LAING'S NOTES Of' A TRAVELLER.

THIS is a volume of the results of travel; a series of disquisitions on subjects which Mr. LAING has observed and considered during various Continental journies, in Holland, Germany, France, Switzerland, and Italy. Discussions on questions of politics or political economy is therefore the character of the work, not a continuous narrative, or descriptions of scenery, or personal adventures,—although there is here and there some very broad and graphic description ; the disquisitions continually furnish striking pictures of the social life, the material condition, and the state of morality in the countries whose circumstances are discussed ; and instances of personal anecdote are incidentally mingled in the disquisition when they illustrate any particular point. The only exception to this account is "Travelling in Italy," which approaches the form of the regular tour.

The primary object of Mr. LAING is to trace the effects of the French Revolution "in the social economy of the European people." And to a certain extent this is fulfilled; inasmuch as it is impossible to investigate the condition of any nation over which that devastating tornado often swept without finding extensive results, that were produced either by the direct action of the Republican and Imperial wars, or indirectly by the efforts made to oppose them. Strictly speaking, however, Mr. LAING discusses the most prominent and important points in the present state of various Continental countries, whether arising from the French Revolution or from some inherent cause deeply seated in the constitution of the country.

In Holland, for example, five or six points are considered, of which only the union with Belgium has any thing to do with the French Revolution ; for the question, can mere commercial greatness be permanent without a broad basis of agricultural or manufacturing industry to rest upon ? is inherent to Holland though not peculiar to it ; Carthage, some of the Italian republics, and the Hanse Towns, exhibiting the same phmnomena. A similar remark applies to the equally interesting question, the extent to which mercantile prosperity affects the mass of people. Does it benefit them like manufactures ? or does it leave them a mem mass of paupers?—as Mr. Luso maintains it does; instancing the well-known poor colony of Frederies-oort as the desperate effort of necessity to provide for a national pauperism it was no longer able to maintain. An examination of the true benefits of Federalism, and its probable extension among the smaller states of Europe, is rather suggested by America and Switzerland than France. The narrow argument upon the national advantage of an expenditure on material products, over an outlay on the fine arts, is of a still more general kind : the instance from France is from Louis the Fourteenth.

The chief topics in France itself arise from the Revolution ; and consist of a keen and comprehensive view of the beneficial effects of the abolition of the law of primogeniture,—in part of which, however, Mr. LAING had been anticipated by Mr. HENRY BELWER and a searching investigation, political, statistical, and moral, into the mischievous influences of centralization, and its probable destruction as freedom advances. In Prussia, the discussion of their military organization so far relates to the French Revolution, that Mr. LAING attributes its origin to the defeat of the troops formed upon the system of FREDERICK the Great : but the German Commercial League originated in purely economical circumstances, and is upheld, Mr. LAING considers, rather from a spirit of nationality than from any material advantages it will produce to many of its members. The elaborate inquiry into the educational system of Prussia, as well as into several other points of its social economy, the discussion on the Corn-laws, and the account of travelling in Italy and the sketches of its principal towns, have no further reference to the great political volcano than the post hoc propter hoc. The comparison of Protestantism with Catholicism has a closer connexion; for Mr. LAING holds that the confiscation of temporalities, and other causes springing out of the French Revolution, have changed the aspect of affairs ; placing the clergy of the Catholic Church in a somewhat similar position to that occupied by the Protestants at the mra of the Reformation.

"The sleek, fat, narrow-minded, wealthy drone, is now to be sought for on the Episcopal bench, or in the Prebendal stall of the Lutheran or Anglican Churches; the well-off; comfortable parish minister, yeomanlike in mind, intelligence, and social position, in the manse and glebe of the Calvinistic Church. The poverty-stricken, intellectual recluse, never seen abroad but on his way to or from his studies or church duties, living nobody knows how, but all know in the poorest manlier, upon a wretched pittance, in his obscure abode—and this is the Popish priest of the nineteenth century—has all the advantage Of position with the multitude for giving effect to his teaching." The topics we have enumerated, and many others of a miscellaneous kind, are commented upon with great spirit and power,—the combined result of much natural shrewdness and a manly tone of mind, sharpened by constant exercise, great information as to living facts, and extensive theoretical knowledge of principles. The quantity of matter contained in this single volume would outweigh a dozen or twenty common travel-books, and exceeds that of any single work which has for years emanated from the press. Nor is it wanting in literary excellence. The subjects are all important in themselves, and well presented with a view to attract the reader who would take the slightest interest in such kind of questions. Every thing is exhausted, according to Mr. LAiNG's mode of exhaustion, yet nothing is overdone. His social and political investigations are interesting for their intrinsic importance, and attractive from their racy, vigorous mode of treatment : his political economy and his statistics have none of the dryness frequently attendant upon such subjects, for they are all well selected and applied ; the reader sees the object they are advanced to prove, and is not wearied by details which convey no idea of a whole or a purpose. The composition, throughout, is clear, vigorous, and full of life ; the style never stagnates ; and in some of the more general descriptions, it displays a rough picture-like power, which presents by a few touches a general view of the country's physical aspect.

