celebrated unless the parties had previously taken the Lord's Supper, and that none should be admitted to the communion-table who could not read, and was not instructed in religion. This law has spread family education. Parish schools are only found where there happen to have been lands or rents bequeathed in old times for the endowment; and these, in some parishes, are fixed, in others ambulatory. In this province (Wexio-lan), in 40,000 people only one person was found unable to read. Yet, with all their poverty,' (says Petrus Laesladius, speaking of his parents,) and all their striving for the most pressing necessaries of ⚫ life, our parents never forgot or put off the teaching us to read. Before we could well speak our father taught us our prayers; and these were, the first thing in the morning, and the last at night. Our mother spared 'no pains to teach us to read in a book; and at five years of age I could 'read any Swedish book; and at six could give reasonable answers to ' questions on the head points of Christianity.' This, too," continues Mr. Laing, was the house life of the poorest of the poor among new settlers; for fish-the making glue from the rein-deer's horns they could gather and a little dairy produce-were all the means of subsistence which the parents of Petrus Laesladius had."-Pages 186-188.

At one of the very first places Mr. Laing stopped at after crossing the Norwegian frontier, namely, Carlsbad, a neat little town of 2500 inhabitants, evidence of book learning met his eye.

"I found," says Mr. Laing, "two booksellers' shops and a music-seller's in the town, but not a butcher's. Here, as in Norway, I presume every family has butcher's meat killed and salted in autumn. With us, in such small country towns, the enjoyment of the fine arts is not so generally diffused as that of eating fresh meat; and the proportions of supply for mind and body would be exactly the reverse-three butchers' shops at the least for one book or music-shop."-Page 29.

Sweden affords remarkable evidence that mere "bookknowledge," even when combined with a law to force people to partake of the Lord's Supper before they are permitted to marry, is insufficient, when opposed to the pernicious example of an ignorant, degraded and thoroughly worthless aristocracy, to prevent a very low state of morality.

"It is a singular and embarrassing fact," says Mr. Laing, "that the Swedish nation, isolated from the mass of the European people, and almost entirely agricultural or pastoral, having, in about 3,000,000 of individuals, only 14,925 employed in manufactories, and these not congregated in one or two places, but scattered among 2037 factories; having no great standing army or navy; no extended commerce; no efflux of strangers; no considerable

a powerful and complete church establishment, undisturbed in its labours by sect or schism; is, notwithstanding, in a more demoralized state than any nation in Europe-more demoralized even than any equal portion of the dense manufacturing population of Great Britain. This is a very curious fact in moral statistics. It is so directly opposed to all received opinions and long-established theories of the superior moral condition, greater innocence, purity of manners, and exemption from vice or crime, of the pastoral and agricultural state of society, compared to the commercial and manufacturing, that if it rested merely upon the traveller's own impressions, observations, or experiences, it would not be entitled to any credit. The traveller in a foreign country swims on the surface of society; in contact, perhaps, with its worthless scum, as well as with its cream; and is not justified in drawing sweeping conclusions upon the moral character and condition of a whole people from what he may meet with in his own little circle of observation. I would not venture to state this fact (meaning the comparatively low state of morality in Sweden) upon any grounds less conclusive than the following.

"According to the official returns published in the Swedish State Gazette in March, 1837, the number of persons prosecuted for criminal offences before all the Swedish courts, in the year 1835, was 26,275; of whom 21,262 were convicted, 4915 acquitted, and 98 remained under examination. In 1835 the total population of Sweden was 2,983,144 individuals. In this year, therefore, 1 person of every 114 of the whole nation had been accused; and 1 in every 140 persons convicted of some criminal offence. By the same official returns, it appears, that in the five years from 1830 to 1834 inclusive, 1 person in every 49 of the inhabitants of the towns, and 1 in 176 of the rural population, had, on an average, been punished each year for criminal offences. In 1836, the number of persons tried for criminal offences in all the courts of the kingdom, was 26,925; of whom 22,292 were condemned, 3688 acquitted, and 945 under trial or committal. The criminal lists of this year are stated to be unusually light, yet they give a result of one person in every 112 of the whole population accused, and one in every 134 convicted of some criminal offence; and taking the population of the towns and the rural population separately, one person in every 46 individuals of the former, and one in every 174 individuals of the latter, have been convicted within the year 1836 for criminal offences. There is no rebellion in the land, nor resistance to obnoxious laws, as in Ireland to the tithe laws; nor are artificial offences created to any great extent by iniquitous legislation, as with us by the game laws and excise laws. These are all offences involving moral delinquency greater than the simple breach of a regulation or conventional law of the state."-Pages 108-110.

Mr. Laing then goes into a detailed statement, similar to the above, of the state of crime in other countries; but for facility of comparison, we have chosen to throw his facts into the tabular form, by which they are brought at one glance

Statement of the proportion which the number of persons accused or committed for trial, and convicted of criminal offences, bears to the whole population in the countries designated:

Speaking not of proportions, but of the absolute numbers, Mr. Laing says,

"Thus in the nearly 14,000,000 of the population of England and Wales, there were 7278 fewer committals, and 8462 fewer convictions, in the year 1831, than in the scarcely 3,000,000 of the Swedish nation in the year 1836, stated to be a year considerably more free from crime than any of the five preceding it."-Page 111.

