cheap there; and all classes of labourers are on an average prosperity far beyond that of the English peasant. The division of properties, therefore, has not hitherto operated to create a beggarly population, or to check the accumulation of a sufficient national capital.*

Nothing can be more gratifying to the eye of the philosopher and the philanthropist, than

than it otherwise would be. In the south, the influence of the revolution has been less felt. The people, there, are poor, ignorant, and superstitious, as compared with those of the northern provinces. Fiscal restrictions upon internal commerce also operate universally to depress agriculture. Errors and prejudices on the subject of free trade, tend to the same unhappy consequences. Notwithstanding the march of intellect, Europeans are yet only in a state of semi-barbarism.

Sir F. Burdett, whose aristocratic leanings on this point are well known, having asked General La Fayette, what they would do in France, when the land shall be divided into properties of a few square yards; he replied by asking, how England would manage, when it has but four or five proprietors.

the spectacle of small slips of land rendering the most bountiful crops, which abound in the neighbourhood of Paris. Every rood of ground is under a separate culture, indicating, generally, a separate proprietor; and the countenance, bearing, and personal appearance of the village inhabitants, bespeak a corresponding ease and intelligence. In the great cities, the constant and regulated demand created by a population of small fortunes, keeps in activity a greater portion of internal commerce, than formerly resulted from the demands of a few large proprietors. In the mean time, the task of supporting life and caste is less burdensome; enormous riches less frequently cast a shade upon honourable poverty, or render luxurious indulgences the best passport to good society. Corruption is not solicited by the too severe pressure of want, or by the thirsting of ungratified passions. Public opinion is therefore more potent, the natural morality is sounder, and a genuine civism pre

VOL. II.

C

vails, unknown to the venal members of close boroughs, or to the crouching bondsmen of county despots. While this spirit prevails, while the institutions which have developed it are in vigour, it matters little what the subsisting political arrangements of power may be. The laws may be as imperfect a security for the citizen, against the encroachments of arbitrary sway, as can be conceived; liberty must eventually triumph for a nation of small proprietors is not to be subdued-it is not to be gulled and defrauded. Before the face of such a nation, the cunning of the Jesuit is

*Nothing can show the liberalizing tendency of gavelling in a stronger light than the recent elections in France. The elective franchise is reduced to its minimum of extent. The eighty thousand richest inhabitants alone exercise the right; yet the returns are, with few exceptions, pure, and in the well-understood interests of the country. How the heart sickens, and the mind is shaken, by the opposite picture of fraud, perjury, and egotism, so frequently exhibited in the elections of aristocratical England!

folly; the self-will of the despot is feebleness. Even under existing circumstances, France, with all its drawbacks and all its difficulties, after passing through two foreign occupations and thirty years of unceasing revolution and warfare, is still the happiest and most prosperous nation of Europe: and this, simply because a distribution of wealth, favourable to industry, has freed it from the tyranny of a wasteful master caste, and has allowed the people the opportunity of exerting their industry to the greatest posssble advantage.

THE ORLEANS GALLERY.

NOTHING deranges my system of temperaments and hereditary organization, more than the Orleans family of our times. There is not a quality or disposition in the present generation that recalls the character of the imbecile and mischievous brother of Louis XIV., whose inordinate folly was the cause of more than one useless crime; there is nothing about them of the Regent, save his good nature, and love of arts and letters; or of Egalité, but his bon hommie and popular manners. Either the race has been happily crossed, or events have acted most favourably upon it. The great school of