largest proprietor in the nation, and the chief and president of the rest, would influence powerfully the liberty and consequence of the peasantry. Continually thwarted in his views, and robbed of the real exercise of the rights nominally annexed to his office, by the opposition of a proud aristocracy, the sovereign would be disposed to view with favour and countenance an order of men, whose interests (like his own) were decidedly at variance with theirs. "Il les regarde (to use the expression of Helvetius) comme les ennemis de ses ennemis.*

He would be at hand, therefore, to contribute as much as possible towards their relief and enfranchisement. In one most material point too, the interest of the sovereign would operate still more directly in favour of this oppressed order. The distribution of justice is in early societies a source of prodigious emolument, which the men of power exact as the price of their interference to shelter or avenge a suitor. A community in this state precisely resembles a school, where the boy, whose individual strength and courage is not sufficient to protect him, must purchase by any means in his power the interposition of a boy stronger than his enemy. The necessity of applying to some neighbouring and powerful arbitrator, for the purpose of settling quarrels, divided the European kingdoms of the middle ages into a number of separate districts or associations, in which the feudal baron, or greatest proprietor, administered justice, exacting considerable fees from the applicants. But the sovereign claimed a nominal privilege of administering justice throughout the kingdom, and even among these barons themselves-a privilege, indeed, which the overwhelming power of these latter generally forbade him to realise; but which he never omitted to keep in view, and to enforce on proper occasions. The lucrative profits which judicial disputes held out to the arbitrator, sharpened the sovereign's anxiety to break these local jurisdictions, and to merge them in that grand public establishment of which the management belonged to himself. This could only be done by lessening the dependance of the inhabitants of any district upon the neighbouring great proprietor. And thus the desire for a larger money-revenue, as well as the continued struggles for power with the great proprietors, would determine the sovereign to promote warmly the enfranchisement of the subordinate classes from their supremacy.

The power of the king, like that of the president in any other society, would depend upon the frequency and continuity of union which circumstances forced upon the members. If the aristocracy were often driven into a state of combined action, the influence of the leader would be proportionally augmented. If they dwelt scattered in remote provinces, without any powerful tie of common interest to unite them, his sway would be reduced to a mere name.

In France and Germany the union of the different provincial grandees was throughout all the middle ages exceedingly loose and feeble.

*De l'Esprit, Discours 4, cap. 10, p. 112.

The great French nobles seem, during the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, to have scarcely considered themselves as subject to the Capetian monarchs. The great extent both of France and Germany contributed much to relax the bonds of union between the inhabitants of the separate provinces. But in England, during the same period, the power of the king was much more considerable. The courts of the Norman kings pervaded the whole country, with some degree of efficacy and authority, even as early as the twelfth century. Charters were continually obtained by the barons, circumscribing the excessive oppression of the sovereign. Nor did the territorial supremacy of the former maintain itself either so permanently or so irresistibly as on the Continent.

Throughout the whole of Europe, we may observe that the poorer classes have been uniformly the most abased where the kingly authority has been most inconsiderable, and where consequently the sway of the aristocracy has been the most uncontrolled. In Hungary, in Poland, in Russia, immense extent and rudeness of manners rendered the tendency to union very slight, and the power of the sovereign equally scanty and restricted. The peasantry there has long been and still remains in an undiminished state of debasement. In Pomerania the same cause may be traced. The kings or dukes of Pomerania possessed scarce any thing more than a nominal supremacy over their refractory nobles. And since the extinction of the native race of princes, the Swedish government, with which the country has been incorporated, has not interested itself at all in favour of the lower classes; so that the Pomeranian proprietors have never known the existence of any opposing force calculated to traverse those exactions which they have meditated towards their peasantry.

But, even though this cause be conceded, much will yet remain to be accounted for. The Pomeranian peasantry, represented in the 16th century as warlike and independent, appear in a few years afterwards so utterly bereft of all spirit and capacity of resistance, as to suffer at the hands of the great proprietors a process of abasement and destitution which no other European country has witnessed. In France, the country of southern Europe where the peasantry were earliest and most completely degraded, the dependancies of villenage at last terminated in the Métayer system,—an arrangement, by which, though the land and farming capital were considered as belonging of right to the lord, yet the peasant was still suffered to remain and to cultivate the farm, retaining one half of the produce as a reward for his labour and superintendence. Now it would have been obviously the interest of the French proprietor, instead of paying so highly for having his farm cultivated and his stock employed, to have altogether abrogated the sort of right which the cultivator was reputed to possess in the spot, and to have placed in it a new manager, whom he could have procured for a salary far lower than half the produce. Such a measure would have been far more profitable to him, had the character of It is the peasants been such as would have permitted its execution. only in the vicinity of the Baltic that the courage and manhood of the peasantry has been so entirely suspended, as to endure patiently a

process of debasement and prostration, which on any other European ground would have provoked the sufferers to implacable hostility. But historical data do not enable us to point out the operative causes which have thus wretchedly unmanned the Pomeranian villeins.

It is consoling, however, to reflect, that within the few last years, much has been done to mitigate the condition of this unhappy order. The tendency which the peasants have of late began to manifest towards resistance, and the increased disapprobation of the Swedish government, seem to have contributed most forcibly towards this result. In the countries, however, bordering upon Swedish Pomerania, far more has been done to alleviate the servitude of the labourer; nor has the practice of laying down the peasants ever prevailed any where else to an equal extent.

The royal domains are uniformly the first in this career of amelioration, and as the sovereign is, throughout all these countries, the most extensive proprietor of land, this example is exceedingly weighty and effective. The king of Prussia is affirmed by the Prussian minister, Hertzberg, to possess, in property, nearly one-third of the land in his dominions (Dissertat. ed. 1787, p. 193). In Swedish Pomerania, not more than one half of the land is said to belong to private persons; the rest is possessed by the crown, and by different corpo

rations.

