conflict between the armies of great nations. Cologne itself, though a
place of no natural strength, has been fortified to an extent and at an
evident cost beyond all American conception. All over this part of
Europe, and to a less degree throughout Italy, the amount of expenditure
on walls and forts, bastions, ditches, batteries, &c. is incalculably
great. I cannot doubt that any nation, by wisely expending half so much
in systematic efforts to educate, employ steadily and reward amply its
poorer classes, would have been strengthened and ensured against
invasion far more than it could be by walls like precipices and a belt
of fortresses as impregnable as Gibraltar. But this wisdom is slowly
learned by rulers, and is not yet very widely appreciated. Whenever it
shall be, "Othello's occupation" will be gone, not for Othello only, but
for all who would live by the sword.

For some miles before it reaches the frontier, and for a much larger
distance after entering Belgium, the Railroad passes through a
decidedly broken, hilly, up-and-down country, most unlike the popular
conception of Flanders or Belgium. Precipices of naked rock are not
unfrequent and the region is wisely given up mainly to Wood and Grass,
the former engrossing most of the hill-sides and the latter flourishing
in the valleys. This Railroad has more tunnels in the course of fifty
miles than I ever before met with--I think not less than a dozen--while
the grading and bridging must have been very expensive. Such a country
is of course prolific in running streams, on which many small and some
larger manufacturing towns and villages are located. At length, it
ascends a considerable inclined plane at Liege, once a very popular,
powerful and still a handsome and important manufacturing town with
60,000 inhabitants; and here the beautiful and magnificently fertile
table lands of Belgium spread out like a vast prairie before the
traveler. In fact, the peasant cultivators are so commonly located in
villages, leaving long stretches of the rarely fenced though well
cultivated plain without a habitation, that the resemblance to level
prairies which have been planted and sown is more striking than would be
imagined. But the growing crops are too cleanly and carefully weeded and
too uniformly good to protract the illusion. Sometimes hundreds of acres
are unbrokenly covered with Wheat, which has the largest area of any one
staple; but more commonly a breadth of this is s