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third-rate military reputation, behind which they shelter themselves, and to expose the ignorance, disposition to arbitrary rule, and unfounded assumption of merit it conceals. The official published records of the yearly amount of crime in Sweden- that documentary proof of the demoralising influence on the Swedish people of the demoralised governing classes could not be got rid of. In vain those classes attempted in controversial pamphlets to delude the public, to divert attention from the true source of the evil, to palliate the undeniable excess of crime in Sweden, by alleging excess of drunkenness and excess of bad legislation, by which simple police transgressions punished and recorded as crimes, swell the criminal record. They only proved what they attempted to deny -the misgovernment of privileged classes, who confounding moral guilt with transgressions against their own conventional regulations in one demoralising code and administration of law, brutalise the habits, and deaden the moral sentiments of the people under them. Swedish diplomacy itself -his Excellency Count Biörnstierna, minister of his Swedish Majesty at the court of St. James'scondescended to satisfy the English public, that the allegations and views of the traveller were, to the fullest extent, correct and incontrovertible; for his Excellency published a pamphlet*, professing to be a refutation of" Mr. Laing's calumnies," and "libels against the Swedish nation," in which, with great success, his Excellency confirms all he attempts to refute, and refutes all he attempts to confirm. The Swedish public with the landmarks of their own published official records of crime from year to year, before their eyes, were not to be misled by their noble party writers. The late Diet appointed a committee to report upon the social economy of the

Mr. Laing's Answer to Count Biörnstierna's pamphlet appeared in the Monthly Chronicle for November, 1840, published by Longmans, London.

country, and the amendments necessary in the Constitution. Their Report recommends the abolition of the exclusive privileges and political powers of those classes which have in this age so signally betrayed the material interests, and corrupted the moral interests of their country- an answer in full, and from the Swedish people themselves, to their noble diplomatic pamphleteer, who, to uphold the tottering power of his order, attempted, in the face of undeniable facts and official documents, to persuade the world that Sweden is a country eminently moral, particularly well governed by its nobility and their hero-king, and quite contented with its present government. To have contributed in the most insignificant degree towards such beneficial movements of the public mind is a great literary success for such trivial literary productions.

In this continuation of the same design of collecting materials which may enable the future historian to form a just estimate of the present political and social economy of some portions of the European people, the Author in these Notes pursues the same plan as in the preceding volumes. Taking historical events, statistical facts, and his own observation in various tours, as a basis, he proceeds from that basis straight forward to his conclusions in political or social economy, regardless of the theories, authorities, or opinions that may be jostled out of the road, or of the establishments, classes, or personages whose assumed merits, or false lustre, may be rubbed off in the collision and shock with truth and just principle.

SAMUEL LAING.

Edinburgh, January, 1842.

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