lications, but we believe
made an effort, hitherto ineffectual, to introduce a system of popular
lectures.

In another respect the city is behind the age, and that is in its
commercial arrangements. Although there are large transactions in raw
produce, in the manufactures of all nations, in stocks and shares, there
is no public Exchange, no Stock Market, no Corn Exchange, all the
business being transacted by ambulating brokers. But if the reader knew
in what condition the country was before the Crimean war, he would
marvel, not at the absence of such institutions, but that there should
be any need of them. In his work on the Roumanians published in 1857,
Edgar Quinet suggests as the means of their regeneration after so many
years of oppression 'a bank,' 'an institution of credit,' and railways,
of which there were at that time none in existence.[39] Now there are
banks, credit institutions, railways between most of the important
centres, and others in progress. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say
that the progress which has been effected in this country in twenty-five
years has in other European States necessitated one or two centuries;
and this is a circumstance of which most writers on the country have
lost sight in their criticisms. For the purpose of erecting suitable
buildings for trade, and for public bodies generally, a corporation has
recently been started which calls itself the 'Roumanian Company for
building Public Works.' Its capital is ten millions of francs, and
Prince Demetrius Ghika, President of the Senate, is the chairman, with
an unexceptionable board of directors, and no doubt the next five or ten
years will witness changes and improvements as rapid as those which have
occurred in the immediate past.

Much, perhaps too much, has been written concerning Roumanian funerals.
That they are showy, almost to irreverence, and that the exposure of the
face of the corpse in its glazed coffin is repulsive, there can be no
doubt, but they are not one whit worse than the lugubrious processions
with their 'arrangements' in black and feathers which are still to be
seen in England; and there, as here, it is to be hoped that with
improving national taste these exhibitions will be discontinued.

Very different, however, is the old-fashioned system of octroi, of which
the poorer classes complain bitterly, still in vogue not only in
Bucarest but in all the other large towns of Roumania, and the still
more iniquitou