gross ignorance and social subservience--may be
looked for and found for at least an age.

Some preparation may thus be made by a glance over the face of the
country. Much depends on whether it is flat or mountainous, pasture or
arable land. It appears from fact, too, that much depends on minor
circumstances,--even on whether it is damp or dry. It is amusing to the
traveller in Holland to observe how new points of morals spring up out
of its swamps, as in the East from the dryness of the deserts. To injure
the piles on which the city is built, is at Amsterdam a capital offence;
and no inhabitant could outgrow the shame of tampering with the
vegetation by which the soil of the dykes is held together. While Irish
children are meritoriously employed in gathering rushes to make candles,
and sedges for thatch, "the veriest child in Holland would resent as an
injury any suspicion that she had rooted up a sedge or a rush, which had
been planted to strengthen the embankments."[L] Such are certain points
of morals in a country where water is the great enemy. In the East,
where drought is the chief foe, it is a crime to defile or stop up a
well, and the greatest of social glories is to have made water flow
where all before was dry. In Holland, a malignant enemy cuts the dyke,
as the last act of malice: in Arabia, he fills up the wells. In Holland,
a distinct sort of moral feeling seems to have grown up about
intemperance in drink. The humidity of the climate, and the scarcity of
clear, wholesome water, obliges the inhabitants to drink much of other
liquids. If moderation in them were not made a point of conscience of
the first importance, the consequences of their prevalent use would be
dreadful. The success of this particular moral effort is great.
Drunkenness is almost as rare in Holland as carelessness in keeping
accounts, and tampering with the dykes. There is no country in the world
whose morals have more clearly grown out of its circumstances than
Holland. On the theory of an infallible Moral Sense, it would be as
difficult to account for a Dutchman's tenderness of conscience on any of
the above three heads, as for a soldier's agony at the imputation of
sleeping upon guard, or an Alabama planter's resentment at being charged
with putting the alphabet in the way of a mulatto.

* * * * *

Having noted the aspect of the country, the observer's next business is
to ascertain the condition of the