So much for the state of crime. Turn we now to the state of morals in one essential particular. The proportion which the illegitimate births bear to the legitimate, indicates that the moral condition of the Swedes is miserably low. In Stockholm, statistical returns establish that, of the children born, more than one-third, or 1 in 2%, are illegitimate. "In no Christian community," says Mr. Laing, " is there a state of female morals approaching to this." What, indeed, should we think, if, out of every seven persons we passed in our streets, three were illegitimate? In London, however, the proportion is only 1 in 38; in Paris it is said to be 1 in 5; and in all France, 1 in 74.

Mr. Laing then gives many striking instances of a low state of moral feeling among the town population of Sweden, and thus proceeds:

"The main cause I conceive to be a radical defect in the construction

*This included many conventional offences; the really criminal offences were only 1 in 1402; a smaller proportion of crime than in England, in nearly the pro

of society in this country. The weight of public opinion upon the side of morality, and acting as a check upon private conduct, is lost in it by the too great proportion and preponderance in the social body of privileged classes of persons whose living, well-being, distinction, social influence, or other objects of human desire, are attained by other means than public estimation gained by moral worth. The privileged classes in this community are not merely the hereditary aristocracy, the military, and members of the learned professions; but the tailor, the shoemaker, the smith, the joiner, the merchant, the shop-keeper; in short, every man exercising any craft, trade, branch of industry, or means of living-that is to say, the whole of the upper and middle classes, down to the mere labourer in husbandry-belong to a privileged or licensed class or corporation, of which every member is by law entitled to be secured and protected, within his own locality, from such competition or interference of others in the same calling as would injure his means of living. It is, consequently, not as with us, upon his industry, ability, character, and moral worth, that the employment and daily bread of the tradesman, and the social influence and consideration of the individual, in every rank, even the highest, almost entirely depends; it is here in the middle and lower classes, upon corporate rights and privileges, or upon licence obtained from government; and in the higher upon birth, and court or government favour. The placing of a man's livelihood, prosperity, and social consideration in his station, upon other grounds than upon his own industry and moral worth, is a demoralizing evil in the very structure of Swedish society. We have escaped this modern disease of society; and public estimation, founded on moral worth and industry, can alone confer any weight, honour, or advantage on individuals in the ordinary stations of life in our social structure.”—Pages 117-121.

To the demoralizing effect of a diseased state of public opinion, which esteems what ought to be despised, and contemns that which is alone calculated to elevate the moral character, Mr. Laing adds the influence of the example of a dissolute court amidst a poor and idle population.

"The Swedes," he continues, "laboured to be lively, and attained the distinction of being called the French of the North. This spirit of imitation outdid what it copied in the worst points; and was not confined to the court circles or the higher classes; but as these became impoverished, and reduced in means to the level of the middle class, it was carried downwards into those orders of the community, in whom frivolity, gaming, profligacy, inordinate passion for amusement, false estimate of human action and character, are not to be called weaknesses or foibles only, but are vices interfering with moral duties."-Page 122.

It thus appears that in Sweden society is divided into two classes the privileged and the unprivileged. Not only is

tremes-a class which supplies all that is valuable in the constituent elements of society; but the two extremes are so remote from each other, that there is no sympathy between them. With an upper class so utterly devoid of political principle as that of Sweden has invariably shown itself, so destitute of public spirit, and even of an ordinary sense of justice, the feature which Mr. Laing points out as characterizing the national character is not surprising. The Swedes, in point of fact, stand at the very bottom of the scale of European morality.

Another effect of this marked division of the people into two classes the privileged and the unprivileged-is the utter ignorance of the condition of the masses which the wealthier portion of the privileged class betrays.

"The educated Swedish gentleman," says Mr. Laing, appears to me so far removed by station and conventional distinction from the man of the lower class, that the condition of the latter is scarcely better known to him than to a foreigner. The Swedish educated class appears also very susceptible of the fashionable opinions of the day in the rest of Europe, and fond of applying them to Sweden, as a part of Europe, without consideration of social or physical differences. There is a fashion of the day, we all know, in general opinions as in clothes. The ignorance and inebriety of the lower classes are the two topics which in other countries engage at this day the attention of all enlightened people. The Swedish gentry adopt the fashionable subjects-without considering that infant schools and temperance societies, however useful in a dense manufacturing population like that of Britain, are inapplicable in a thinly-peopled country, in which infants would have to be carried a day's journey to make up a number for a school; and people could not meet to be sober without a vexatious loss of time, and a fatigue which would almost excuse their getting drunk. I venture to place to this account a good deal of the attributed drunkenness of the Swedish people, and believe them to be in this respect not worse than their neighbours*.”—Page 135—6.

The ignorance of the upper classes, touching the habits of the industrious classes generally, must necessarily be conspicuous in all countries, though perhaps less so where there is a widely-extending and minutely-graduated middle class insensibly melting into the two extremes. Even in this country such ignorance prevails to a considerable extent. The upper classes talk, and form opinions of the lower, without

*"The females are not, even in the lowest class, addicted in the slightest de