are
positively honest. Not by individual newspapers must the traveller form
his judgment, but by the freedom of discussion which he may find to be
permitted, or the restraints upon discussion imposed. The idea of
liberty must be low and feeble among a people who permit the government
to maintain a severe censorship; and it must be powerful and effectual
in a society which can make all its complaints through a newspaper,--be
the reports of the newspapers upon the state of social affairs as dismal
as they may. Whatever revilings of a tyrannical president, or of a
servile congress, a traveller may meet with in any number of American
journals, he may fairly conclude that both the one and the other must
be nearly harmless if they are discussed in a newspaper. The very
existence of the newspapers he sees testifies to the prevalence of a
habit of reading, and consequently of education--to the wide diffusion
of political power--and to the probable safety and permanence of a
government which is founded on so broad a basis, and can afford to
indulge so large a licence. Whatever he may be told of the patriotism of
a sovereign, let him give it to the winds if he finds a space in a
newspaper made blank by the pen of a censor. The tameness of the
Austrian journals tells as plain a tale as if no censor had ever
suppressed a syllable;--as much so as the small size of a New Orleans
paper compared with one of New York, or as the fiercest bluster of a
Cincinnati Daily or Weekly, on the eve of the election of a president.

* * * * *

In countries where there is any Free Education, the traveller must
observe its nature; and especially whether the subjects of it are
distinguished by any sort of badge. The practice of badging, otherwise
than by mutual consent, is usually bad: it is always suspicious. The
traveller will note whether free education is conferred by charitable
bequest, (a practice originating in times when the doctrine of expiation
was prevalent, and continued to this day by its union with charity,) or
whether it is framed at the will of the sovereign, that his young
subjects may be trained to his own purposes,--as in the case of the
Emperor of Russia and his young Polish victims; or whether it arises
from the union of such a desire with a more enlightened object,--as may
be witnessed in Prussia; or whether it is provided by the sovereign
people,--by universal consent, as the right of every individ