The condition of the peasants in Prussian Pomerania has been materially amended during the reign of the three last kings. In the royal domains, villenage seems verging towards extinction. On the payment of a very moderate price in gradual instalments, each peasant becomes a full proprietor, and the king is stated to have received a considerable revenue in this manner. The superior comfort of the labourers is attested by the more rapid increase in the population, which has augmented by one-third during the last fifty years, and is given in 1798 at 360,000. And their loftier position in the scale of society is shewn by the existence of a jury elected from amongst their own number, who decide the differences which take place among them, assisted by the advice and presidency of the parochial clergyman.

In Holstein also, villenage has been abolished in the royal domains, and this example has been followed by many of the nobility. In 1797, the proprietors of land came to a general resolution that the abolition of body-property was necessary, and that steps should be taken for its gradual extinction during the next twelve years. Most of the peasants there are now upon a fixed rent for a certain term of years, and the stimulus and improvement which has thus been bestowed upon agriculture is described as strikingly evident.

G.

NEW MODES OF EDUCATION.

“I am convinced, Yorick, that there is a North-west passage to the intellectual world; and that the soul of man has shorter ways of going to work, in furnishing itself with knowledge and instruction, than we generally take with it."-Tristram Shandy.

I REMEMBER having somewhere read of an ingenious person who, being possessed of a large library, employed it chiefly in misplacing particular volumes; and when he had perfectly forgotten the circumstance, amusing himself in searching for the stray books. Man is said to be naturally a chase-loving animal, and I do not see why a book-hunt may not afford as much sport as a pack of foxhounds. Certainly there are many worse ways of employing the goods of this life, and of turning advantages into curses and as the great majority of readers see nothing in books beyond mere amusement, there is the less to cavil at in the pastime of this worthy trifler. If, however, we look somewhat deeper into the subject, we shall find in the best selected and most choice libraries the great majority of books serving merely to put those of more value out of our heads, and preventing us from laying our hands at once upon the matter of which we are immediately in want. Deduction being made of those volumes which contain false facts, false reasonings, or false arrangements and associations of ideas, the most extensive collections would shrink into a very diminutive compass; insomuch, that the more a man is learned the less knowing he will generally be found. The mere book-worm, burying his scanty mother-wit beneath a load of antiquated error and authoritative absurdity, is therefore scarcely better occupied than the gentleman here quoted; and, like him, employs his time in losing books among books, till, to use a proverbial expression, he can no longer see the wood for trees.

In the earlier stages of civilization the great obstacle to education was the want of books, or rather the want of ideas to be registered in them. The principal difficulty in our own time arises from the multiplicity of our stores, which have rendered even the knowledge of title-pages a species of learning, and the catalogue raisonnée of authors too much for heads of no ordinary capacity.

In a storm at sea the prudent navigator flings overboard his bulkiest and least valuable commodities; and the commonest builder, having completed his edifice, takes care to remove the scaffolding: while in literature the ship is suffered to sink before a particle of lumber is thrown overboard, and the cords and the scaffolding, the pegs and the ladders of knowledge, are esteemed its most ornamental parts, and are preserved and exhibited, on all occasions, with a pride commensurate with its folly.

There are, however, very few evils so extreme as to yield no collateral advantages. The difficulties and unwieldiness of learning possess many. But for such artificial and adventitious obsta

cles, the pathway being too plain, and the ascent too gentle, we should have every common fellow climbing and grasping at the forbidden fruit. Knowledge would no longer be a distinction, and what is worse, it would cease to be a source of power. As things are managed at present we contrive to spend seven years in acquiring the commonest trade, while the greater part of a long life is scarce sufficient to make a man master of the learned professions. This is a fine source of emoluments and distinctions. What, in the name of fortune, would become of the physician's fee, if Galen and Hippocrates went out of fashion; and if a knowledge of the means by which the antients missed their mark, were not as essential as an acquaintance with the simplest observations of fact. What would become of the whole tribe of lawyers, if codes were intelligible; or of theologians, if creeds had no mystery?-why, they would starve. "They could not dig, and to beg they would be ashamed." Is it not, therefore, a wise disposition of things, which not only clothes the naked, and feeds the hungry, but begets all sorts of luxuries and comforts for its favourites? Then again, it would puzzle a Say, a Malthus, and a Ricardo, put together, to find out an employment for the fellows of our colleges, and "enable them to get rid of that long disease, their life," if all that is worth knowing could be obtained by a hop, skip, and a jump; and nothing remained in after-life but to put our acquirements to practice. Lancastrian schools, and "short methods with beginners," may indeed be useful enough in giving the first elements to the poor who require to be taught, as hobnails are counted, by the hundred; but it may very safely be doubted, whether any scheme for rendering men's services to society available at shorter periods than formerly should be deemed advantageous; or whether they are not to be considered as having a direct tendency to produce undue competition, and overstock the market.

The wisdom of our ancestors has prudently determined that no one shall be permitted to govern the affairs of the nation before he is by law admitted to the management of his own estate; without this" fundamental feature" in the British constitution it might reasonably be feared (so short are the cuts to political knowledge), that Eton and Harrow would assume the reins of state; that "fagging" would be substituted for the slave-trade; that oppositionists would be liable to receive from ministers an occasional good licking," and high treason be punished with a "toss in the blanket." It may be questioned whether the dignity of parliament would be consulted when a call of the House was issued in the Etonian formula of "Come here, last goes;" or if a committee were censured for "shirking" a report.

As things are, however, the bad effects of that precocity, which short methods have introduced, are manifested in that great diffi