS. MEN. TOO DELI- CATELY BRED IN THE PRUSSIAN ARMY LONGEVITY OF OFFICERS. THE PRO- BABLE ISSUE OF A WAR BETWEEN PRUSSIA AND FRANCE. POLICY OF ENGLAND IF SUCH A WAR ABISE. The Prussians "are not nationalised by those moral influences which bind men together into distinct communities. They are, not like the English, the French, the Spaniards, a people distinct in character, spirit, and modes of living — a nation unamalgam- ated and unamalgamable with others. They have no national language, literature, or character; no old established customs, manners, traditions, modes of living and thinking, laws, rights, or institutions of ancient times peculiar to 3 and distinctive of Prussians. Their history as a nation is but of yesterday, and is not properly their history, but that of the sovereigns of a small part of the present Prussia— of Brandenburg — who begin- ning the world about a century ago with a margraveship of about; one and a half million of subjects, have, by good luck and military talent, gathered together a kingdom of shreds and patches of other countries, containing about fourteen millions of people. These have no national history of ancient times common to all, or to a majority of Prussians, and connecting the present with the past by feelings of veneration and hereditary attachment. Prussia has, in ordinary parlance, only a geographical or political meaning, denoting the Prussian government, or the provinces it governs — not a moral or social meaning. The Prussian nation is a combination of words rarely heard, of ideas never made, the population not being morally united by any common sentiment or spirit of nationality distinguishing them in character, mind, or habits, from the other German populations around them, the 68 PRUSSIAN POLICY IN THIS CENTURY. Austrian, Bavarian, Saxon, or Hanoverian. The German popula- tions have never been distinguished by any strong spirit of nationality. They have always been divisible, like a flock of sheep, into any parcels at the pleasure of their shepherds, without vigorous indications of such national distinctiveness, character, and feelings of their own, as might render their division, and amalgamation with other groups, dangerous or impracticable. To remedy this defect in their social structure, to kindle a spirit of nationality, form a national character, and raise a Prussian nation bound together by moral influences, like the French or English, as well as by mere territorial and political arrangements, is the great under-principle which has run through all the domestic policy of the Prussian government in this century. Frederic the Great had no higher policy than to retain the ter- ritories he had acquired by the means which acquired them — a strong standing army and a military system superior to that of other powers. His successors adhered to the same policy; but the first shock with the armies of a people animated by national spirit dissolved the dull German delusion, that drill and discipline alone are sufficient in modern warfare to replace the higher moral influences. Germans against Germans, monarch against monarch, in a scramble for territory, and the people in apathy and indifference, and with no interest at issue, the contending potentates made conquests according to the number of their highly-disciplined troops. War was really what it was often compared to, a game at chess, in which the royal gamesters could calculate upon the powers and effect of each piece, and move. The French wars from 1794 to 1814 wrought a mighty change in this royal game, and made every cabinet of the old school feel, that, with national sentiment kindled by moral influences, no people can be subdued, ard without it none can be secure. The alteration in Prussia of the law and holding of landed pro- perty, and the subversion of the ancient feudal relations between the peasantry and the nobility — a change almost as great in the state of property, and altogether as great in the structure oi society, as the revolution produced in France; the new military system by which the people themselves became the only standing army; the new educational system, by which government has in its own hands the training of the mind and opinions of the public through its own functionaries; the new ecclesiastical sys- tem, by which the two branches of the Protestant church, the Lu- theran and Calvinist, are joined together, and blended into one THE PRUSSIAN MILITARY SYSTEM. 69 different from both, the Prussian church ; the German custom- house union, or commercial league, centralising in Prussia the management of the commercial and manufacturing industry connected with the supply of the other German populations, and raising a Prussian dominancy over the industrial pursuits of the rest of Germany, are so many steps towards the one great object of imbuing the Prussian population with those moral influences, without which a population is not a nation, and on which national greatness, independence, and even existence, depend. To what extent has this great experiment been successful] this solitary attempt on the old continent — analogous to that which has been so successful on the new — to form a national character, to kindle a national spirit, to convert a mass of individuals of different origins, languages, religions, histories, laws, customs, into a nation. The American cement, the main ingredient in the American cement, is totally wanting in Prussia — freedom, the uncontrolled freedom of industry, property, mind, and person, without interference of the government by laws to the enactment of which the people are no party, and by a system of functionarism which supersedes free agency in all civil and even many do- mestic relations of life, and extinguishes the moral influences and national spirit which the government wishes to kindle, leaving the people a passive mass in the hands of their rulers. The Prussian government has taken one step, and is afraid to take the next which naturally and unavoidably must follow the first, and lives in an unavailing struggle to reconcile things irreconcilable with each other — a supreme interference of the state in all human action and opinion among her subjects, with the activity, industry, and prosperity, the national character, public spirit, and patrio- tism, which a people only attain where action and opinion are free and uncontrolled. The present military organisation of the subjects of Prussia is one of the most important features in the social economy of the Continent. It has been adopted, with more or less rigour in its application, by almost all the secondary European powers, and its principle and spirit enter into all the civil as well as the military arrangements of those countries, and extend an influence over the whole social condition of the European population, much more extensively than any other military system has done since the decay of the feudal. The system of standing armies which preceded it, and which still exists with us, entered but slightly as an element in the social economy of a country. The 70 THE PRUSSIAN MILITARY SYSTEM. classes who had to furnish recruits to it either by enlistment or impressment, more or less concealed under the forms of a ballot, suffered a loss of the members thus abstracted from •civil life; but that was almost the only effect on the social economy of the mass of the population, excepting the taxation, more or less heavy in different countries, necessary for supporting a standing army totally distinct from the people. It is a singular historical fact, that Prussia has twice within these hundred years furnished the model on which almost all the other European powers have formed their military force, even to the most- minute details. The former military system of Prussia, as it was left in its highest perfection by Frederic the Great to his successors ; was one of harsh and brutifying discipline, enforced by the cudgel over trembling squads of serfs trained into mere movable machines. The first shock with the undisciplined troops of the French republic proved that this system was false, that humanity was not to be outraged with impunity in the formation of armies, and that mind and moral influences were superior elements even in modern tactics to the deadening discipline of the corporal's stick. The whole of the European armies formed, even to the shape of their buttons, upon this Prussian model, were by num- berless defeats totally disorganised. It is not the least of the benefits resulting from the French revolutionary wars, that a more humane spirit of military discipline, a greater consideration for the mind and rights of the soldier as a human being, and a greater dependence upon the spirit and moral influences than upon a forced mechanical movement, have been introduced in consequence of these defeats into the military system of every country. The new military system of Prussia, as established by edicts of 3rd September, 1814, and 21st November, 1815, has been adopted by almost all the secondary European powers. By this system* every subject between the ages of 20 and 25 years, without distinction of fortune, birth, class, or intended profession, is bound to serve as a private soldier in the ranks of the stand- ing army for a period of three successive years. From this obligation only the most obvious incapacity from bodily or mental defect or infirmity can excuse any individual, and that incapacity must be examined and admitted by the local board of commissioners for military affairs, whose proceedings are reported * Gesetze ueber die Militair Pflichtigkeit. Berlin, 1840- SERVICE TS THE LIXE — IX THE RESERVE. 71 to, and watched over by, a superior provincial board, and both report upon every claim for exemption to the war department. By the construction of these boards it is impossible that favour, partiality, or local interest can screen any individual from his turn for entering the service for three years- — which turn is de- termined by lot, drawn by those who are between the prescribed years, viz., between 20 and 25 years of age — nor from serving his three years in that particular branch of service or regiment, for which, from stature, constitution, or previous occupation, he may be best adapted. Officers from each branch of service — of the guards, artillery, cavalry, and infantry — attend these boards at their sittings, for this selection. In order not to press too severely on the professions or occupations incompatible with such a long period of military service, certain exemptions on account of the social position of the individual are allowed by favour, and on certificate from the proper authorities, so as to reduce the period of service in a regiment of the line from threes years to one year, the individual thus favoured being at the ex- pense of his own clothing and accoutrements. But such exemp- tion is the exception, not the rule; is not matter of right, but of favour ; and also of political convenience, when the ranks of the standing army are already sufficiently full. After this service of: three years in a regiment of the line or standing army, the indi- vidual returns on leave of absence as a supernumerary, liable to rejoin his regiment in case of war ; but upon attaining his 26th year, after his three years' service, he is discharged from the lists of the standing army into the army of reserve, and into that division of it which is called erster Aufgeboths, or first for service. This is the real army of the country, being composed entirely of soldiers of three years' training, and between the ages of 26 and 32 years. The standing army is the formation-school for the population. One third of its numbers is discharged every autumn into this division of the army of reserve, aud replaced in spring out of the population by the local and provincial boards of commissioners. The army of reserve is called out for exercise and field manoeuvres for fourteen days every year, which however is sometimes extended to four weeks. The individual after his 32nd year is turned over from this first division to the second division (zweiten Aufge- boths) of the army of reserve. In case of war, this division would not take the field, but would do garrison duty, as being composed generally of men with families, aad more advanced in life, and also of half-invalids who had been found unfit for severer 72 SERVICE IN THE LINE — RESERVE — LAND-STURM. duty. After his 49th year, the individual is turned over into the land-sturm, or levy en masse, which is only mustered or exercised in its own locality, and would only be called out in case of actual invasion, or domestic tumult. The whole land is thus one vast camp, the whole population one army. Every man, in every station of life, and in every locality, is a drilled soldier, who knows his regiment, his company, his squad, his military place in it, and appears under arms at his rendezvous m~jhr duty, with as little delay or confusion, and a,s complete in all military appointments, as a soldier of any standing army quartered in cantonments. The admirable precision and arrange- ment with which all the equipments of each portion of the army of reserve ate placed in convenient depots, and head-quarters over the country, for the inhabitants of each locality belonging to that force, prevent any confusion in the working of this vast and admirably arranged military system. Standing armies, composed of men enlisted, or impressed, for an unlimited period of service, or for a period long enough to separate them from the rest of society almost entirely, to detach them as a class from all the ties and habits of civil life, exist now only in Russia, Austria, France, and England. Prussia, and all the secondary powers, have dropped this kind of military force. In France six years, and in Austria eight years, are the terms of service for the conscript drawn by ballot for the army, and lately the period is extended to eight years in France; and, as far as regards the individual's habits and ties, this is almost equivalent to unlimited service. All the other European powers have organised their military force upon the Prussian principle; and this has imper- ceptibly altered most essentially their relative political importance, and the weight of Prussia in European affairs ; and particularly has become an element in the social structure, and in the political balance of power of the European states, of great interest to the political philosopher observant of those silent changes which i come over civilised society unremarked, until on some sudden crisis they produce striking effects. This national army of the Prussian system appears to be the cheapest, the most effective, and most valuable military force, a country can keep. Its cheapness, indeed, in proportion to its great numerical strength, and to the fine and efficient appearance under arms, to which good arrangement and discipline have brought this force in . Prussia, has led to the almost general adoption of the system on the Continent. The soldiery are only in pay during the period EFFECT OF THIS SYSTEM IN EUROPE. 73 they are embodied, that is, during the three years' service in the line, when they may be considered as learning their military duty, and, afterwards, only during the few weeks yearly of army of reserve service, when the troops are assembled for field manoeuvres, in great masses, in different points of the kingdom. Our military men who gallop about at these grand Prussian reviews declare unanimously their admiration of the appearance, movements, manoeuvres, and military excellency of the Prussian army; and its drill and equipments, as well as its organisation, have become a model for other troops, almost as generally as they were at the commencement of the revolutionary war, before the onset of troops far less exquisitely drilled and dressed than the old Prussian army, settled the real value in the field of this parade perfection for half a century. This kind of military force, however, if duly weighed in all its bearings on the community by the political economist, will be found in reality the most expensive and ruinous, instead of the cheapest, a country can support. It is an enormous pressure, a ruinous tax, in reality, upon the industry of a nation — a reck- less waste of the property — of the time and labour which consti- tute the property — of the labouring and middle classes, and which reduces, and for ever keeps down the people, to a state of poverty. Look at its working among those classes. Take, for instance, a lad of two and twenty, who has just learnt his business as a carpenter, smith, weaver, or other handicraft, and then for three years, the three most valuable years in his life for acquir- ing steady habits of work, and manual dexterity and skill in his trade, put him into a regiment of the line in a distant part of the country to live the idle life of a soldier for three years, away from the advice or control of his friends, and without seeing or handling the implements of the trade he was bred to. What kind of operative tradesman, or head of a family, is such an education to produce? But after three years' service, he finds his way home, resumes his original trade, marries, and from 25 to 48 years of age, that is, for 23 years, he has to give at the least two weeks yearly- — I believe it is more usually four weeks — to his army of reserve duty. Now, if we take the working years of such a man to be 40, that is, from 22 to 62 years of age, we have 14,600 4 working days in his life, including, however, Sundays, holidays, sickness-days, and drunkenness-days; and out of this gross capital of 14,600 days, this man's military duty of three years' service in the line, and 14 days for 23 years 74 PRUSSIAN MILITARY ORGANISATION". afterwards in the army of reserve, takes away 1417 days, or just about 10 per cent, of his operative life. It is equivalent to a property tax of 10 per cent., taking the lowest data of calculation, upon the labour and industry of the working, producing classes of the nation; and observe, it is not 10 per cent, on the value only of the produce of the time, labour, and industry of the people, that is consumed by those governments, but one -tenth of the productive powers themselves — of the very time and labour of the people. Nor is this all. It is in the good weather half-year, in the drilling and reviewing season only, that many kinds of out-door labour, and many sorts of crafts can be carried on to advantage; and besides the greater severity of winter in Prussia, and generally on the Continent, the extent of country, and the consequent inferiority of cross- roads and facilities of transport, impede industry and business, during the bad weather half-year, to a degree unknown in our compact, well roaded land. The working man's time is worth double to him at the very season it is taken from him by his government for drills and parades. The system is incompatible with a progressive condition of a people, with any considerable growth of national wealth, or any extensive development of manufacturing industry. The, labouring man cannot raise his condition to the middle class ; scarcely can he gather savings for old age. The middle class is formed under this system of taxation on time and labour, not by the rise of individuals from the lower class, as in our social system, but by the breaking down of the class >above itself. The German military system, and the German commercial league, are at direct variance with each other. If the former prevail, and continue to devour the only basis of national wealth and prosperity — the time and labour of the people — the latter will linger in a forced existence, and gradually die away. If the latter prevail, and Germany become in reality a thriving, industrious, manufacturing country, this military system, and the whole system of interference of the Continental governments with the people in all their doings, engendered by it, must fall to the ground. Many conceive, theoretically, that it must be the great safeguard of the liberties of a country, its best protection from tyranny, that the whole people have arms in their hands and know how to use them. This may be true, if political liberty alone, that is, the form or constitution of a free government, be all that is understood by liberty, and if the people have got the forms of a free government, ITS ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES. 15 "which they have not in Prussia; but if civil liberty — the right of every individual to the free use of his mental and bodily powers, and to his own free agency as a moral and social being, subject only to such restrictions as he himself has concurred in, and imposes by his own representatives, for the general good — be the end, and political liberty