lic Chamber, or Board of Public Subsistence,
exhibited a deficit of 3,293,000 crowns, (L645,000,) incurred in retailing
bread to the people cheaper than they could purchase it even in the
cheapest foreign markets.[6]

The Campagna of Rome is the great type of the state to which the doctrine
of the Chrematists would reduce the states of modern Europe. Agriculture,
ruined by the perpetual curse of foreign importation; urban industry alone
flourishing by the stimulus of foreign export; vast fortunes accumulated
in the hands of a few merchants and great proprietors; constant distress
among the labouring poor; all the symptoms of prosperity in the
cities--all the marks of decay in the country; luxury the most unbounded,
side by side with penury the most pinching; an overflow of wealth which
cannot find employment, in one class of society; a mass of destitution
that seeks in vain for work, in another; a middle class daily diminishing
in number and declining in importance, between the two extremes; and
government, under the influence of popular institutions, yielding to all
the demands of the opulent class, because it gives money: and deaf to all
the cries of the impoverished, because they can only ask for bread. The
name of slavery is indeed abolished in Western Europe, but is its reality,
are its evils, not present? Have we not retained its fetters, its
restraints, its degradations, without its obligation to support? Are not
the English factory children often practically in a worse servitude than
in the Eastern harem? If the men are not "ascripti glebae," are they not
"_ascripti molinis ac carbonariis_?" What trade can a factory girl or
coal-mine child take to, if thrown out of employment? The master cannot
flog them, or bring then back by force to his workshop. Mighty difference!
He can starve them if they leave it: he chains them to their mills by the
invincible bond of necessity. They have the evils of slavery without its
advantages. Can, or ought, such a state of things long continue? Whether
this is descriptive of the state of society in France and England, let
those determine who are familiar with the people of either of these
countries.

Such are Sismondi's political views, which are enforced in the volumes
before us by a vast array of historical and statistical facts, which, as
well as the deservedly acknowledged talent and character of the writer,
entitle them to the highest respect, and render then of the deepest