ontent and disagreement
than to a kindly social state.

The middleman system is favourable or unfavourable to morals, just in
proportion as it is so to prosperity. Every one knows the wretchedness
of it in Ireland, and that there are numerous instances in Italy of the
complete success of the metayer plan.

Where the land is the property of large owners, and is tilled by
labourers, there must be more or less of the feudal temper and manners
remaining. Where the labourers are attached to the soil, there must
necessarily exist whatever good arises from the certainty of the means
of subsistence, coupled with the evils of subservience to the will of
the lord, mental sluggishness, and ignorance. Where they are not
irremovably attached to the soil, habit and helplessness have usually
much of the same effect. The son hedges, ditches, or ploughs where his
father hedged, ditched, or ploughed; he takes his beer, or cider, or
thin wine, (according to the country he lives in,) at the same house of
entertainment, and gossips about the doings of the lord and his family,
much as labourers were wont to gossip two hundred years ago.

It is the business of the traveller to note which mode of agricultural
life prevails, and how the morals which pertain to it are modified by
particular circumstances.

* * * * *

He must make the same kind of observations on the Manufacturing and
Commercial Classes of the country he visits. Here again the chief
differences in morals and manners arise out of the comparative
prosperity or adversity of the class. Take the cotton manufacture.
Passing by the Chinese operative plying his shuttle as he sits under his
bamboo shed, and the Hindoo drawing out his fine thread under the shade
of the palm, what differences there are among artisans of the same
race,--Europeans and of European extraction! In Massachusetts there are
villages of artisans, where whole streets of houses are their property;
the church on the green in the midst is theirs; the Lyceum, with its
library and apparatus, is theirs. There are rows of neat
frame-dwellings, painted white or yellow, with piazzas before and
behind, and Venetian blinds to every window,--all growing up out of the
earnings of girls, who bring their widowed mothers to preside over their
establishments. Others are paying off the mortgages on their fathers'
farms. Others are procuring for their brothers a learned education in a
college. In th