only the means, then this is not true of such a military organisation of a whole people. It is sacrificing their civil liberty — which is the great end and object of free institutions — for their political liberty, if they had any, for the defence of a share in the forms of legislation^ It is paying for the saddle, and leaving nothing to buy the horse. It is stated by a statistical writer, Jancigny, as an approxima- tion to the proportion of the military to the population of different countries, that in Russia 1 in 57 of the population is serving as a soldier; in Prussia 1 in 80; in Austria 1 in 118; in France 1 in 122; and in England 1 in 320. But in this statistical ap- proximation, the writer forgets the most important element in it, as far as regards the industry, morals, and habits of a people, viz., that in England this 1 represents a whole military genera- tion. As long as this 1 lasts, the 320 do not furnish another 1 to fill his place as a soldier, and when they do, it is 1 who can be spared, whose social condition allows him to enlist. In Russia it appears to be the same — the 1 represents a whole military generation. In Austria and France, the 1 represents 8 years, and 6 years respectively, during which periods the 1 is not replaced out of the body of the community; and as, after 6 or 8 years of military service, many soldiers have lost all civil ties and means of earning a living, and re-engage as substitutes for those drawn to replace them, the system is nearly equivalent in practice to the English and Russian. But in Prussia the 1 represents only 3 years. He is then thrown back, with his half military, half civil habits, into the mass of the community, and another 1 is taken out of the 80, without regard to his social position or relation to others, to be demoralised by the same process. By demoralised, it is not here meant that the soldier is necessarily a less moral man than the civilian, but that hi3 habits of industry and steady application to work, and his knack or skill in his trade, are necessarily deranged; and in this sense his military service demoralises him for civil utility. His mind and habits, as well as his manual dexterity and aptitude, are injured. The operative, taken away from his factory, where his individual intelligence and dexterity may often be most import* i PRUSSIAN MILITARY ORGANISATION. ant to its prosperity, to be drilled and lead a military life for three years, and afterwards yearly for several weeks, returns with his habits, mind, and hand, out, as workmen express it, when they resume their tools after long disuse. He is no competitor against a workman in the uninterrupted exercise of his handicraft all his life. A public trained in the habits of military life are, also, bad consumers, as well as bad producers. The whole community necessarily brings from the ranks the rough tastes and habits easily satisfied with rude production, and very little of it, which are inseparable from the condition of the common soldier, whatever class he may have been originally drawn from. .As consumers, they do not bring into the home market the almost fastidious and finical taste for, and estimate of fine workmanship, superior material, and perfect finish, which is a principal element in^the superiority of one manufacturing country over another. Notwithstanding the testimony of all military officers to the fine appearance and efficiency of the Prussian troops, it is reasonable to believe that men who know that they are only tied to their military service in the line for three years, and are hankering after their civil occupations, and counting the days until they can return to their homes, are, as soldiers, not equal to men who have no connection with civil life, no ties, cares, hopes, property, or domicile, beyond their military position. This seems to be a point in human nature, on which others as well as military men are able to form an opinion; and as im- mediately previous to 1794, the testimony of all the military officers of Europe ran quite as high in favour of the efficiency of the Prussian army, as then constituted, such testimony to its superiority as now constituted cannot be received as altogether infallible. Regiments of the line almost totally renewed in the course of three years, with one-third of their strength always raw recruits, and their oldest soldiers, generally speaking, of less than three years' standing, can scarcely be equal to old regiments of seasoned soldiers, although they may be pattern regiments for drill, dress, and good arrangement; and regiments of reserve, although consisting of soldiers of three years' standing, if only embodied for a few days or weeks in summer, are after all only a good militia. England, Russia, France, and Austria, have adopted a far cheaper military system for society, one better for the civil liberty of the people, and probably one better too ITS ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES. * 7 for Laving effective troops, by taking a proportion of the people by voluntary enlistment, or by forced conscriptions, and keeping the same individuals always, or as long as they are fit for service, embodied as an army, relieving the rest, the. great body of the community, altogether from the heavy annual tax on their time and industry, which presses on the people in Prussia and the other German States. . These scape-goats for the rest of the community form, probably, more effective soldiers individually ; and collectively are, without doubt, a more effective military power in the hands of a government. The whole population of a monarchy, organised, drilled, disciplined, regimented, ready and effective at a call to fight for king and country, sounds remarkably well in a school boy's oration, or a newspaper para- graph. But look closely into the thing. A modern army is a political machine, composed of artillery, cavalry, and infantry, in the hands of a state, and movable at its pleasure; and unless this machine be not only perfect in all its parts, but movable and disposable for offensive, aggressive operation, as well as for mere defence of its native land, it is of no real political weight . in Europe. Does the Prussian system fulfil these conditions of an effective, political, military power? Is it perfect in all its parts, or only as perfect as the nature of its formation allows it to be? Artillery and cavalry, the most essential parts of this machine, can scarcely be formed at all in less than three years, we are told by our most experienced officers who have written on tactics; and in these services the man is part and parcel of his horse, or of his gun. He has not, like the infantry soldier, a value independent of other things; but out of connection and practice with the identical gun, horse, and squad he is trained to work with, he is but part of a tool, the stock if a firelock, the handle only of a hammer. It is evident there can be no perfection in these two important branches of military pow r er in such militia troops. Is such a military machine as that of .Prussia movable and disposable? Is it a military force which could be shipped to attack or to garrison distant colonies — and without colonies Germany can scarcely become what German politicians fondly dream of, a great commercial power — or to carry on such a war as France has now on her hands in Africa, or as Russia wages in the Caucasus, or even to carry on a few campaigns in Germany itself, or in the Netherlands'? If Hanover were to occupy the Duchy of Brunswig, or France to invade the Baden or Hessian 78 PRUSSIAN MILITARY ORGANISATION. provinces on the Rhine, or to get up a war in the East, is the Prussian national army, constituted as it is, a military force which could be freely used in a succession of campaigns, like any other political military force, on such ordinary political occasions nowise affecting directly the safety of Prussia? Or is this military machine defensive only, and, from its composition, of no weight or value as an available offensive power? Prussia was called upon by sound policy, and the ties of kindred, to prevent the dismemberment of the kingdom of the Netherlands, and to extinguish the Belgian Revolution ; and a few disposable regiments sent to Brussels to support the King of Holland — on the same principle that Austria sends a few regiments on every alarm into the Papal or Neapolitan states — would have turned the scale. At the siege of Antwerp, Prussia Was obviously called upon in honour to take a part, when a French force was actually in the field against her allies the Dutch. A good cause was not wanting, nor evidently was the will wanting on the part of the Prussian royal " family and cabinet: but the means, the machinery of an aggressive military power movable at the pleasure of the state, for any purpose, for any length of time, and to any quarter, were wanting. A Prussian army could be assembled for annual exercise and manoeuvre on the frontier, for purposes of demonstration, and even of occupation of ad- joining parishes in Luxembourg; but however brilliant, expert, and well disciplined such an army might be, and however ready and eager to engage in actual warfare its officers or its men might be, it is obviously so constituted, that it cannot be freely used in the field by its government as a political machine. The property, the industry, the intelligence, the influence of the country, are*in its ranks — all that is valuable in a nation is in its ranks, and not merely a class given up to military service, as scape-goats for the rest of the community, and composed generally of the least valuable and most isolated members in it, whose loss is simply the loss of soldiers. Here, the loss would be the loss of the owners or heirs of the property of the country — the loss of fathers, husbands, sons — of men on whom the interests and industry of the country hinges — of the most useful and influential classes in it, not of the unconnected, idle, and outcast only, of whom an ordinary standing army is composed. The loss by a victory would be greater to Prussia in a political and economical view, than the loss by three defeats of ordinary troops. The affairs of society would be more deranged ; more PRUSSIAN MILITARY ORGANISATION. 79 useful life would be destroyed. An army composed of such materials cannot be risked, unless on the rare occasions, as during the last war, when national existence and safety are visibly at stake. The loss even of time and labour to all the productive classes, the destruction of all manufacturing industry and enter- prise, by calling out the army of reserve, composed as it is, for actual service for a campaign or two, would be such a sacrifice of all social interests, as only the most imminent danger could justify. If all wars were, like the last, for national existence, no system could be superior to the present military arrangement of the Prussian population ; and all the secondary European powers have run headlong into it, on account of its obvious excellence for the defence of a country, and its apparent economy; and for the same reasons, all politicians and political economists are loud in its praise. If all the European countries had adopted the same military system at the conclusion of the last war, this might have been wise. The only question would have been, whether the economy is not in appearance only — whether the taking up of the time and labour of the whole productive classes of a nation, for military service, be not in reality a retrograde step in civilisation and political economy, and one more expensive and ruinous to the people than the taxes upon the value of the products of their time and labour, necessary to pay a particular class to perform that military service for all. But the other powers have each retained a disposable military force of a different nature, constituted on a different principle, and avail- able as a political machine for any purpose in or out of the country, without regard or reference to the machine itself, or its connection with the industry and property of the nation, and therefore as a machine of* superior weight and availability in European affairs. The new national armies have no aggressive capability, and consequently no power of intimidation in them. They are like the enormous pieces of ordnance found in old for- tifications, to be fired off only in one direction, and only in de- fence. A French diplomatist would probably laugh in the face of a Prussian diplomatist, who could talk seriously of an armed alliance of Prussia and the other German powers who have adopted her military arrangements, for any political purpose whatsoever beyond the simple defence of their own territories, each for itself from within. The power of acting offensively without their own territories is gone. This great difference in 80 AMOUNT OF PRUSSIAN ARMY. the constitutions of their armies N since the peace, has produced the most important alteration in_the relative weight and import- ance of the European powers. It has altogether changed, in an unseen way, the balance of power in Europe. For offensive war, and as a political power, Prussia has dropped the sword; while Russia, Austria, France, and England, have retained it, as something of weight ready to be thrown upon great questions arising, into the political scale. It is a mistake to talk of the five great dominant European powers; for as a belligerent capable of giving eifect by offensive operation beyond her own territories to her political determinations, Prussia is in reality as much out of the question as Denmark, or any of the secondary powers in the European system. It is a signal instance of the hidden compensations which neutralise and counter-balance all excess of evil in human affairs, that this great military monarchy, the last which made and retained conquests and acquisitions of territory, without reference to moral principle, or appeal to the feeling of the people themselves, or to the sense of right among mankind — for such were the conquests of Frederic the Great, the acquisitions of Silesia and of the Polish and Pomeranian provinces now concealed under the name of East Prussia — is the first which was shaken to the ground in the late war, by the insufficiency of her own military power for her own defence — a mechanical military power without national feeling; and now, by the perfection of the mechanism of 'her military power for home-defence she is paralysed, and disarmed as :a great political power. Of all the European powers, Prussia supports the greatest military establishment, in proportion to her extent, population, and finances. The infantry of the line is reckoned 132,013 men. The cavalry of the line and of the guards, 25,200 men. The artillery of the line *»ud of the guards, 22,3 65 men. Pioneers, miners, and other bodies of the engineer corps, 13,500 men. The infantry of the landwehr, exercised yearly, 124,737 men. The cavalry of the landwehr, exercised for four weeks yearly, 19,656 mounted men. The artillery of the- landwehr, 17,292 men. The amount, including 8,118 ofiicers, is 362,881 fighting men. Two-thirds of the landwehr, first f^r service, is sufficient to complete the landwehr regiments to their war establishment, so that one-third (above 80,000 men) of this division of the force remains disposable, and the whole of the division of the landwehr second for service, which is as strong AMOUNT OF PRUSSIAN ARMY. 81 as the first division. The whole available exercised force of Prussia is reckoned by military writers at 532,000 men. The artillery is said — of course no exact information on such a point can be obtained or sought by the traveller — to consist, in pieces complete and useful, of 648 six-pounders and howitzers, of 216 twelve-pounders, and of 216 light field-pieces for horse-artillery, besides an unknown amount of heavy guns in the fortresses and in 336 garrison towns. The funds required in time of profound peace and non-movement of troops, to keep up this enormous military force, appears to be 22,798,000 thalers; out of a total revenue of 51,287,000 thalers. The revenue being pushed to the utmost point beyond which the productiveness of additional taxation would be null, being managed and collected also with great economy — the direct taxes costing but 4 per cent., and the indirect taxes 15 per cent, on the gross amount, as expense of collection — it does not appear how, in the event of a war, funds could be found to move this huge military machine. The time, labour, industry, and money, which should have been accumu- lating during peace in the hands of the people, and forming a capital diffused over the country capable of bearing the expenses of a war, are expended every year in military shows, drills, and manoeuvres, which, even admitting that they make perfect soldiers of the whole population, leave nothing to move them with in the event of real war — nothing to raise taxes from. In the w^hole Prussian population the number of males fit for productive labour, that is, between their seventeenth and forty- fifth year, inclusive, appears to be about three millions. It is 3,042,946, including the infirm, sick, blind, lame, deformed, and all fit or unfit for military duty and productive labour. Above one-sixth of this gross number of productive labourers is taken by the state every year, for longer or shorter periods, from productive labour, to be employed in the unproductive labour of handling their firelocks, marching, and manoeuvring. A people whose time and labour are thus taken away from in- dustrial occupation, can never become rich or powerful as a nation, nor well off as individuals. The Duke of Wellington was right in an observation which has often been cavilled at — that notwithstanding our heavy taxation, the English labouring people are the least heavily taxed of any labouring people in Europe. The time and labour of the common man, with us, are not taken from him by his government. The unwieldiness and disproportion of the Prussian military force to the industrial B 1 82 DEFECT IN CONTINENTAL ARMIES. force which should raise the means to move it appears from the following comparison: — Prussia *, with a population of 14 millions, has an army of 532,000 men. Austria, with a popula- tion of 32 millions, has an army of 750,000 men: but if Austria adopted the Prussian military system, her army would amount to 1,216,000 men. France, estimated in 1841 to have a popula- tion of 35 millions, has an army of 840,000 men; hut on the Prussian military system, her army would amount to 1,330,000 men. Great Britain, with a population of 26 millions, would, in proportion to Prussia^ have an army of 987,000 men as her present establishment — a greater number than in the heat of the last war, reckoning volunteers, yeomanry, and all, were ever withdrawn from preparing the sinews of war by the exercise of private industry, to make shows and sham-fights, or even to repel a threatened invasion. It is a defect in the present construction of the Continental armies — of that of Prance as much as any — that the private soldier who has raised himself to the station of a non-com- missioned officer has no prospect whatever of attaining the rank of an officer. The class of non-commissioned officers is, in fact, expressly excluded from any higher military pro- motion by the distinction kept up, in most services, be- tween nobility, from whom alone officers can be appointed, and the non-noble citizen, or burgerliche class. In France and Prussia this distinction is kept up by appointing officers only from the cadets, or military schools, and requiring scientific examination for a commission. The sons of functionaries, civil or military, who are educated carefully, and at some expense to the state as well as to their parents, are thus exclusively entitled to become officers ; and as functionarism breeds up to its own supply, there is, especially in the healthy services of those powers who have no colonies or unwholesome climes to wear out human life in, always a surplus of those who have a right by education, promise, and long expectation, to vacancies as they occur in the regiments in which they are doing duty as expectants or cadets. The meritorious private soldier or non-commissioned officer is thus entirely excluded from any chance of promotion. 2now this is a defect upon which a civilian is entitled to form an opi- nion as well as a military man, because it is a defect in the * Betracbtungen eines Militaers ueber eiiiem bevoratebenden Krieg zwiscben Deutscbland und Frankreich. Leipsic, 1841. DEFECT IN CONTINENTAL ARLirES. 