"and bark) bread," says Mr. Laing, "tastes strongly of tim"ber, and gets as hard as a board when kept long." The politico-œconomical arrangements of Sweden are in the highest degree prejudicial to the freedom of industry and the security of property; and therefore tend to promote the poverty of the great mass of the people; and yet the plea for their unwise regulations is, "the protection of labour." Every trade is a species of guild or fraternity; and "the exercise of industry is a property as well as its produce." To exercise any trade there must be an apprenticeship, and a long period of probation as a journeyman; and even in this status there are degrees, all of which must be passed through before a man can become a master. "Every trade or branch of industry that can be thought of, excepting, perhaps, common labour in husbandry, is exercised by privilege; and, as the tradesman pays a tax to government for his privilege or right to exercise his trade, he is entitled to protection from law-like any other proprietoragainst whatever would diminish its value, and injure his means of living and paying his tax-that is, against free competition. The public, on the other hand, must have protection from the monopoly which this want of competition would establish. Government attempts to hold the balance, to correct, through its colleges of commerce, and on the reports of its local functionaries, the tendency to monopoly in these institutions, and to judge whether in any particular locality there be, from the additional population, room for an additional tradesman or dealer, with advantage to the public."-p. 81. Mr. Laing sees all the evil which is calculated to spring from such a system; but he is of opinion that it has a tendency to check the undue increase of population, by throwing impediments in the way of early marriages. From voluntary regulations made by bodies of working men themselves, we believe such a result might follow. In this country, wages have been raised in many trades by well-ordered combinations among the working men. In London especially, nearly every skilled trade has so succeeded. But experience in this country shows that guilds (such, for instance, as the City companies) have not produced similar effects. The difference between a voluntary combination and one sanctioned by a government, we take to be this: that the former presupposes a considerable degree of prudence among the people who so combine; whilst the guild not only presumes none, but its tendency is to prevent prudence--to destroy self-reliance. Now prudence in one respect is prudence in all. It will invariably be found where a working man begins to save even the merest trifle from his weekly earnings, that he has become a prudent man. The mere desire to save indicates a state of mind which rarely (we think never) exists without general prudence; and this is the reason why occasional combinations have appeared to produce such extraordinary results,-results which apparently run counter to some well-established doctrines of political economy; whereas, in fact, properly considered and estimated, they rather confirm such doctrines. In short, we repeat, that a government combination-such as the fraternities or guilds of Sweden and other countries-never can be productive of such effects as the voluntary combinations, of which we have every day experience in this country; and the reason is, that voluntary combinations are never undertaken but by intelligent and prudent men; whilst guilds, by dispensing with prudence and forethought, rob all prudence of its real value, and reduce all to the same miserable level. The pernicious results of these guilds are detailed by Mr. Laing in his third chapter, but his statements are far too long to quote at length. It is part of the system of these guilds, that every artisan should have a sort of roving licence to seek work from town to town; and when such artisan cannot secure work, he is supported out of the "box of his trade." Thus, whilst they ought to be acquiring skill, they are merely acquiring the habits of vagabonds. "It is not even upon dexterity," says Mr. Laing, "but upon his privilege, that the workman depends-upon his right to exclude a better workman and a better man from enjoying any portion of public favour in the exercise of the same trade, where the competition could be injurious to his means of living. The consequences of this want of free competition are visible in the most simple and necessary trades-those in which national labour and consequently national industry and wealth are most concerned. Smithwork, joiner-work, work in leather, in cloth-in short, all kinds of work are very imperfectly executed compared to the work of English tradesmen in the same line; are never ready at the time proposed; and are performed with great waste of time and labour. To plane a board, for instance, is the work of two men, one shoving the plane from him, the other drawing it to him. With us one man planes the roughest board, and reduces it to a smooth surface. To cross-cut a piece of wood of 18 or 20 inches in diameter, is done with us with a hand-saw by one man, who holds the wood fast with his left hand, or with his knee. Here it is a job for two men with a two-handled saw, and often a third is attending to hold the piece of wood steady. In national economy these are no trifles. A waste of time and labour in the daily work of a nation is important."-Pages 87, 88. A case of actual occurrence is given by Mr. Laing, as reported in a Danish newspaper, strikingly illustrating the effect of the guild system upon national industry:— "A person had ordered a still to be made by a coppersmith, on some particular plan. The brass cocks and fittings had of course to be cast and adjusted to the machine, as one of the most essential of its parts. But a coppersmith is not entitled to cast metal; that belongs to the corporation of girdlers (the girdle is a flat plate of cast-iron for baking oat-cakes upon), and the coppersmith was prosecuted for unlawfully exercising a trade belonging to another class of tradesmen. It was in vain that he urged the necessity of a workman completing within his own workshop all the parts of a machine, proportioning their dimensions to each other, and fitting them so as to work together:-it was a breach of the corporation law, and he was fined. In Sweden, from its isolated position, and political division into classes, this system is in considerable vigour. With us, everything is lawful that law does not prohibit; here, the maxim seems to be, that nothing is lawful but what law permits. Where law is silent, special permission from government is held to be necessary even to exercise any of the numerous branches of industry which have come into existence since the simpler trades were incorporated."