83 application of principles of social economy common to all insti- tutions in society as well as to an army. To exclude merit or capability from the highest point to be attained, can never be a good arrangement in any social institution. Education is the plea upon which this exclusion of the whole class of non-com- missioned officers from promotion in the Prussian service is justi- fied. Education is certainly not to be undervalued, especially for the officer ; but if we consider what the duties of a commis- sioned officer are, as ensign, lieutenant, or captain, and that in an army of a hundred thousand men, not two hundred are required to apply science or high education to their military duties, it appears obviously to be only a cover for the monopoly of the rank of commissioned officers by a particular class, to require that every subaltern should be educated to take the command of the movement of armies, and should pass through scientific examinations which would probably puzzle a Wellington. A sergeant-major with his sergeants, manoeuvres his company, troop, or regiment, without the aid of the officers. He does daily the duties which they superintend, and in reality learn practically to do from him. To shut the door totally upon this class is evidently a faulty arrangement of the military system, of a country. The efficiency of the French armies, so long as this door was thrown wide open — that is, during the whole of the republican period, and until the Emperor Napoleon shut it upon them, and upon his own success — proves that no military force is well constituted under the exclusion of the common soldier from the hope of attaining the higher military situations. The moral principle is too powerful for the aristocratic, in modem times even in military arrangement. The French and Prussian governments, without acknowledging the exclusion in favour of a noblesse, introduce it practically, by requiring the education which their noblesse or functionary class can alone afford to give. I could not hear of a single instance in Prussia of a man, not entered as a cadet, and entitled by his examination in science to a commission, who had risen from the ranks, since the peace, to the station of -an officer. The .government indeed has expressly declared, that the ultimate reward of long service and merit in this class is to be the appointment to such civil offices in the departments under government, as the non-commissioned officer or private soldier may be qualified to fill. In Prance, it is this defect in her military system which, in time of peace, seems in- separable from her civil arrangements from her functionary 84 DEFECT IN CONTINENTAL ARMIES. system, that keeps alive the discontented republican spirit in the great body of the youth who supply the ranks, yet are excluded from promotion in the army. The Bourbon family never can obtain military popularity, as this exclusion is naturally ascribed to their system of government. The " petit caporal" applied to Napoleon, is not merely a term of endearment in the recollections of the French soldiery — it has a political meaning. In England, this defect in the old military arrangements has been perceived by the liberal ministry ; and the non-commissioned class has been raised to a higher respectability than in any service in Europe. The chances are small, no doubt, in the British army, of the private soldier or non-commissioned officer attaining the rank of officer ; yet more such promotions of men. 6riginally from the ranks, take place in one year in the British sendee, than have taken place since the peace in all the Continental ser- vices put together. The non-commissioned class in an army are the equivalent to the middle classes in civil society. When the want of education, the vice, the brutality of our lower orders, are so much talked of by our higher orders, it is somewhat sin- gular to find in the lowest order of all among us — that of the enlisted soldiery — no want of men of education and conduct to form a class which, in moral and intellectual condition, stands above -the middle class* of civil society, and not as all belo.v the higher orders who vilified that from which it is formed. Is it not in a great degree a mere fagon de parler among our gentry, when they speak of an ignorance, and moral, and intellectual degradation, of our working classes, with whom they in reality never mix or converse on such a footing as to know what they are % The superior status, as men of conduct and intelligence, of this middle class in military life, its higher respectability, and greater efficiency in the British service, strikes the traveller abroad, who happens to observe the different style of doing those ordinary duties in which the men are left entirely with a corpo- ral or sergeant — as in relieving sentries — in the British and in foreign regiments. In the latter, it is obvious that, when the eye of the officer is off, the restraint of discipline is not upon the men. The unmilitary observer abroad can apply no other test of the state of discipline to what he sees of soldiery, than the precise or lax style of the men when in charge of non-commis- sioned officers only. If this be an admissible test, the discipline of the British service is more genuine and better than that of the Prussian. DELICACY OF THE PRUSSIAN SOLDIER. 85 Two distinct elements may enter into the construction of a military force in modern times. The rough peasant, or working- man -element, may compose not only the main body of the soldiery and non-commissioned officers, but may be mixed pretty high up even in the class of commissioned officers ; or the gentleman-element, that of the educated, refined, delicately bred and brought up classes, may, by the formation of the military force out of the social body, be found preponderating, if not in numbers, at least in example and influence, in the ranks of an army. Which of the two, as military machines, would a Wel- lington prefer to work with in a campaign 1 It is possible that a certain delicacy of mind and body, a certain inrpatience of fatigue and discomfort, a certain over refinement for the work of the common soldier, may creep in and pervade too generally the mass of an army, assimilating the rougher material, of which soldiery, to be effective, must be composed, too much to itself. The soldier, like the horse, may be too finely bred, too delicately reared for his work, too soft, too refined, too much used to com- forts. The composition of the Prussian army, drawn indiscrimi- nately from all classes, from the middle and comfortable as well as the roughly living classes, has this defect evidently in it. The common labouring man himself on the Continent is, from the nature of the climate and his indoor employments for half the year, much less exposed to, and less hardened against, wet, cold, fatigue, and privation, than our common people. Those above the mere labouring class, the peasantry, the artisans, the middle class, and higher classes, all of whom are in the ranks, are so comfortably brought up, so wont to their regular meals, their cup of coffee, their pipe, their warm clothing, warm rooms, and are so cold- catching and sensible of weather, wet, fatigue, and discomfort, that even our highest classes of nobility and gentry are much more hardy, and, as every traveller remarks, fir more robust in constitution and capability of enduring great fatigue and privation, than the very servants they hire on the Continent to attend them. A military force composed of such a material may be very brilliant for a single field-day, a battle, or a short campaign even, and very effective for home defence, but is not of the stuff for long rough fatigue and persevering endurance of all discomfort and privation, which in all ordinary military conjunctures are the military qualities that ensure suc- cess. Something of this want of the rougher material, and of this excess of the finer material, appears, even to the unniilitary SQ DELICACY OF THE PRUSSIAN SOLDIER. eye, about the Prussian soldiery. They are light, well made, even elegant figures — youths evidently formed upon the standard of a higher class of society than the common men in other ser- vices. They have not only the use of their limbs, but the kind of grace of movement which such exercises as dancing, fencing, and gymnastics give. They attitudinise well on sentry, dress indi- vidually well, and with a certain degree of dandyism, pautalooned, padded, and laced in, and which beseems the soldier. But still the unmilitary English eye of the common traveller misses the giant frame, strength, and vigour, of the front rank men of our good regiments of the line. The guards even, and cuirassiers, compared to the British, appear — can it be prejudice, or is it reality 1 — of ordinary infantry and ordinary dragoon make and size. Put them in the uniforms of riflemen, or of hussars, and they would pass for such on ordinary unmilitary people ; but put one of our horseguards, or cuirassiers, on the horse, and in the accoutrements of a light cavalry man, or one of our grena- diers, not of the guards alone but of any of our good regiments, into a light infantry company, and there is not a grocer iu Marylebone parish who would not find out at once that this kind of man was misplaced. !STow this kind of man — the strong, sinewy, bony, muscular, grenadier frame of man, such as com- poses the front ranks at least of all our good regiments of the line — is a very scarce kind of man in Germany, probably from the natural growth and make of the people, and also from their softer and more delicate, more sedentary, more indoor life in boyhood when the frame is forming. If you see a stout man he is generally fleshy, with more weight than strength. A ten- dency to grow corpulent, and with what generally accompanies that tendency of the frame, a shortness of the arm bones as com- pared to men of the same size of lean, spare constitutions, is very common in Germany. This tendency to a lusty roundabout rather than a muscular growth, strikes the eye in the Prussian soldiery, and is no doubt derived from the easy, regular, good living, to which the classes from whom the ranks are tilled have been accustomed from infancy. If a doubt may be permitted to a traveller, not certainly qualified to judge of such military matters, it would be — Is this so good a material to form an army of, this admixture of a class more delicately bred than the com- mon labouring man, and giving its own habits, wants, and tastes, to the whole mass 'I Is this gentleman-element so well adapted to f&Uid privation, fatigue, discomfort, and all that assails the com- LONGEVITY OF PRUSSIAN OFFICERS. 87 mon soldier, as the rougher material, the common working-man- element, out of which our army is composed ? Another obvious defect in the military establishment of Prussia is the want of any cure for longevity. The common men live indeed too short a time in the service — only for three years ; but the officers live by far too long. Captains of companies of forty-five years of age, and lieutenants advancing to that time of life, are too common. Africa in the French service, the East and West Indies, the expense of home quarters, and the good half-pay in our service, are remedies counteracting in some de- gree this malady, the most pernicious to the efficiency and vigoui of a, military force that can get the ascendancy in it. It was the main cause of the destruction of the Prussian army in the first campaigns of the revolutionary wax against the French ; and our own army never did any good in the last war until the elderly gentlemen were got rid of, and captains of companies were generally under five-and-twenty, and field officers under five-and- thirty. With officers of the age when, in the course of nature, activity, endurance of fatigue, elasticity of body and mind, are failing, order, discipline, and appearance may be kept up admir- ably in a body of men, but the spirit and dash is wanting. Prussia lias no unwholesome districts, or severe military duties wearing out human life, or disgusting the officer with the service, and but few advantages for the military man to retire upon when getting too old for the duties of the inferior officer. The promotion is consequently slow, and men grow old in situations which require the spirit and activity of youth. It is not in the habits, also, of the upper class to keep themselves young by hard exercise or fatigue. The French officer is perpetually in movement, like a hyena in his den. It may be only a clen of a coffee-room, or billiard-room ; but there he is all day, in perpetual activity of mind and body. The English officer has his daily feat of pecles- trianism, harder than any forced march ; his hunting, his shooting, and is always in wind and working condition for any exertion. The German officers seem naturally of more sedentary habits. You seldom see them taking heavy downright fatigue for mere pleasure or emulation, a.s our young officers do. The very school- boys walk, and don't run in Germany. In the event of a rupture with France upon the French claim of having the Rhine for their boundary, the chances would run very much against Prussia, notwithstanding the excellence of her military arrangements for defence ; it is a national question in 88 RESULT OF A WAR WITH FRANCE. France, one which has become almost personal in the spirit of every Frenchman : it is a mere political distant object to the great majority of the Prussian population. They have shown themselves capable of great exertion on great occasions ; but this would not be one of those great occasions which call forth national spirit for the defence of national existence, or material interests. German steam is not easily got up. The jealousy of the governments extinguishes every where in Germany the expression of public opinion, and consequently the diffusion of national spirit on subjects not immediately pressing upon the people. No political discussions in newspapers or in conversation, no agitation or party feelings upon their own affairs keep alive the flame. In public places where people meet and talk, the literature or science of the day, the theatre, opera, or ballet, and perhaps the reviews of the military, and the journeys of their princes to- or from their residences, are discussed, but never the national objects, interests, or politics. You never hear among the lowest class of Germans the vulgar prejudices of the vulgar Englishman, French- man, or American, about the superiority of his country, which make him insufferable as an individual, but respectable as an atom of a nation inspired with the same intense public spirit. The Prussians are educated, trained, and governed out of this spirit. The German newspaper writers, since the agitation of France under the administration of Thiers about the Rhine boundary, begin to talk of a German national spirit to be kindled in every breast by the German commercial league, but have only got so far, as yet, as to be quarrelling about whether this univer- sal Teutonic flame is to be lighted upon a Prussian hearth- stone, or is to have a fire-place for itself ; whether all Germany is to be Prussia, or Prussia a part of all Germany united into one bundle, and set fire to as soon as the French march to the Rhine. The partition of Poland is but beginning now to present Prussia with the fruits of iniquity. The two or three millions of Polish subjects of Prussia, so far from being amalgamated with, the Prussian subjects, live in a state of passive resistance to the Prussian government. They cultivate their own nationality, will not mix with the Prussians, and will not even accept of civil office, or educate their children in the German language, customs, and laws, so as to fill the civil functions in their own country. They hold themselves as subjugated provinces, and are evidently in a state which will paralyse the Prussian military power the moment the French throw up a signal rocket from the banks of POLICY OF ENGLAND. 89 the Rhine. All that time had done since the partition of. Poland towards amalgamating the people with Prussia, has been lost by the Prussian government delivering up to Russia the Poles who had sought refuge, during the last commotions in Poland, among their relations and friends on what they considered Prussian territory. At present the Polish peasants who desert their homes in Russian Poland to escape the military conscription, are seized in the villages of Prussian Poland, and sent back. This, say the Prussian Poles, justly enough, is not the state of a country amalgamated and incorporated with another independent country and protecting government, but the state of a subjugated country held only by conquest, and entitled to throw off the yoke. So general has this spirit of passive resistance to Prussian rule become in this part of the Prussian dominions, that his present Majesty has been obliged, since his accession, to remind his Polish subjects by a proclamation, that they have been incorporated with his kingdom in the settlement of Europe in 1815, by the five great European powers. The Poles quietly reply, that three of the five are themselves the robbers, partaking in the spoil to which they gave themselves these legitimate rights ; and refer to the undeniable non-protection of their provinces as Prussian territory, for the proof that they are not Prussian. It is here, and on the Rhine, that the flame of war will first break oat on the Continent of Europe. What will be the policy of England ? The day is past when an English ministry, however conservative, could venture to propose to the country to join a despotic state in subjugating Poland, or in repressing the extension of constitutional representative government over an enlightened, manufacturing, and commercial population on the Rhine. The aggrandisement of France by such an accession of territory and people is a bugbear which, in the present age, would not mislead the common sense of England, because it would be an accession of the elements of peace, industry, manufactures, and power in the public affairs of France, lodged in the hands of an enlightened, industrious, peaceful population — not an accession of warlike spirit and means ; and is at any rate an aggrandisement in no way af- fecting English interests or honour. England can only be a gainer, if every population from the White Sea to the Straits o£ Gibraltar were to give themselves free institutions, civil and political liberty, influence of the public over public affairs, and the power of restraining their rulers from wars or oppression. 90 PRUSSIAN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM CHAPTER V. NOTES OX THE PRUSSIAN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM. ITS EFFECTS OX THE MORAL CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE. The educational system of Prussia is admirable — admirable as a machinery by which schools, schoolmasters, superintendence of them, checks, rewards both for the taught and the teachers, and in a word education — that word being taken in the mean- ing of the means of conveying certain very useful acquirements to every class of society, and to every capacity of individuals — are diffused over the country, and by law brought into operation upon every human being in it. The machinery for national education is undoubtedly very perfect. The military organisa- tion of the w T hole population, and the habitual interference of government in all the doings and concerns of every individual — his very outgoing and incoming being, from the nature of his military service, matter of leave, licence, superintendence, and passport — make it as easy to establish an admirable system ?md regulation in every object government undertakes through- out the kingdom as in a barrack-yard. But great statesmen and politicians, especially of the military and nobility who see only one class or one side of society, are very apt to mistake the perfection of the means for the perfection of the end. The mistake is common with our own parliamentary philosophers. An admirable machinery is constructed, which with its various and well-considered regulations and checks, improved on perhaps by the experience and ingenuity of successive generations, is in reality a masterpiece of human wisdom and contrivance — such for example was our own excise system with its salt laws, and such is the same excise system now, in all that comes under its superintendence : and in the regular working and wise adapta- tion of all the parts of this beautiful and perfect machinery, we forget that the object itself may not be worth all this wisdom, may be attained in a more easy, natural, and effective way. or may be even not worth attaining. The wisdom and perfection of the machinery of the laws, and arrangements for attaining ITS EFFECTS ON THE MORAL CONDITION. 91 the end, are confounded with the value and wisdom of the end itself. The educational system of Prussia is no doubt admirable as a machinery ; but the same end is to be attained in a more natural and effective way — by raising the moral condition of the parents to free agency in their duties • or if not — if education, that is, reading, writing, and arithmetic, cannot be brought within the acquirements of the common man's children, but upon the Prussian semi-coercive principle of the state, through its functionaries, intruding upon the parental duties of each individual, stepping in between the father and his family, and enforcing by state regulations, fines and even imprisonment,* what should be left to the moral sense of duty and natural affection of every parent who is not in a state of pupillage from mental imbecility — then is such education not worth the demora- lising price paid for it — the interference with men as free moral agents, the substitution of government enactments and superin- tendence in the most sacred domestic affairs for self-guidance by conscience, good principle, and common sense — the reduction, in short of the population of a country to the social condition of a soldiery off duty roaming about their parade ground, under the eye and at the call of their superiors, without free agency or a sense of moral responsibility. Moral effects in society can only be produced by moral influences. We may drill boys into reading and writing machines ; but this is not education. The almost mechanical operations of reading, writing, and reckoning, are unquestionably most valuable acquirements — who can deny or doubt it I — but they are not education ; they are the means only, not the end — the tools, not the work, in the education of * I asked an intelligent Prussian what eould be done if a parent refused to send hi- child to school? He told me he had lately been at ihe police- i when a man was brought in for not sending his girl to school. She could not read, although advancing to the age to be confirmed. The man said his girl was earning her bread at a manufactory which he named, and he could not maintain her at school. He was asked why he did not send her to the evening schools established for such cases, and held after work- ing hours, or to the Sunday schools. He said his wife had a large family of young infants, and his girl had to keep them when she came from her work, while her mother was washing for them, and doing other needful family work, which she could not do with a child in her arms. The man was told that he would be committed to prison if he and his wife did not send their girl to school. In such a case would the school-learning be worth that learning which the girl was receiving at home in household work, or in taking care of children ? 92 PRUSSIAN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM ! man. We are too ready in Britain to consider them as tools "which will work of themselves — that if the labouring man is taught to read his Bible, he becomes necessarily a moral, religious man — that to read is to think. This confounding of the means with the end is practically a great error. We see no such effects from the acquisition of much higher branches of school education, and by those far above the social position of the labouring man. Beading and writing are acquirements very widely diffused in Paris, in Italy, in Austria, in Prussia, in Sweden; but the people are not moral, nor religious, nor enlight- ened, nor free, because they possess the means: they are not of educated mind in any true sense. If the ultimate object of all education and knowledge be to raise man to the feeling of his own moral worth, to a sense of his responsibility to his Creator and to his conscience for every act, to the dignity of a reflecting, self-guiding, virtuous, religious member of society, then the Prussian educational system is a failure. It is only a training from childhood in the conventional discipline and submission of mind, which the state exacts from its subjects. It is not a training or education which has raised, but which has lowered, the human character. This system of interference and intrusion into the inmost domestic relations of the people, this educational drill of every family by state means and machinery, supersedes parental tuition. It is a fact not to be denied that the Prussian population is at this day, when the fruits of this educational system may be appreciated in the generation of the adults, in a remarkably demoralised condition in those branches of moral conduct which cannot be taught in schools, and are not taught by the parents, because parental tuition is broken in upon by govern- mental interference in Prussia, its efficacy and weight annulled, and the natural dependence of the child upon the words and wisdom of its parent — the delicate threads by which the infant's mind, as its body, draws nutriment from its parent — is ruptured. They know little of human nature who know not that more of moral education may be conveyed in a glance of a mother's eye than in a whole course of reading and writing, under educational sergeants or clergymen in primary schools and gymnasia. Of all the virtues, that which the domestic family education of both the sexes most obviously influences — that which marks more clearly than any other the moral condition of a society, the home state of moral and religious principles, the efficiency of those principles in it, and the amount of that moral restraint ITS EFFECTS OX THE MORAL COXDITIOX. 93 upon passions and impulses, which it is the object of education and knowledge to attain — is undoubtedly female chastity. Will any traveller, will any Prussian say, that this index-virtue of the moral condition of a people is not lower in Prussia than in almost any part of Europe I * It is no uncommon event in the family of a respectable tradesman in Berlin to find upon his breakfast table a little baby, of which, whoever may be the father, he has no doubt at all about the maternal grandfather. Such accidents are so common in the class in which they are least common with us — the middle class, removed from ignorance or indigence — that thty are regarded but as accidents, as youth- ful indiscretions, not as disgraces affecting, as with us, the respect- ability and happiness of all the kith and kin for a generation. This educational drill of all the children of the community to one system, in schools in which the parent has no control or election of what is taught, or by whom or how, is a very suitable prelude to the education that follows it — the barrack life of all the Prussian youth, during three years of the most precious period of human life for forming the moral habits and character of the man as a future member of society. The unsettled military life for three years of every Prussian on his entrance into the world as a man, the idleness, want of forethought, and frivolity inseparable from his condition during this period, his half military, half civilian state, neither one nor the other, during all the rest of his life, his condition of pupillage under his military or civil .functionaries, in every act or movement during his existence, from his primary school service (schulpflich- tigkeit) to his being enrolled in old age as a landsturm man, are in reality the steps of his education. Are these the steps to any of the true objects of education? to the attainment of any high feelins: of individual moral worth and di^nitv? This edu- * In 1837 the number of females in the Prussian population between the beginning of their 16th year and the end of their 45th year — that is, within child-bearing age — was 2,953,146; the number of illegitimate children born in the same year was 39,501, so that 1 in every 75 of the whole of the females of an age to bear children,* had been the> mother of an illegitimate child. Prince Pukler Muskau states in one of his late publications (Sudostlieher Bildersaal, 3 Theil. 1841), that the character of the Prussians for honesty stands far lower than that of any other of the German populations : but he adduces no statistical data for this opinion. As a Prussian, he would scarcely come to such a conclusion, if it were not generally believed in Germanv. 94 PRUSSIAN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM : cation al system is in reality, from the cradle to the grave, nothing but a deception, a delusion put upon the noblest prin- ciple of human nature — the desire for intellectual development —a deception practised for the paltry political end of rearing the individual to be part and parcel of an artificial and despotic system of government, of training him to be either its instru- ment or its slave, according to his social station. The British government has accomplished a much wiser and more effective educational measure — the only measure, perhaps, which, without giving umbrage to some political or clerical body or other, could have been adopted for the general education of the people — by the reduction of the postage on letters. It has brought the use and advantage of education home to the com- mon man, for it no longer costs him a day's wages to communi- cate with his family. This great moral improvement in the condition of the lower class extends the influences of advice, admonition, and family affection among them. The postage was, in reality, a tax upon these moral influences. The people will educate themselves in a single generation, for the sake of the advantages this great measure has bestowed on education. A state-machinery of schools and schoolmasters, spread over the country on the Prussian system, would probably have cost more than the sacrifice of revenue by the reduction of postage, and, owing to the clashing of religious parties, would never have been so effective in extending education. The means in fact of edu- cation — a neighbour to teach reading and writing, were not wanting — were to be found in every parish, and the want of schools was a far smaller obstacle to the diffusion of education than the want of any desire of the people themselves for educa- tion. The labouring class saw no advantage or benefit from it. This obstacle is overcome without interference with the religious opinions of any class or sect ; and it will be found that already the business of the schoolmaster in society is providing for itself, like that of the miller or the blacksmith, without any aid from church or state. The supply will follow the demand in educa- tion as in every other human want ; and the demand will be effective in producing supply, just in proportion to the value and use of the article in ordinary life. This measure will be the great historical distinction of the reign of Victoria I. Every mother in the kingdom who has children earning their bread at a distance, lays her head upon her pillow at night with a feeling of gratitude for this blessing. It is the great and- enviable dis- ITS EFFECTS ON THE MORAL CONDITION. 95 tinction of the liberal ministry then in power, that they earned this measure boldly into effect without crippling its moral in- fluence, by reduction of a part only of this tax on the communi- cations of the people. Selbtsgefuhl is a superb word which the German language possesses, to describe the sense of one's own moral dignity as a man ; but the feeling or sentiment it expresses is wanting in a remarkable degree where you expect to find it strongest, — among the German youth, the nationally educated youth. Did it ever happen to a traveller taking a walk in the neighbourhood of Oxford, Cambridge, Dublin, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, St. Andrew's, or any of the universities in the United States, to be accosted by a stout, able-bodied, well-enough dressed student begging, with cap in hand, for money from the passengers on the highroad ? Ten thousand to one no man alive ever witnessed such debasement of mind among the youth of those countries, edu- cated or not educated. The lad would sell his clothes, work, enlist, si arve, drown, hang, but beg he would not. In Germany, within 1 alf a mile of the University of Bonn, on a Sunday even- ing, when all the town was abroad walking, I have seen a student in tolerably good clothes, his tobacco-pipe in his mouth, begging with his hat off on the public road, running after passengers and carriages, soliciting charity, and looking very sulky when refused ; and the young man in full health, and with clothes on his back that would sell for enough to keep him for a week. — This is no uncommon occurrence on the German roads. Every traveller on the roads around Heidelberg, Bonn, and the other university towns of Germany, must have frequently and daily witnessed this debasement of mind among the youth. This want of sensibility to shame, or public opinion, or to personal moral dignity, is a defect of character produced entirely by the system of government interference in all education and all human action. It is an example of its moral working on society. It is not from moral worth, character, or conduct in their private relations, but from government, from educational, military, or civil functionaries, that the studying class have, in every stage of life, to seek advancement. The generous feelings, impulses, and motives of youth, are smothered under the servile institutions of the governments, by which all means of living in any of the li- beral professions, or even in the ordinary branches of industry, are to be obtained only by government licence, appointment and 96 PRUSSIAN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM ! favour,* not by moral worth, merit, and exertion, gaining the public estimation. Morally, they are slaves of enslaved minds. Compulsory education, compulsory religion, compulsory military service, and the finger of government interfering in all action and opinion, and leaving nothing to free will and uncontrolled individual judgment, produce youths well educated, as it is called, because they can read, write, and sing, well dressed, well drilled, and able-bodied ; and whose selbstgefuhl, whose moral sense has not been educated, raised, and cultivated, even to the extent of making them feel debased or degraded at running, cap in hand, begging at the side of carriages on the highway. This want of self-respect in the German character, produced by the educational and social system, and the undue importance in the German mind of rank, office, and conventional distinction, and the undue weight of these in the social economy of Germany, are strongly marked by the profusion! of orders, stars, crosses, ribbons, and empty titles, with which the people, both of civil and military station, adorn and gratify themselves. Every third man you meet in the streets has a label in his button-hole, telling, all the world, " I am a knight, look at me." No very young man among the Continental military can have ever heard a bullet whistle in the field : so that even by this class no very profound respect for the ribbon at the button-hole can be claimed, and none at all by the ordinary civil classes who trick themselves out with it en militaire. The feeling of personal worth — the pride, it may be — seems unknown to them, which leads the British nobleman, gentleman of high station, or military officer, who may have been honoured with a British or foreign order, to wear it only on particular parade occasions. He feels that he is something without the external testimonial of it : the German takes the emblem for the thing itself. The English gentleman would think it quite as inconsistent with his personal dignity to * Tn 1834, for every 100 church or school situations to be filled up in the Prussian dominions, there were 262 candidates qualified by studies at the universities ; for every 100 juridical situations, 256 candidates; for every 100 medical 198 candidates. f The difference of national character between the English and Con- tinental people on this point is illustrated by the circumstance, that in 1S34 the members of a singleJContinental order — the French order of the legion of honour — amounted to 49,620 persons, and in the same year the five British orders numbered only 906 members, and of these the greater number were persons of that social distinction from birth, rank, or office, that the decoration of an order was but an adjunct of little importance. ITS EFFECTS ON THE MORAL CONDITION. 97 walk about on ordinary occasions, in the ordinary circles of society, with his stars, crosses, and ribbons plastered on his breast, as with the gazette of the actions in which he had won his distinctions, plastered on his back. The German, again, ties his bit of red ribbon even to the button-hole of his dressing- gown ; the merchant goes to his counting-house, the apothecary to the barber's shop to be shaved, the professor to his lecture room, in crosses and ribbons, as if they were going to the levee of the sovereign. The upper classes of society in all countries are said to be very much alike, and to show few of the peculiar \ distinctive differences which mark the national character in the middle and lower classes of each country. This is a mistake. The English gentleman, from the highest rank to the very lowest that assumes the appellation, is distinguished from the Continen- tal gentleman by this peculiar trait of character — his dependence on himself for his social position, his self-esteem, call it pride, or call it a high-minded feeling of his own worth. There he stands, valuing himself upon something within himself, and not upon any outward testimonials of it conferred by others. This feeling goes very deep into society in England. It is often objected to us by foreigners, that we pay the same, or even greater respect and deference to wealth, than they pay to the external honours conferred on merit by the sovereign ; that wealth with us, as a social distinction, takes the place even of moral merits, and " what is a man worth," means how many pounds sterling he has, without any reference to his merits, real or conventional, to his birth, education, morals, manners, or other distinctions ; that if he is poor, he is nothing in our so- ciety, if rich, he is every thing. This too is a mistake, a wrong conclusion from right premises. Wealth has all that pre-emi- nence in social distinction with us, which the foreign traveller observes ; and even more than he observes, censures, and is witty over. But what is wealth % It is a proof, a token un- deniable, of great industry, great energy, great talent in hid sphere, great social activity and utility in the possessor, or in his predecessor who acquired it. It is the indubitable proof, gene- rally speaking, of great and successful exertion of prudence, skill, mental power applied to material interests, and of extensive social action; and what ought to be honoured and esteemed, and held in the highest estimation in an enlightened society, if not the visible proof of these social virtues in the owner or his pre- decessors 1 The deference paid to mere wealth honestly acquired; G 98 PRUSSIAN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM : its pre-eminence as a social distinction, stands upon far more philosophical grounds than the social distinction of mere ancestry, or of mere function, or of mere title, or of the empty honours conferred by a sovereign. Wealth is an independent social power, and is the equivalent in the material world to genius and talent in the intellectual. The Rothschilds, the Barings, and these great millionaires, are in the world of pounds, shillings, and pence, what the Shakspeares, Goethes, Schiller s, are in the world of ideas ; and their social action and influence, their wielding of a vast social power in the working of which the fortunes, the comfort, the bread of millions are involved, require a grasp of mind, and are entitled to a social distinction, beyond the com-, prehension of the mustachioed German baron, who, issuing from some petty metropolis, finds to his utter astonishment that mere wealth commands greater respect in this working world of realities than his sixteen ancestors, his lieutenant's commission, his chamberlain's key embroidered on his coat flap, and his half- a-dozen orders at his button-holes. The common sense of all countries gives this social distinction to wealth, above any other distinction that is not purely moral or intellectual. The princi- ple is as clearly felt in Russia as in America ; and where public opinion is in free action, as in England, it supersedes the princi- ple of mere conventional distinctions so far, that the latter without the former — nobility, titles, functions, orders, without wealth — are of no social weight. This common, almost in- stinctive judgment of all men, under all varieties of govern- ment, according this pre-eminence of social distinction to mere wealth, proves that this judgment is right, that it is founded on. some natural, just, and useful social principle, that cannot be philosophised away ; that wealth, mere wealth, is a more natural and just ground of social distinction than any conventional ground from mere birth, mere court favour, mere title, or mere rank. It arises from the people, and is conferred by the people ; and all other conventional distinctions arise from, and are con- ferred by the will of the court or sovereign. The encroachment of the former upon the latter is a barometer showing the real progress of a community towards a just estimation of social worth and action, and towards a higher moral condition. Where every third man is lounging about, as in Prussia, and generally on the Continent, with his orders of merit of some kind or other — and many whose general merits would apparently be nothing the worse of the addition of a little industry to earn a new coat ITS EFFECTS ON THE MORAL CONDITION. 