-Page 89. In our review of Mr. Laing's book on Norway, we were at some pains to give the reader a clear and connected view of the Norwegian constitution, especially as far as the legislative and judicial departments were concerned. This we were well able to accomplish from the copious data scattered throughout the work; so that the sum of our labour consisted in collecting, arranging, and abridging the author's ample materials. We should have been well pleased to have given a similar outline of the constitution of Sweden, but we find Mr. Laing's data too vague and scanty to allow us to do so in a manner at all satisfactory. A country in which the government does all things, and in which, consequently, individual energy is paralysed; where industry is under that species of blighting restraint called protection; where taxation is heavy and arbitrary; and where forced contributions of labour, somewhat similar to the old French corvées, are required of the people; where, in short, the people are trained, as Mr. Laing observes, "to consider 66 nothing their own but what is left to them by the clergy and government, to whom, in the first place, their labour, time "and property must belong;"-such a community "wants the "very foundation upon which civil liberty must stand-a sense "of independence and property." "It is almost ridiculous," continues Mr. Laing, "to hear of the constitutional rights and liberties of a people whose time, labour, and property are not their own, in the sense in which these are enjoyed by free people ; but are at the disposal and for the benefit of classes, corporations, and public functionaries. The constitution and civil rights of the nation, mean here the right of corporate bodies to meet in a legislative assembly, without reference to the mass of the community on whom they prey."-Pages 274-5. The Swedish diet consists of four distinct bodies-the nobles, the clergy, the burgesses and the peasants; and they meet in four separate chambers. Every measure has to pass through each chamber and its committees separately, and is adopted or rejected by the plurality of the chambers. If the lower chambers were freely elected by a large body of independent and intelligent men, the constitution of Sweden could not work with the upper chambers, having interests so completely opposed to the interests of the masses: but the several chambers do harmonize, and for the very simple reason, that the houses of the burgesses and peasants are elected by a narrow constituency, with a high electoral qualification,—that is, the occupation of a large quantity of land or the enjoyment of a privilege. For further details we must refer the reader to the work: we shall therefore merely add here, that the qualification in question excludes all that would be valuable in a constituent body. It excludes -"all persons of condition who, as burgesses, have acquired fortunes in trade or business of any kind in the towns, and have retired to the country. It excludes all who, being allied to noble families, have acquired property in office or public service, as these are considered to be represented in the Chamber of Nobles. By this constitution, all educated persons, unless they belong to one or other of the privileged classes the clerical or the noble-are excluded from the legislative body. Berzelius could neither elect nor be elected, until he was raised to the class of nobility, which qualified him for his seat in the diet."-Page 285-6. “The clergy elect their members by consistories, and the bishops have ex-officio a seat and voice in their chamber. Although the clergy generally depend upon court favour for appointments and provision for their fami lies, they are the most enlightened and most independent of the four chambers of the diet." The principle on which the chambers of the nobles is constituted, is this: "The stem of each noble family-the head of it—or, reducing the idea to what is familiar to us, the chief of the clan, represents the whole, who are noble by derivation from his stock, by hereditary right, without election or reference to them."-Page 287. This, in fact, only differs from ours inasmuch as the junior Lord Johns and Lord Thomas's are not deemed noble: though Mr. Laing calls it " a system which is representative without being elective," we should hardly be disposed to call this system representative,-a term which, according to our notions, involves the idea of election. Of the administration of justice Mr. Laing says, “The machinery for administering the laws of a country is of as much importance as that for making them: it deserves the traveller's notice, because it is of every-day influence in the business of the people. In Sweden this machinery is superior to our own: there are 264 courts of first instance, called hereds' courts, with a judge or hered-hovding to preside in the court; and the country is divided into hereds or districts, equivalent in judicial affairs to parishes in ecclesiastical. The courts sit three times a year. Twelve peasants are elected by the peasants of the hered, to serve as a jury for two years; and in this election of nammdsman, as they are called, every peasant has an equal vote, be his property or share of a hemman of land great or small."- Page 294. The access to these courts is easy, cheap and satisfactory to the suitors. The cases tried before these courts of “first instance," or original jurisdiction, amounted in 1836 to 71,312, or about 270 to each court; besides which there were 9288 in the town courts," and 403 in the " college courts.” ** As in Norway, there are courts of appellate jurisdiction, intermediate and Final. The former are called the layman's courts, and answer to the Sorenserivers courts of Norway; and the latter, the Hof courts, of which there are three answering to the beste ret court of Norway; the Hof court alone having criminal jurisdiction, It should seem that the lower courts of Sweden perform their business well, as out of $1,003 causes tried before the inferior courts, only 680 were appealed. Sweden has not imitated Norway and Denmark in their courts of mutual |