99 to stick their honours upon— the people, be their forms of go- vernment what they may, are but in a low social and industrial condition — are ages behind us in their social economy, and in their true social education as free agents and members of the community. 100 PRUSSIAN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM. CHAPTER VI. NOTES ON THE PRUSSIAN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM CONTINUED. ITS EFFECTS ON THE SOCIAL AND MORAL CONDITION AND CHARACTER OF THE PEOPLE. The voice of history in praise or reproach of kings is not heard amidst the whispers of courtiers, or the hurra of armies. Her aote comes to the ear of posterity from the cottage and the foot- path of the common man. The upper and educated classes in Prussia live upon the industry of the people entirely, by their appointments under the government, either as military officers, civil functionaries, clerical or educational officials ; or if they derive their living direct from the people, and not from the hand of government, still they derive the privilege to exercise this means of living, be it in the law, in medicine, in trade, or any branch of industry, from the constituted authorities. These classes are loud enough in their adulation of the government of the late monarch, and of the social economy of Prussia, — of its military system, its educational system, its functionary system, and of all that emanates from the higher powers. No wonder. They are strangers to individual free agency in society, and they hold their appointments and means of living, and look for their bread, or that of their children, from the hand of government. Their voice alone is heard in the literary world, on Prussian education, religion,- social economy and affairs ; and their voice is one shout of praise. But the future historian of this age, judging from purer sources, from facts and principles, will regard the Prussian social economy established by the late monarch as an attempt, now that the power of the sword and of brute force in civilised communities is gone, to raise up an equally despotic, irresponsible power of government, by enslaving the habits, mind, and moral agency of the people, thi^ough an educational, military, and religious training, and a system of perpetual sur- veillance of functionaries over every individual from his cradle to his grave. The attempt will probably fail, because it involves inconsistencies. It is a struggle of contradictions. A rigid censorship of the press, and a general education of the people ; a religious population, and an interference of government with, PRUSSIAN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM. 101 and a subversion by its edicts of, the religious observances, forms, and prayers of a church for which their forefathers had shed their blood in the battle field ; a moral people, and an intermeddling of the hand of government in the free action' of man as a moral agent, in the sanctity of family duty and management, and during the most precious period of human life for forming the moral habits and character — a barrack-room education for all classes ; a wealthy and happy people, and a ruinous yearly demand upon that time and labour out of which alone national wealth and wellbeing can grow, for the sake of an idle and unfounded display at reviews, and parades, of a military strength not efficient, in reality, from the nature of its materials, for military purposes ; these are incompatibilities which even Prussian discipline cannot make to march together. The reign of the late monarch will be regarded as an attempt to hold fast by autocratic irresponsible power ; but to shift the ground which supported it from sheer military force, to a power founded, somewhat like the Chinese, the Mahometan, or the Russian, upon the education, habits, and religion of the people, — all of which were to be Prussian, under the guidance of government, and subservient to its support. He will be judged of by poste- rity as a well-meaning but weak man, tenacious of what he deemed power (as all weak men are), and which (as is often the case) was in reality not power ; who forfeited his word to his people to give them a constitution, and who had a people as abject as he was autocratic. He came out of severe trial and adversity untaught by it, forgetful of the struggle made for him by his subjects upon his promise of giving them a representative constitution ; and he has bequeathed to his successors a social economy of his own construction, full of inconsistencies and false principles. There are men even in England, and they abound on the Continent, who deem it a social, almost a moral duty, to see nothing wrong in the doings of kings, to laud every act and every character clothed in royal authority. Our middle classes do not partake in this indiscriminating love for the purple. The distance of social position, like the distance of time, enables them, and they constitute the great body of our intelligent thinking public, to form an historical judgment of the men and events of their own times. They judge now, as posterity will judge here- after. They will judge that the late Prussian monarch, — the lauded, the almost worshipped by our aristocracy and clergy, as the best, the wisest, the most conservative, the most anti- 102 PRUSSIAN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM. revolutionary monarch of our age, — Las overturned the Pro- testant religion, and shaken Christianity itself, by his ultra- conservative zeal to establish the basis of his autocracy on the religion of the people. What would those lords, and squires, and clergy say, if a king and irresponsible cabinet among us were to put down the churches of England and Scotland, and to impose on the people by royal edict a selection of Mrs. Barbauld's prayers and hymns, instead of the time-honoured liturgy of the former church, and the spirit-awakening effusions of the latter ? This is precisely what has been done in Prussia. Mrs. Barbauld's nursery prayers and hymns are, as devotional compositions, quite as near to the excellence of the admirable old liturgy, or to the Psalms of David, as the compositions of Pr. Eylert and Dr. Neander, although aided, it is said, by the royal pen itself in some of the prayers, and of the doggerel ditties of the Gesang-buch. The Kurie Eleaison, and other operatic quaverings in the new service, are, it is said, borrowed from the Greek church, the late king having, when on a visit to Russia, been much pleased with those parts of the Greek service. The one point for political philosophy is, that this act was the act of the pattern king of the Continental governments, whose reign is held up by all the conservative interests on the Continent as a signal and undeniable proof that irresponsible autocratic power vested in the monarch, and all legislation emanating from the royal authority alone, without any con- stitutional representation of the people in the legislature, are compatible with the utmost good government, the utmost physical, moral, and religious wellbeing of society. The other great point is, that this is the people whose educational system, spirit, and institutions are held up as a model by the liberal, the pious, the benevolent of other countries, who are anxious for the diffusion of education • but who mistake the means for the end, the almost mechanical arts of reading and writing for the moral elevation of character which education should produce. The page of history does not supply another example so striking as this of the deteriorating influence of arbitrary, irre- sponsible power, both on the ruler and the ruled. It cannot be doubted that the late monarch was an amiable, well-meaning man, beloved by all who approached him. The more the his- torian gives on this side, the more he must take on the other. PRUSSIAN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM. 103 The mere possession in modern society of this irresponsible, unchecked, autocratic power in legislation, brings this good and popular sovereign into the unenviable historical fame of having overturned religion in Germany, and of having established a social, moral, and religious vassalage over his people. History will have her day of judgment, and will judge public men by their public acts. She will hear the cry of the victims, said to have been 2966 individuals, suffering for their religious or po- litical opinions, and pardoned on the death of this good and amiable sovereign by an act of amnesty of his successor. History will ask, what were the crimes of these persons (whatever their numbers may have really been, a secret probably only known to government) I What rebellions, what treasons, what tumults occurred in this reign ? Or were they the victims of their free expressions of opinions, — torn from their families and homes, imprisoned, condemned, banished, because they presumed to re- mind their sovereign of the natural and constitutional rights of the people, and of the royal promise to restore those natural rights to a representation in the legislature ; a promise given in the hour of need, and broken in the hour of prosperity '? Or was it their crime that they conscientiously opposed an arbitrary and unnecessary change in the Protestant religion, as handed down to them by their forefathers 1 History will have her day of judgment ; nor will her judgment of the sovereign be biassed by the private virtues or amiable qualities of the man ; nor by the adulation of a people trained to crouch before their master, and lick the hand that smites. The abject submission of mind to all authority, the suspension of judgment on public acts, and the adulation of all royal personages, are .natural effects on the ruled, of the unmixed, irresponsible, autocratic power in the ruler. The popularity of the ruler in such a condition of society is formed on his private personal character, not on his public acts ; and the fine terms of beloved, adored, patriotic, beneficent, applied to the monarch, are words of form by which the judgment of history will not be swayed. But, in stating the evil of this reign, the good should not be overlooked. It broke the oppressive feudal vassalage of the peasantry under the nobles, and has raised their condition phy- sically and morally. If a heavy military burden be laid upon the people, — if they have, in effect, only changed masters, and their time, labour, and free action in industry be now as much absorbed by the state, and its functionaries, as formerly by their 104 PRUSSIAN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM. local feudal lords, still the yoke is easy, which all hear the weight of equally. Let it not be forgotten, too, that the freedom of mind in intellectual, political, and even religious action, and the freedom of person and property in industrial action, are not felt as essential wants in a state of society in which the people have no intellectual or industrial activity. A few of the upper and cultivated classes only are in a social condition to feel restrictions, such, for instance, as~ those on the press, which all men, in our social condition, would fly from or rise against, as insupportable oppression. The good of the late king's reign, — the emancipation of the peasantry, — the promise, at least, of a representative con- stitution, — the removal of many old restrictions on trade, — and the introducing of many useful establishments, belong undoubt- edly to the monarch himself — to the good-hearted, benevolent, well-meaning king. - The evil of his reign, — the perpetual drain on the time and labour of the people for military service, — the attempt to make education, religion, and all social movement subservient to the support of a government system, — the centra- lisation in the hands of functionaries of all affairs of society, — and the interference of £overnment with matters which are beyond the legitimate objects of government in any free en- lightened state of society, may be ascribed to the influence of men around the throne, disinterested, perhaps, and sincere, but not enlightened, or advancing with the age ; bred in function, and seeing the interests of the people through a false medium. With enlightened men, as Stein and Hardenberg, for his minis- ters, the late king was an enlightened ruler ; with bigots about him, he was a bigot ; with functionaries, a functionalist. There is no inconsistency between the first part of his reign and the last ; he was evidently a good, well-meaning, weak man, led this way and that by each successive band of functionaries he em- ployed. The whole shows impressively the working of irrespon- sible power on the minds of the ruler and the ruled. The intermeddling with the Luthem and Calvinistic churches, and the unhappy attempt — unhappy for the Protestant religion in every country — to set up a third intermediate church, may be traced to the love of concentrated power over all things inherent in the functionarism which guides the Prussian state, combined with the system adopted in all the governments of the Continent, — of governing on juste milieu principle, of avoiding any decided mode of action, and of always taking some third course between two. Ancillon, who had been private tutor to the late king, PRUSSIAN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM. 105 and who died prime minister in 1835, published a work in 1828 upon. Yermittelung der Extreme — Mediation between Extremes. In a number of-'essays on moral, political, and literary subjects, he lays down the extreme opinions upon each side — as for in- stance, on the classical and romantic schools of literature; and deduces from the absurdity of each extreme, the truth of the old saying — " in medio tutissimus ibis." There is a saying, however, quite as old, and much more generally true — " there are but two ways of doing a thing, the right and the wrong." It is the policy, or reasoning, of weak minds that seeks a middle w^ay between. In religion, in morals, in politics, as in mathematics, a juste milieu is a nonentity. Morally, and intellectually there is no middle point between true and false, right and w T rong ; and practically, no attainment between hit and miss. There is no neutral ground in religion, none in morals, and none in sound politics. When governments attempt to extend their power beyond the legitimate object for which government is established in society, and would embrace the intellectual, moral, and religi- ous concerns, as w 7 ell as the material interests of their subjects, they are obliged to adopt a middle course, between the extreme power they would usurp, and the innate principle in the human mind of resistance to power over intellectual action. This mid- dle course, founded on no principle but the evasion of applying principle to action, has been the line of policy of Continental statesmen during this half century. "We have seen the principle applied at home, and signally fail in the hands of able men, and in a popular cause — in the whole management and results of the Parliamentary Heform Bill in the hands of the Whig ministry. The common sense of the people would accept of no trimming between right and wrong in a great measure. If the measure and its principle w^ere right, they ought to have been followed out, and not sacrificed to any secondary or partial interests. The concession to Tory party power, — the attempt to find a middle point between right and w T rong, to settle the constitution upon a fog bank, neither land nor water, — the attempt at a juste milieu, in short, between reform and no reform, disgusted the nation, ruined the liberal ministry, and for a moment has injured the cause itself. " ■ In Prussia we see similar results from governing on juste milieu principle in an opposite direction of policy ; and attempting to govern in matters beyond the legitimate limits of government — in the religion of the people. That government exists in society 106 PRUSSIAN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM. for the people, not the people for the government, is admitted in our social economy, but not in the social economy of the Con- tinent. It is practically the reverse in Prussia ; yet here, the juste milieu principle applied to uniting the two Protestant churches into one for governmental support, has failed when ap- plied to the human mind ; it has upset the Protestant religion in Germany, — has opened the door to popery, and to infidelity, as the only two asylums from arbitrary interference with indepen- dent religious opinion, and has at last run up those who still adhere to the Protestant faith to a state of excitement and fana- ticism — to the extravagant doctrines and feelings of the age of the first reformers. It is said the present sovereign sees this false position, and intends to try back, and to abolish this mongrel Prussian church. But this is only conjecture, for in this highly educated land the people are only made acquainted with the intentions of their own government through foreign newspapers. In consequence of some paragraph in the Augsburg Algemeine Zeitung — a Ba- varian newspaper, in which the intentions of the Prussian government are sometimes made known — a change in the present church is supposed to be in contemplation ; and pamphlets on both sides, by Prussian subjects, are printed abroad, at Ham- burg or Leipsic, and smuggled in for the information of the country.* This is the state of instruction upon their own religious affairs, and this the means of information and discussion on their own most important interests, among a people boasting of being the most generally and highly educated in Europe, — whose edu- cational institutions, indeed, we are told by our divines, philo- sophers, and politicians, are a model for all other civilised coun- tries, and the most efficient ever devised for the intellectual development, and the religious and moral advancement of society. Owing to the censorship of the press, and the consequent want of interest in, as well as of information upon, the affairs of the country, the people in Prussia seldom talk home news or politics, and are as ignorant as in Turkey of what is doing by their own government. Foreign newspapers — those of Leipsic, Hamburg, Frankfort, or Augsburg — give them the first intelligence on their own affairs. The persecution of the poor villagers in Si- * For instance, Die in Preussen beabsichtigte Aufhebung der Kirch- igen Union, &c, von eineni alt Preussen. Printed at Hamburg, 1841. PRUSSIAN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM. 107 lesia who adhered to the Lutheran church, was, of course, not a matter to be hinted at in the Prussian newspapers ; and the circumstances would perhaps never have been known be- yond the immediate neighbourhood of the sufferers, if the Prussian government could have imposed silence on others, as well as on its own subjects. As the latest, if not the last, of religious persecutions in Europe in civilised times, some minute- ness in the detail of the circumstances of it may be satisfactory, or will, at least, show how, in highly educated countries, perse- cution is carried on. The amalgamation of the Lutheran and Calvinistic churches, and the introduction of a new liturgy and church service, or agenda, met with a passive resistance every where. In vain royal edicts assured the people that no change in their religious belief, and no restraint on the freedom of conscience, were involved in the new service. The ministers in Silesia con- sidered the attempt itself to assimilate the Lutheran and Calvinistic churches dangerous to the pure Lutheran doctrine, and openly declared that no earthly power had a right to interfere with freedom of religion and conscience. The parish of Hermannsdorf, under its minister the pastor Berger, and the parish of Hoenigern, consisting o^ ten villages, under its pastor Kellner, refused obedience to the order of the consistory to introduce the new service, and continued to use the old liturgy and service, and to receive the sacrament according to the old Lutheran formulary — it is the body and blood of Christ. The people flocked from far and near to these genuine old Lutheran preachers. The consistory of Breslau ordered pastor Berger to administer the sacrament alternately according to the new and the old service. He refused any such compro- mise of conscience, any such juste milieu, in his religious persuasion and duty, and was consequently suspended. In the great parish of Hoenigern, pastor Kellner adopted measures for a more powerful opposition. Before the arrival of the com- missioners of the consistory, he surrendered the church keys, and church property, into the hands of 40 elders chosen from the congregation, who received the commission with their minister at their head, singing psalms, and who gave a decided No to the question if they would receive the new liturgy and agenda. The commissioners were not admitted into the church ; and when they pronounced a sentence of suspension against Kellner, he protested against their authority as not representing 108 PRUSSIAN CHURCH. the true Lutheran church by law established in the land. Kellner and his elders were arrested and imprisoned at Breslau ; but when the minister appointed as his successor came to perform the church service according to the new agenda, he found the church doors nailed, and a crowd of people obstruct- ing the entrance. On the 20th December, 1834, a body of 400 infantry, 50 hussars, and 50 cuirassiers, marched from Breslau to this recusant parish of Hoenigern. The civil and clerical authorities again tried in vain to induce the people to accept the new service. Their elders and pastor had been twelve weeks in prison, but they continued obstinate ; and, at last, on Christmas eve, the military took possession of the church, forced open the door by a petard, and dispersed the people by a charge of cavalry, in which some twenty persons were wounded. The interim minister was thus intruded into the church, and the new service was performed on Christmas day, but it was to a congregation of soldiers only ; for not one parishioner was to be seen in the church. It was necessary to resort to other measures to obtain a real congregation for the new service and the stormed parish church. The military were stationed in the villages of the parish, and each recusant householder was punished by having ten or twelve soldiers quartered on him. The soldiers themselves were to exhort their landlords to go to the church, that they might be relieved from the ruinous quartering of men upon them, and those who would not conform were exposed to gross ill usage. These are the peasants, who, ruined by this persecution, sought a refuge in America. The diffusion of education may be great in Prussia ; but its influences have certainly not yet reached the governing class in the community : for these are scenes, persecutions, and principles of royal power, more like the history of the religious persecutions in Scotland and England under the Stuart family, two hundred years ago, than events not four years old, among the most educated people in Europe, and in which their government itself took the initiative and the gratuitous per- petration. If such be the state of intelligence of the educating govern- ing class in Prussia upon the simple point of religious toleration, one looks with curiosity to the state of intelligence upon religion, of this governed, educated people. Among all the aberrations from true religion, and often from THE SECT OF MUCKERS. 109 common sense, of the countless sects our uneducated people are divided into (including even Johanna Southcote's followers, the Mormonites, Socialists, and the thousand others which appear and disappear amidst our freedom of all religious opinions), no aberration from the laws of morality, decency, or admitted social virtue, has ever been able to exist. All will bo good and religious in their way; and it is only in their way and ideas of being religious, not in their way and ideas of being good, that they differ. Left to act and think for themselves, the people .may take different speculative doctrines in religion; but in the practical doctrines which have a reference to real life, the public mind with us is well educated, and takes in- variably the one moral doctrine applicable to social affairs. In Prussia, the people, not accustomed to act or think for them- selves, are like children escaping from school, and rush into speculations in religion, politics, and morals, altogether absurd in the estimation of the more highly educated public mind of this country, accustomed to apply principle to.. action as free agents in all social movement. » In this way one must account for the singular fact, that the only positively immoral religious sect of the present times, in the Christian world, arose, and has spread itself in the most educated part of the most educated country in Europe— in and about Konigsberg, the capital of the province of Old Prussia. -The Muckers are a sect who combine lewdness with religion. The name, Mucker, is said to be derived from a local, or sporting term, indicating the rutting season of hares. The conventicles of this secb are frequented by men and women in a state of nudity; and to excite the animal passion, but to restrain its indulgence, is said to con- stitute their religious exercise. Many of the highest nobility of the province, and two of the established clergy of the city, besides citizens, artificers, and ladies, old and young, belong to this sect ; and two young ladies are stated to have died from the consequences of excessive libidinous excitement It is no secret association of profligacy shunning the light. It is a sect, accord- ing to the declarations of Yon Tippelskirch, and of several persons of consideration in Konigsberg who had been followers of it themselves, existing very extensively under the leadership of the established ministers of the gospel, Ebel and Diestel, of a Count Yon Kaniz, of a lady Yon S , and of other noble persons, and of several of the citizen class; and it appears that a great part of the nobility of the province belong to it. The 110 THE SECT OF MUCKERS. notice of the government was first attracted to its existence by a complaint to the consistory, of a Count Von Fink, who had been a zealous member of the sect, that the minister Ebel, one of the pastors of the city, and who is one of its leaders, had at- tempted to seduce his wife, under the pretext of procreatingl a Messias. The consistory appointed two commissioners to examine, and report to government upon this business. The system and theory of this dreadful combination of vice with religion are of course very properly suppressed. All that can be gathered from the Allgemeine Kirchenzeitung of 1836, and the historical writ- ings of that year, is that this horrible sect was spread so widely that the official people were themselves slow in the investigation of the matter, and that the countess who had disclosed the prac- tices of the sect was in danger from their fury, and had to be protected by the police — that a very strict hierarchy existed in the sect, that it was divided in three classes, and that the ap- prenticeship in the first class must be accomplished, before the reception into the second class ; and that the strictest trials were required for being admitted into the third class, of which the members were called by a name of honour — that the doctrine and practice of the Muckers were a mixture of mysticism and gnos- ticism, of fanaticism and lust ; and that the heroes and heroines who had sustained the trials of their continence, or power over the flesh, were rewarded with the seraphim hiss with which the most abominable excesses were connected. The government wisely suppressed the examinations and proceedings, although copies of some of the first official reports and depositions had got into cir- culation among the curious, and the case was transferred from the local courts of the province to Berlin for further consideration in 1837, but nothing since has been made known to the public on the subject. The sect itself appears by Dr. Bretschneider's account of it, to have been so generally diffused, that he says, " It cannot be believed that the public functionaries were in ignorance of its existence, but that they were afraid to do their duty from the influ- ence of the many principal people who were involved in it." * In his honest indignation he proposes, as the only means of extirpating it, that all religious meetings, all conventicles, missionary societies, religious tract societies, and in short all pious doings of the public * See Dr. Karl Venturing s Neue Historische Schriften, Brunswick, 1839; also Algemeine Kirchenzeitung, Jahr, 1836, Xo. 50; also Pragmatische Geschichte unserer Zeit, das Jahr, 1835, Leipsic, 1837 ; for what is known to the public respecting the Muckers. PRUSSIAN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM. Ill among themselves, should be put clown by the state. This remedy- is a little too Prussian, dreadful as the enormity is in a civilised country of such a sect having existed in this age. It is only in the history of Otaheite, that its parallel can be found. A great deal of delusion on the subject of national education has arisen from confounding the means with the end — the ad- mirable means for diffusing reading, writing, and such acquire- ments, first adopted on the great scale by the Prussian govern- ment, with the end and object of education — the raising the religious, moral, and social character of men as intellectual free agents. It is only by free institutions in society that the moral, religious, and intellectual endowments of the human mind are exercised and educated. The mere operations of reading and writing, nay, the acquisition of knowledge itself, are but the means, not the end, and, if carried even to the utmost perfection, do not necessarily exercise and educate the moral powers of the human mind — the judgment, the self-restraint, the self-govern- ment, the application of principle to action, and of action to principle in our social relations. We see every day in indivi- duals that the mental powers and the moral and religious principle are in a very low, uncultivated state, although educa- tion, in its ordinary sense, has done its utmost, and reading, writing, languages, accomplishments, and knowledge have been extensively acquired. There is, in reality, a social education of the human mind, more important than its scholastic education, and not at all necessarily connected with it. This, the only true national or general education of a people, can only be given where man is a free agent living under social institutions in which he acts for himself, politically and morally, and applies by himself, and not by the order and under guidance of the state or its functionaries, the principles of justice, law, morality, religion, which should guide his conduct as a member of society. This exercise, or education of the human mind, is wanting in the social economy of Prussia, in which men are in a state of pupilage as members of society, and not of free agency. No amount of scholastic education, of reading, writing, or information can make up for this want of moral self-education by the free exercise of the individual's judgment in all the social relations of life. It is thus that the existence of this sect of the Muckers among the most highly educated, that is, scholastically educated people in Europe, must be accounted for. Their school acquirements have had no influence on their moral state — or rather have had a per- 112 PRUSSIAN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM. nicious influence on it, as being part of a social system in which the human mind is dormant, is trained to act without thinking, and under orders, instead of exerting its own judgment and exercis- ing free agency and reflection in its own moral, religious, and social affairs. In true moral social education the Prussian people, from the nature of their government and social economy, necessarily stand lower than the lowest of our own unlettered population. In the importance attached to the Prussian arrangements, or means for diffusing scholastic education, there is also much de- lusion. Reading, writing, arithmetic, and all other scholastic acquirements follow evidently the same law as all other human wants — the demand will produce the supply. Create a demand for such acquirements, for knowledge, for educated labour of any kind, and people will educate themselves up to that demand. The reduction of the postage in Britain has created this demand with us, has given to such acquirements a value almost entirely wanting before in the position of the labouring man; and this measure is bringing out the schoolmaster, without the machinery of national arrangements for education. The social value or im- portance of the Prussian arrangements for diffusing national scholastic education has been evidently overrated ; for now that the whole system has been in the fullest operation in society upon a whole generation, we see morals and religion in a more unsatis- factory state in this very country than in almost any other in the north of Europe; we see nowhere a people in a more abject po- litical and civil condition, or with less free agency in their social economy. A national education, which gives a nation neither re- ligion, nor morality, nor civil liberty, nor political liberty, is an education not worth having. Truly much humbug has been played off by literary men — unwittingly, no doubt, for they themselves were sincere dupes — upon the pious and benevolent feelings of the European public, with regard to the excellence of the Prussian educational system. They have only looked at the obvious, almost mechani- cal means, of diffusing instruction, viz., schools for teaching the people to read and write, and have, in their estimate and recom- mendation of the means, altogether overlooked the all-important circumstance that, if these means are not in free action, they will not produce the end — the moral and religious improvement of the people — and that the almost mechanical arts of reading and writing may be acquired with as little moral, religious, or PRUSSIAN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM. 113 even intellectual improvement of the human mind, as the . manual or platoon exercise. In their admiration of the wheels and machinery, these literary men have forgotten to look under the table, and see what kind of web all this was producing. Who could suppose while reading pamphlets, reviews, and literary articles out of number on national education, and on the beautiful system, means and arrangements adopted by Prussia for educating the people, and while lost in admiration in the educational labyrinth of country schools and town school?? — com- mon schools and high schools — real schools and classical schools ■ — gymnasia — progymnasia — normal schools — seminariums — universities — who could suppose that with all this education, no use of education is allowed — that while reading and writing are enforced upon all, thinking and the communication of thoughts are prevented by an arbitrary censorship of the press, sometimes strict, sometimes lax ? Who could suppose that the only visible use to the people of Prussia of all this national education is, in reality, to write out official, civil, or military reports from infe- riors to superiors — that it enters in no other way into their social affairs ? Who could suppose that at the very period Vic- tor Cousins, the Edinburgh Reviewers, and so many other emi- nent literary men of all countries, were extolling the national education and general acquirement of reading in Prussia, and kindling around them a holy and truly virtuous enthusiasm among the moral and religious — for the diffusion of knowledge in all countries — that the exercise of worship any where but in a church was prohibited, and made criminal in Prussia by an edictal law dated the 9th March, 1834; and that many persons were suffering imprisonment, civil disabilities, or other punishments, for this Prussian crime of worshiping God in their own houses, and were only liberated and pardoned by the amnesty of August, 1840 ? Who could suppose that while the praises of the educa- tional system of the Prussian government were resounding in our senate and our pulpits, this educating government was driving by religious persecution from her educated land upwards of 600 Christians, who went from Silesia to the wilds of America simply to enjoy the privileges of religious freedom, and of communi- cating at the altar according to the forms and doctrines of Luther or Calvin, rather than of his late Majesty ? Who could suppose that while literary men were extolling the high educa- tional state of Prussia, her moral state stood so low that such a sect as the Muckers could not only exist in the most educated H (1^ PRUSSIAN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM. Df her provinces, but could flourish openly, and number among its members, clergy, nobility, and educated and influential peo- ple ? These writers had evidently been deceiving themselves and the public ; had looked no further than the means of edu- cation ; and had hastily concluded that these means must necessarily be producing the end. If to read, write, cipher, and sing, be education, they are quite right — the Prussian subject is an educated man. If to reason, judge, and act as an indepen- dent free agent, in the religious, moral, and social relations of man to his Creator, and to his fellow-men, be that exercise of the mental powers which alone deserves the name of education, then is the Prussian subject a mere drum boy in education, in the cultivation and use of all that regards the moral and intellectual endowments of man, compared to one of the unlettered popula- tion of a free country. The dormant state of the public mind on all affairs of public interest, the acquiescence in a total want of political influence or existence, the intellectual dependence upon the government or its functionary in all the affairs of the community, the abject submission to the want of freedom or free agency in thoughts, words, or acts, the religious thraldom of the people to forms which they despise, the want of influence of religious and social principle in society, justify the conclusion that the moral, religious and social condition of the people was never looked at or estimated by those writers who were so en- thusiastic in their praises of the national education of Prussia. The French writers took up the song from the band of Prussian pensioned literati of Berlin, and the English from the French writers ; and so the song has gone round Europe wuthout any one taking the trouble to inquire what this educational system was producing ; whether it had elevated, as it should have done if genuine, the moral, religious, and social position and character of the Prussian people as members of civilised society, having religious, moral, civil, and political rights and duties to enjoy and to perform. It is to us in England, with our free institutions and indi- vidual free agency in all things, an inconsistency scarcely conceivable, that a government should give the means, nay, en- force the acquirement of the means, yet punish and suppress the use and exercise of the means it gives — should enforce education, yet deny the use and exercise of education in the duties of men, as social, moral, religious, thinking, self-acting beings. But this is the consistency of arbitrary, uncontrolled rule, and of the PRUSSIAN "EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM. 115 juste milieu principle of government by which* it seeks to continue its power. This is the government of functionarism and despotism united, endeavouring to perpetuate itself by turning the education of the people, and the means of living of a great body of civil functionaries placed over them, into a machinery for its own support. 116 DISJOINTED STATE OF PRUSSIA : CHAPTER VII. DISJOINTED STATE OF PRUSSIA AS ONE NATIONAL BODY. DIFFERENT LAWS AND ADMINISTRATIONS FUNCTIONARISM- ARISTOCRACY AND FUNCTIONARISM COMPARED. The military system of the Prussian government not only im- poverishes and demoralises the people without creating that kind of military force, which, from its offensive capability, gives a state real political weight in European affairs ; but it counteracts its own object, and actually weakens the moral element of the defence of the country, in proportion to the perfection to which it carries the physical element — the military organisation. As under this system each individual is necessarily confined very much to his own military locality, the free circulation of the mass of the population through the country is impeded, and family ties, ties of acquaintanceship, of petty business, of trades, of common interests and objects, and a common spirit, can scarcely spread over adjacent provinces, much less over such a widely outstretched land. This military system with its pen- dant, the civil system, is the only thing common to all. The people of distant provinces have no common interests or objects amalgamating them into one whole — no liberties, laws, consti- tutional rights, common to all, to rally upon. " What is it to me if the French are on the Rhine," would be the reasonable feeling of every man north of the Oder, when called out for actual service in the field — " if they come to us we will defend ourselves, but what have we to do with these countries ] " The different provinces of the Prussian kingdom are, in fact, not amalgamated by mutual trade and communications, not united by their material interests. They are connected together only in a common bureau at Berlin, but are distinct existences in all that binds men together. The people can scarcely be called one nation. They are centralised but not nationalised. But is loyalty, is the devoted attachment of the subject to the adored and beneficent monarch, to go for nothing in this cold-hearted estimate of the connection between a country and its government, and of the impulses which lead a gallant people DIFFERENCE OF HER LAWS, ETC. 1 17 to fly to arms, and defend with their lives and fortunes the rights of their beloved sovereign ? Let him who asks turn up a file of old newspapers, and he will there find his answer. He •will there find the same effusions of enthusiastic loyalty and devotedness from the same towns, provinces, and people — to King Jerom of Westphalia, that are now addressed to his majesty Frederick William IY. of Prussia — to King Louis of Holland, that are now addressed to King William of Orange. Change names, and dates, and the one would do for the other. It is within the verge of possibility that the same pen and the same scribe copied, and the same burgomasters or other official personages presented the same, the identical addresses to both monarchs, containing the same assurances of the inviolable attachment, the devoted zeal to the royal house, and the beloved sovereign, of the most loyal and faithful of subjects. The age of loyalty expired amidst the laughter of the world, when the Buonaparte brood of kings and princes exchanged their straw stools in Ajaccio, for thrones, and were treated in their Bara- trarias with all the honour, adulation, and devoted loyalty, that the "lives and fortunes men" of the day in Holland and Germany could muster. There was a moment in this half century, when royalty and aristocracy might have restored themselves to their ancient social position, by an act of great moral justice to society, by reducing to their original nothingness the swarms of counts, princes, dukes, marshals, who have been elevated to social dis- tinction by no social, intellectual, or moral worth or merit, but merely by chance, favouritism, or dexterity in unprincipled military achievement ; and by restoring to the countries, cities, communities, and individuals, the riches expressed from them by these personages in the shape of contributions, dons, taxes, and which, in reality, were unmilitary booty and illegal rapine. The allied powers overlooked or disdained, in the pride of victory, the opportunity of uniting the monarchical and aristocratical principles which they wished to re-establish, with the principle of moral justice. They themselves, by thus contaminating the conventional reverence for the monarchical and aristocratic ele- ments of society which they wished to revive, reduced the ties between the European people and their governments to that of their material interests. The constitutional states have endea- voured to strengthen this tie by giving the people a voice in the management of their own affairs, a representation in the legisla- ture. Prussia endeavours to manage the material interests of 118 DISJOINTED STATE OF PRUSSIA : the people without the people, without a constitution ; and as loyalty and aristocratical influence in the social body are unde- niably effete as principles of national movement, her government is connected with her people only by two ties — that of the mili- tary army with its officers, and that of the civil army with its functionaries. Compared with Britain or America, the kingdom of Prussia is in a very disjointed state, owing to this entire reli- ance upon the civil and military power, without any connection between the government and the people in the management of their material interests. The material interests of the people, even among themselves, those of the different provinces of Prussia, are not amalgamated. There are no common interests, common laws, common religion, common voice in the legislation of their common country, uniting all. In that most important perhaps of all the elements of social union in a country — the law and its administration — differences and confusion prevail. The different shreds torn from other countries, of which the kingdom is com- posed, retain, in some degree, each its own laws, forms of judica- ture, religion, and rights, inalienable even by despotic power, unless with the will and concurrence of the people themselves. The power which alone could, with safety to the government, touch and change these, the power of the people in legislative assembly, will not be conceded by the autocratic government, so that tbe country remains in a chaotic state, governed as one, but not united. In the country west of the Phine, and also in those provinces east of that river, of which Cologne, Dusseldorf, Elber- feld, Lenney, Solingen, Coblenz, are the chief towns, the French law and its administration, the Code Napoleon, Code de Com- merce, Code de Procedure Civile, Code Criminel, the Justice de Paix, Tribuneaux de premiere Instance, &c, are all retained, and are so firmly rooted in the affections of the people, that no government could venture to alter them unless bj a constitutional act of a representative assembly of the people themselves. On this point these provinces have given manifestations of their sentiments not to be mistaken, when the government has pro- posed assimilations in the laws or tribunals to those of Prussia. This population living under French law, is the very kernel of the Prussian kingdom — a concentrated population of from .three to four million s, the most wealthy, commercial, and manufactur- ing, and the most enlightened upon their rights and wants ofauy perhaps in Germany. In the Province of Posen, again, at the other extremity of the kingdom the French administration by DIFFERENCE OF HER LAWS, ETC. 119 justices de paix, and by open courts of justice, and open examina- tions of witnesses, prevails over the general Prussian adminis- tration. In the provinces which were mediatised, and even in the provinces which had long been under the Prussian sceptre, baro- nial courts were a species of private property which could not be taken away from the estate of the prince or baron. Government always had the needful check over the patron, in his appointing none as judges but from legally qualified persons bred at the universities — as in the appointment of a clergyman by a patron — and also over the judge, in superintending, revising, or revers- ing his judicial proceedings ; but such courts have the inhabitants of certain districts thirled to them, in cases civil or criminal, in the first instance ; and forms, expenses, conveniences to suitors, and confidence in' justice, are, necessarily, very different in a multiplicity of different local courts established at different periods, and originally with different usages. Deducting the population of the provinces standing altogether under the Code Napoleon, of the remaining 10,000,000 of people under the Prussian sceptre, 3,700,000, or about one-third of the whole population of Prussia, are under private jurisdiction, and 7,900,000 only under the royal governmental courts. Of the royal governmental courts, not including the higher courts of appeal, there are 7,018, and of private courts, 6,134, of which 128 are of the patrimony of princes, standesherrn or high nobility, and of provincial nobility, and 6,006 are common baronial courts of patrimony. The judges in these patrimonial local courts appear to be paid either by fees or by dues from all the peasantry within the circle of the juris- diction, or by land mortified in old times, for the support of the judge; but appear to be so ill paid, that, like curates of old in Kent, one judge officiates in eight, or even twelve, of these local courts. The total number of judges in the 6,134 private courts is but 523. The greatest number of inhabitants subject to these local patrimonial courts, is in Silesia, where, out of 2,500,000 people, 1.500,000 are under barony courts. The smallest number is in Westphalia, where, in a population of 1,300,000 people, only about 80,000 are under these patrimonial jurisdictions, the system having been abolished almost entirely, when Westphalia was erected into a distinct kingdom for Jerome Buonaparte. Of royal or regular governmental courts, the number in Prussia appears to be 7,018, and of judges paid by government 2,325. of whom 1,593 are judges in the inferior local courts. The total 120 DISJOINTED STATE OF PRUSSIA number of all functionaries living by the ad ministration of law, and appointed by government, appears to be 11,401 persons. It is the first law of functionarism to take care of itself. To reduce to uniformity the administration of law, and the law courts, among a people, appears one of the most needful steps towards an amalga- mation of the whole into one nation, and, if strong measures were a-going, one of the most important to which a strong measure could be applied, especially as these patrimonial courts are founded on no principle of advantage or convenience to the people, or of just right of the baronial proprietor. But it would have been a curtailment of the living to be gained in function, a reform not to be expected from a government of functionaries. Until this, however, be done, the people of Prussia can scarcely be called one nation. The state wants unity. In the provinces, also, clipped out of ancient Poland, which are not inconsiderable, the province of Posen alone, containing nearly one million and a half of inhabitants, a strong anti-Prussian spirit, and not a passive spirit, prevails among all ranks. ISince the accession of the present king, the nobility there have refu to accept the constitution of a provincial assembly of t! desherrn, or nobles of a certain class, to deliberate upon such provincial affairs as the king may order to be laid before them, which is the kind of representative Constitution proposed to be substituted in Prussia for that constitutional representation of the people in the legislature promised by the late king — and avowedly upon the principle that they do not choose to be amalgamated with Prussia, and placed upon the same footing as the other provinces of the Prussian dominions. They will stand by their Polish nationality. It is this spirit, and not fanaticism alone, that was at work in this part of the kingdom, in supporting the bishop of Posen. and the Catholic clergy in resisting the church measures of government. Independently of the influence of the clergy, the Polish nationality is increasing to such alarming inten- sity in this q uarter, that obscure state paragraphs have been ii i sert e* 1 in the foreign newspapers admitted into Prussia — those of Augs- burg, Frankfort, or Leipsic — to prepare the public mind in Prussia for some strong measure to put it down — some attempt, similar to the Eussian, to abolish by law the Polish language, customs, and national distinctions. It is a curious trait in the working of a censorship of the press, and of public opinion on public affairs, that an autocratic irresponsible government must condescend to cheat its own establishments, and avail itself ot the DIFFERENCE OF HER LAWS. ETC. 121 press of a foreign town to sound the public opinion of its own subjects upon its own intentions. Can such a state of things be permanent ? Is such a principle of government as this autocratic principle, suitable to the advanced condition of the subjects of Prussia ? Are the relations between the governing and the governed what they ought to be ? The Prussian government wants to nationalise its subjects, and yet puts down the means of obtaining its own object. It wants to rouse a national spirit, yet would have the public mind passive, calm, and unagitated by political discussions of the press, or of public meetings, or by free communications on public affairs, It wants to sail with a fair gale of wind, yet to keep the sea smooth and unruffled bv the agitation which unavoidably attends the gale. The traveller inimical to hereditary aristocracy as a privileged state power in a community — not from prejudice or party feeling, but on principle, as an institution adverse to a liberal social economy — will find much to shake his opinions when he sits down here on the Continent to .consider deliberately the power which has succeeded to aristocracy in France, Prussia, and generally in the modern social economy of Europe. Aristocracy, it is evident, has worked itself out, and is effete in every coun- try, even in those, as Sweden, Denmark, Spain, in which it had • not been formally abolished or undermined by law. Where it still stands, with all its ancient supports, it is evidently going to decay, and has lost its roots in modern society. But the power which has sprung up in its place — the power of functionarism — is by no means satisfactory. It is aristocracy without the ad- vantages of aristocracy. The highest functionary is not an independent man. He has been bred in a school of implicit, almost military, submission of his own opinion to authority — has attained power through the path of subjection of his own principles aucl judgment to those of others above him. He has no independence of mind. Such public men in the higher offices of government, as our hereditary aristocracy and gentry on all sides of politics produce — men not to be swayed from what they hold to be right, and who renounce office rather than consistency and independent judgment — are not to be heard of in the functionarism of the Continent. The nobleman, generally speaking, is an educated man from his social position, and not educated merely for functionary duties, with the contracted views of office. He is also, generally speaking, independent in position and circumstances, and the public opinion and judgment of his 122 COMPARISON OF political conduct is an influence more powerful with him than with the office-bred functionary. He is working for a reward, and under a check from public opinion which neither the su- preme power of the state, nor its subordinate powers above him, or beside him, can give, or take away, or compensate for, if it be lost by the course of his political conduct in public affairs. The functionary is not only independent of public opinion, but is bred up in a social system which has no reference to it, in which it is set at nought, and in which it can give him no support or reward for the sacrifice of office to principle, or of his own in- dividual material interests to his political interests. As a state power, or social body, functionarism compared to aristocracy is much more detached from the cause of the people. It is also, as a state power, much more dangerous to the monarch. It is a mistake to consider functionarism, as it now exists on the Con- tinent, a machine in the hands of despotic, autocratic sovereigns. It is a machine which governs the government. The history of France, from the hour that the military support of Buonaparte was broken at Moscow, shows that the crown itself is altogether in the gift of this new state power. The history of Belgium, of Spain, of Bussia, tells the same fact. It is considered by many, that here, in Prussia, it is functionarism, not royalty, that rules. The body of functionaries are like the boof Schiller's tragedies, all of Jean Paul Eichters productions, require readers trained, like the readers of Kant or Fichte, in a certain school, and to a certain considerable intellectual culture. Their philosophers and poets do not, like ours, address themselves to the meanest capacity. The social influence of German literature is, conse- ITS EFFECTS ON LITERATURE. 131 quently, confined within a narrower circle. It has no influence on the mindof the lower, or even of the middle classes in active life, who have not the opportunity or leisure to screw their faculties up to the pitch-note of their great writers. The read- ing public must devote much time to acquire the knowledge, tone of feeling, and of imagination, necessary to follow the writing public. The social economist finds accordingly in Ger- many the most extraordinary dulness, inertness of mind, and ignorance, below a certain level, with the most extraordinary intellectual development, learning, and genius at or above it — the most extraordinary intellectual contrast between the profes- sional reading classes, and the lower or even middle non-reading classes engaged in the ordinary affairs of life. Another peculiarity in German literature arising from the social economy of the country, is, that the class of literary compo- sition to which the works of Shakspeare, Cervantes, Scott, Le Sage, Fielding, Goldsmith, belong as pictures of natural action and character, is poorly filled up. Situation and plot, not deli- neations of characters and incidents " true to nature," are the points on which the highest efforts of dramatic and poetic genius in German literature are the most happy. It is in the ideal world that the German mind is developed. The action of man upon man, the development of character and individual pecu- liarity by free social movement, are so restricted and tied down to uniformity by the social economy of Germany, that the author in this class of composition finds no type of reality around him for the imagination to work upon. It would be difficult to point out any character, speech, or passage from the German drama that has become popular literature — understood, felt, brought home to himself by the common man in Germany, in the same way that characters, expressions, verses, sentiments from Shakspeare, Burns, De Foe, Scott, are familiar to all of the slightest education in the same classes in Scotland or England. German literature is perhaps of a far higher cast, but it is not so widely diffused through the mass of the social body as our literature, although the class of people addicting themselves to it as a means of living, are more numerous than the literary class in Britain : and German literature is certainly less influential than ours on the public mind and social economy. The theatre in Germany, and in all countries which have no civil liberty, no freedom of action independent of government, 132 GERMAN THEATRE ITS INFLUENCE. and no free discussion of public affairs, occupies an important position in its social economy, is reckoned a great educational and social influence, a power not to be entrusted out of the hands of the state. The fictitious incidents of the drama supersede the real incidents and interests of life. In reading of the organisation of the Prussian government, the simple English reader stares at finding among the ministers of state for home affairs, for military affairs, for ecclesiastical affairs, a minister of state for theatrical affairs. He can understand that from con- siderations of police, the theatre may be, as with us, under a censorship, and its superintendence attached to some office about the court; but that theatres are of such importance as to be held a subject for distinct administration, and one on which considerable sums of the public revenues are regularly expended, appears extraordinary to one coming from our social state, in which dramatic representation is of no social influence what- soever — in which it is held to be of no moral or educational value — in which theatrical performers of high talent cannot get bread in cities s.s populous and wealthy as Berlin. The social economist hastens to visit the German theatres, to satisfy him- self that there is no mistake about this supposed social influence of the stage — to see the working of this court-machine for education on the public mind, — to see the number and quality of the usual kind of audiences, as much as to see the play. Germany is reckoned to have 65 theatres, employing about 2,147 actors and actresses, about 1.229 singers, male and female, about 448 dancers, and about 1,273 fiddlers and other musicians. About 5,000 people in all are on the theatrical establishments of Germany as the personale, without including tradesmen or others not on the boards. The Hof-theater, or court theatre, is a necessary appendage to every little residence or capital; and it is understood that the deficit in the expense of a well-appointed the- atre in a small population is made up by the state. In Berlin, even with a great and pleasure-seeking population, it is said the theatres cost the country about <£ 15,000 a year, besides the re- ceipts. At Berlin there are three theatres in constant work, Sunday evenings not excepted, and an Italian and a French troop are also in activity part of the year. The houses are of moderate size, elegant, and in scenery, dresses, and especially in the orchestral department, very perfect. The prices of admission are extremely low. In Berlin, for instance, you pay 15 groshen at the German theatre, or 20 at the Italian opera, viz. Is. 6cL GERMAN THEATRE — ITS INFLUENCE. 133 or 2,9. for a seat in the parquet, or front division of the pit of our theatres, with the advantage that each sitting is numbered, and the seat folded back, and your ticket bears the number of your seat, so that be the house ever so full, you get to it without squeezing or crowding: — great inducements these to go to the play. The time and patience of the public also, as well as their money, are respected by these state players. Owing, no doubt, to their superior discipline, a, long five-act tragedy — such, for instance, as Schiller's Marie Stewart or Cabale unci Liebe, — which with us would keep the audience gaping till half-past eleven, or perhaps till midnight, is performed between six and half-past nine. The play-bill tells when the performance ends, as well as when it begins, and even when three pieces are given, half-past nine is the latest hour. These are unquestionably great induce- ments to a good theatrical attendance of the public. But governments cannot force the intellectual movement of a people. They may establish schools, theatres, and churches, as educational means, but the using these means must be the impulse of the people themselves. You look in vain for the public in a German theatre. The public is more scarce in it than in our own. You see the travelling strangers, and the young people of the middle class, such as clerks, tradesmen, or students, when any celebrated actor or play appears ; and on opera nights, the up- per classes : but the people, the real people, the German equivalent, if there be any, to John Bull, you never see. If this lower class ever come to the theatres at all, they sit as quiet as mice in the little hole allotted them. A German theatre is a true picture of the social state of Germany — princes and functionaries oc- cupying the front boxes — the educated and middle classes look- ing up to them from the pit below, in breathless awe and admiration, and the people out of sight and hearing of these two masses of the audience. As a social influence acting on the public mind, the German stage is of as little real importance as our own. It has to rear for itself the kind of public to whom it is of any importance. A theatrical corps and expenditure no doubt does raise a public for itself in the towns, and to them the theatre becomes important, perhaps a great deal too im- portant, and too influential in educating the mind of that class to a sort of dreamy, imaginative, inactive life, to an undue value for appearance, show, and dress, and to an inaptness to encounter the rough realities of their social position. The social influence 134 SCOTCH AND GERMANS COMPARED. of the drama is in this class — and this is the only class it effect- ually works upon — a positive evil, not a good. What are the social institutions which educate a people, which form their moral, intellectual, and national character? In this land of schools and theatres, here where every individual is drilled into reading, writing, and the catechism; and the church, the playhouse, and the press, are all under the special management ■ of the governments as influential means for the improvement of the people, in what state is the mind of the people in Germany, morally and intellectually'? To come to any satisfactory conclusion on these questions, we must define what is meant by the people. The Continental man generally means by the people the lower ranks of the middle class — the artisans, journeymen, servants, and tradesmen about towns, living more or less by educated labour, and having some degree of taste, leisure, and refinement. We mean by the people the labouring mass of a nation, living principally by agri- cultural work, and in every country constituting the mass of the population. We must compare this lower class in Germany w^th the same class amongst ourselves, and endeavour to find out the difference, and the causes of the difference in the physi- cal and intellectual condition in each country of this lowest class of all in the commun.ty. It is a peculiar feature in the social condition of our lowest labouring class in Scotland, that none perhaps in Europe of the same class have so few physical, and so many intellectual wants and gratifications. Luxury or even comfort in diet, or lodging, is unknown. Oatmeal, milk, potatoes, kail, herrings, and rarely salt meat, are the chief food ; a wretched, dark, damp, mud- floored hovel, the usual kind of dwelling; dirt, disorder, sluttish- ness, and not too much good temper at the fireside, the ordinary habits of living; yet with these wants and discomforts in their physical condition, which is far below that of the same class abroad, we never miss a book, perhaps a periodical, a sitting in the kirk, a good suit of clothes for Sunday wear, and an argu- ment every day amounting to controversy, almost to quarrel, with some equally argumentacious neighbour upon subjects far above the reach of mind of the common man in other countries, and often carried on with an acuteness, intelligence, and play of mental power, especially in the discussion of abstract philosophical or religious subjects, which the educated classes in other countries SCOTCH AND GERMANS COMPARED. 135 scarcely attain, and which are strangely in contrast with the wants in their physical condition. The labouring man's sub- scriptions in Scotland to his book-club, his newspaper turn, his Bible society, his missionary society, his kirk and minister if he be a seceder, and his neighbourly aid of the distressed, are ex- penditure upon intellectual and moral gratifications of a higher cast than music-scraping, singing, dancing, playgoing, novel- reading, or other diversions of a much higher class of people in Germany. The Scotch labouring man gives yearly considerable contributions to spread civilisation and Christianity among people much better off, far more daintily fed, lodged, and clothed, in more physical comfort, and much farther removed from the wants and hardships of an uncivilized condition, than he is him- self. This may be foolish, but it is noble and ennobling in the character of the lowest class of a people. The half-yearly shil- ling given in all sincerity of purpose by the cottar-tenant of a^ turf-built hovel on a barren Scotch muirland, to aid the missions for converting the South Sea Islanders or the Hindoos, is the noblest-paid money, as far as regards the giver, in the Queen's dominions. There is also in the mind of the common man of Scotland an imaginative thread interwoven somehow, and often very queer! y, with his hard, dry, precise way of thinking and acting in ordinary affairs, which makes the whole labouring class in Scotland of higher intellectuality than the same class in other countries. We ofter hear, what country but Scotland ever produced a Burns among her peasantry? Bat the real question of the social economist is, what country but Scotland ever produced a peasantry for whom a Burns could write? Burns had a public of his own in his own station in life, who could feel and appreciate his poetry, long before he was known to the upper class of Scotch people, and in fact he was never known or appreciated by the upper class. In other countries it is the poetry of the higher educated class that works down to the people ; as the poetiy of Ariosto or Tasso, among the Italians ; of the Xiebelung, of the Saga, of the lays of the Troubadours, among the German, Scandinavian, and French people; or as ballads of Burger, Goethe, and Schiller are said to be now working downwards in Germany, and becoming folkslieder, — the songs and poetry of the people. But where have been poets belonging to the labouring class called into song by their own class? This is more extraordinary than the genius of the indi- vidual himself, this genius of the class for whom he composed. 133 SCOTCH AND GERMANS COMPARED. Is there any spark of this intellectual spirit among the common labouring people in the finer soils and climates of Europe? or does the little exertion of mind with which all physical wants may he supplied, and many physical enjoyments obtained in abundance, tend to form a heavy, material, unintellectual cha- racter, among the labouring class in Germany, which is con- firmed by the state of pupillage and non-exertion of mind in which they are educated and kept by their governments ] while the mind of the Scotch labouring man is stirred up and in per- petual exercise by the self-dependence, exertion, privation, fore- thought, moral restraint, and consideration required in his social position in which neither climate nor poor-rate, neither natural nor artificial facilities of living without. thinking, allow him to sink into apathy or mental indolence? But there are other educational influences, of far more im- portant action in forming the intellectual character of a people than schools or theatres, which the German people want, and the British possess. The social economist, who reflects upon our crowded open courts of law in the ordinary course of their business at Westminster Hall, or at the Court of Session, at the assizes or circuits, or sheriff-courts, in short, wherever any kind of judicial business is going on, and upon the eagerness and attention with which the common people follow out the pro- ceedings even in cases of no public interest, will consider the bar, with its public oral pleadings, examinations of witnesses, and reasonings on events, a most important instrument in our national education. Whoever attends to the ordinary run of conversation among our middle and lower classes will think it no exaggeration to say, that the bar is more influential than the •pulpit, in forming the public mind, and in educating and exer- cising the mental powers of the people. It is a perpetual exercise in applying principle to actions, and actions to principle. This unceasing course of moral and intellectual education, enjoyed by our very lowest class in every locality, is wanting in Germany in general, owing to the different mode of judicial procedure in closed courts, by written pleadings, or private hearings of argu- ment, and private examinations of facts and witnesses. Law and justice are, perhaps, as well administered in the one way as in the other ; but the effects on the public mind, on the moral training of the character, and on the intellectuality and judg- ment of the common people, are very different. All schools for the people, all systems of national education, sink into insigni- INFLUENCE OF THE PRESS. 137 ficance, compared to the working of this vast open school for the public mind. We see its influence in the public press. Law cases are found to be the most interesting as well as the most instructive reading for the people, and our newspapers fill their columns with them. This taste has arisen also in France, since France has enjoyed open courts of law; and it is one of the most striking proofs of the social progress of the French people, that their theatres are deserted, and their courts of law crowded, and that their popular newspapers now report all interesting civil or criminal law cases. Another great educational influence wanting in Germany, is the moving moral diorama of human affairs and interests pre- sented to the public mind by our newspaper press. This liter- ature of the common people is unknown in Germany. Foreign newspapers do not furnish food for the mind of the common man. The newspaper public abroad is of a higher, more intel- lectual, more educated cast, than ours ; but therefore more cir- cumscribed — a public of professional men, functionaries, scholars, men of acquirements far above those of the mass of the people. It is to them, not to the people, that the press, both the literary and the periodical, and the pulpit also, in Germany, address themselves, by far too exclusively; and the mass of the people, the labourers and peasantry, are lost sight of. If we come down in German literature to what is intelligible to this lowest class, we find a great vacuity not filled up by those daily or weekly accounts of the real affairs and local business passing around them, which our country newspapers furnish to the mind of the common man, and which exercise and educate his intellectual and moral powers. The strictness — pharisaical strictness it may be — with which the repose of Sunday is observed in England, and particularly in Scotland — the complete abstinence not merely from work, but from amusement, is unquestionably a powerful educational influence in our social economy. Its religious value is not here considered. It may possibly produce as much hypocrisy as piety. But viewing it simply in its influence on the intellectual ^culture of a people, and comparing its effects with the intellectual culture produced by the round of amusement to which Sunday is devoted on the Continent, the social economist will not hesitate to say that our strict observance, where it is the voluntary action of the public mind, and not an observance enforced by kirk sessions and town bailies, is of a higher educational tendency, 138 RELIGIOUS OBSERVANCE OF SUNDAY. and both indicates and produces a more intellectual character. The common man is thrown by it upon his own mental resources, reflections, and ideas, be they religious or not. He is not a mere recipient of fatigue for six days, and of amusement for one, with- out thought or mental exertion in the one state more than in the other — which is the Continental man's existence; but for one day he is in repose, and, without taking religion at all into consideration, is in a state of leisure, in which he is thrown back upon reflection, judgment, memory of what he knows or has heard, and upon considering and reasoning upon his own affairs, whether spiritual or temporal. It is a valuable pause from manual labour, which, if filled up by mere amusement, is lost as to intellectual culture. The want of religious dissent, and consequently of religious discussion among the people, is also the want of a powerful means of educating, and sharpening by controversy, the intellec- tual faculties of the lower orders of Germany. The want also of public or common business, small or great, to discuss, or influence by their opinions or votes, and in which they can act freely, and according to their own will and judg- ment, without superintendence and control, tells fearfully against the development of the human intellect in this lowest class in Germany. It is the same cause, only in less intensity of force — viz., the want of exercise and excitement of the mental^powers ■ — which reduces to idiotcy or imbecility the inmate of the silent penitentiary. Here, in Germany, the government, and the whole social economy of the country, remove systematically all exercise of mental powers from the people, and reduce the common work- ing German peasantry, the lowest but greatest class in the com- munity, to a lower state of intellectuality than we are acquainted with in Great Britain; where, even in the most remote and solitary situations, there is, owing to the nature of our social economy and institutions, a perpetual stream of exciting and educating influences and circumstances acting on the mind of the common man. Here, this lowest class of the population are, intellectually, but big children who know their letters. They are in a state of extreme inertness of mind. Take one of our uneducated people who can neither write nor read, converse with him, try his good sense, his judgment, his powers of comprehend- ing, deciding, and acting within his sphere, and we find that the education of realities in our free social state, through which this ignorant man's mind has passed in the various exciting circum- WANT OF MENTAL EXERCISE IN GERMANY. 139 stances, which, in our social condition, daily exercise the faculties of every man in every station, has actually brought him to a higher intellectual and moral state, — has made him a more think- ing, energetic, right-acting character, than the passive human beings of the same class in Germany, who have had the educa- tion of the schools, but without the practical exercise of the mental powers afterwards in their social relations. The blessings of school education let no man undervalue but in our zeal for the education ot the people let us not take the show for the substance, and imagine their education to consist in reading and writing, and not in the exercise and enjoyment of their own mental powers as free agents, acting in their own civil, political, moral, and religious duties as men and members of society. National schools, and theatres, and all that can be taught or represented by governments on the German system, are but poor substitutes for that education through the real business of life which can only be given to a people by free social institutions. The most educated countries in the present age give little encouragement to the philanthropist who expects, from a general diffusion of school-education, a higher moral cha- racter, and an efficient check upon crime, among a people. The most generally educated nation in Europe is unquestionably the Swedish. It is stated by Colonel Forsell, the Director of the Statistical Board of Sweden, in his valuable work, "Statistik ofver Sverige," that not so many as one in a thousand of the total population of Sweden, who are not incapable of instruction from mental or bodily infirmity, is unable to read and write, and the few who cannot are aged persons of a past generation, in which school-education was not so generally diffused and enforced. Religious instruction also is universal; because no person can be married, or perform any act as major in years, before taking the sacrament, after the rite of confirmation, and, on both occasions, going through preparatory instruction, and a suitable examination by the clergyman, who in this duty is strictly watched over by his superiors. Sweden being geo- graphically and politically isolated, and detached from other countries — being almost entirely agricultural, with little com- merce or manufacture, and with no great assemblages of its population in cities or large towns — and being provided also with a government which is a model of well-intended interference with all the interests of the people, ought to present to the world a pictUxfe oi the happy results of an universal national education ^-^™™^™ 140 WANT OF MENTAL EXERCISE IN GERMANY. and religious instruction, of a more perfect system of school and church education, than any country in Europe has been able to establish. It is not without dismay, therefore, that on turning to the criminal, statistics of this generally educated people, we find that the amount of criminal offences, in proportion to the numbers of the population, exceed greatly those of England, Scotland, or Ireland, which are certainly not educated countries — that the numbers of illegitimate children, and of divorces from the marriage tie — both undeniable tests of the moral condition of a people — are vastly greater. This statistical fact was so unex- pected, so contrary to the generally received opinion, that school education must of itself diminish the tendency to crime in a country, that it was supposed the number of commitments in a year for mere conventional police transgressions, involving no moral delinquency, had been numbered as crimes in the state- ment made by the author of these Notes in his tour in Sweden; and the minister of Sweden at the Court of St. James, the Count Biornstierna, published a pamphlet to refute his calumnies. But statistic?