In speaking thus of the merits of the Notes of a Traveller, it must not be supposed that the book is devoid of faults ; for it has several, but still of a racy kind. Mr. LAING always displays a " becoming confidence" in himself, which in his preface breaks out exultingly : his mind inclines very strongly to overrate the material and to underrate the intellectual : he has no objection to a paradox ; and, not content with bringing every thing to a home standard, he makes it, whether right or wrong, the touchstone by which most things are to be tested. These defects, however, though they detract from the philosophical value of the book, do not affect its attractive power. In selecting our extracts, we shall rather aim at giving a taste of the different things which may be found in the volume, than at presenting a distinct idea of any particular topic ; all of which deserve a special perusal. Here, as an example of his description, are generic pictures of France, Holland, and Berlin.

HOLLAND.

Holland, the land of cheese and butter, is to my eye no nnpicturesque, uninteresting country. Flat it is; but it is so geometrically only, and in no other sense. Spires, church-towers, bright farm-houses, their windows glancing in the sun, long rows of willow-trees, their blueish foliage ruffling up white in the breeze ; grassy embankments of a tender vivid green, partly hiding the meadows behind, and crowded with glittering gaudily-painted gigs and stoolwaggons, loaded with rosy-cheeked, laughing country-girls„ decked out in ribands of many more colours than the rainbovv,all as streaming in the wind; these are the objects which strike the eye of the traveller from seaward, and form a gay front view of Holland as he sails or steams along its coast and up its rivers. On shore, the long continuity of horizontal lines of country in the background, each line rising behind the other to a distant, level, unbroken horizon, gives the impressions of vastness and of novelty.

FRANCE.

The traveller in France finds much to observe, but little to describe. The landscape is a wearisome expanse of tillage-land, unvaried by hill and dale, stream and lake, rock and woodland. The towns and villages are squatting in the plains, like stranger beggar-women tired of wandering in an unknown land. No suburbs of connected rows of houses and gardens, and of lanes dotted with buildings, trees, and brick-walls, stretch, as in England, like feelers into the country, fastening the towns to it by so may lines that the traveller is iu doubt where country ends and town begins. Here, the towns and villages are distinct, round, inhabited patches upon the face of the land, just as they are represented upon a map; and the flat, monotonous surface of the map is no uncharacteristic sketch of the appearance of the country. La belle France, in truth, is a Calmuc beauty ; her flat pancake of a face, destitute of feature, of projection or dimple, and not even tattered with lines and cross-lines of hedges, walls, and ditches. This wide, unhedged expanse of corn-land on either hand, without divisions, or enclosures, or pasture-fields, or old trees, single or in groups, is supremely tiresome. The traveller at once admits that France has a natural claim to the word which all other countries have borrowed from her— ennui.

BERLIN

Has the air of the metropolis of a kingdom of yesterday. No Gothic churches, narrow streets, fantastic gable-ends, no historical stone and lime, no remnants of the picturesques ages, recall the olden time. Voltaire in satin breeches and powdered peruke, Frederick the Great in jack-boots and pigtail, and the French classical age of Louis the Fourteenth, are the men and times Berlin calls up to the imagination of the traveller. A fine city, however, Berlin is—very like the age she represents—very fine and very nasty. Berlin is a city of palaces; that is, of huge barrack-like edifices, with pillars, statues, and all the regular frippery of the tawdry school of classical French architecture— all in stucco, and frequently out at elbows, discovering the naked brick under the tattered yellow faded covering of plaster. The fixtures which strike the eye in the streets of Berlin are vast fronts of buildings, clumsy ornaments, clumsy statues, clumsy inscriptions, a profusion of gilding, guard-houses, sentryboxes ; the moveables are sentries presenting arms every minute, officers with feathers and orders passing unceasingly, hackney droskies rattling about, and numbers of well-dressed people. The streets are spacious and strait:ht, with broad margins on each side for foot-passengers ; and a band of plain flagstones on these margins make them much more walkable than the streets of most Continental towns. But these margins are divided from the spacious carriageway in the middle by open kennels, telling the nose unutterable things. These open kennels are boarded over only at the gateways of the palaces, to let the carriages cross them ; and must be particularly convenient for the inhabitants, for they are not at all particularly agreeable. Use reconciles people to nuisances which might be easily removed. A sluggish but considerable river, the Spree, stagnates through the town ; and the money laid out in stucco-work and outside decoration of the houses would go far towards covering over their drains, raising the water by engines, and sending it in a purifying stream through every street and sewer. If bronze and marble could smell, Blucher and Bulow, Schwerin and Zeithen, and duck-winged angels and two-headed eagles innumerable, would be found on their pedestals holding their noses instead of grasping their swords. Of the educational system of Prussia and other Continental states, Mr. LAING speaks with disapprobation if not with contempt. It is mechanical, not moral; it produces reading and writing machines, not men and women, accountable creatures. This system of school " drill"—this " reduction of the population of a country to the social condition of a soldiery off duty, roaming about their parade-ground," coupled with the system of centralization—causes, in our author's opinion, that low public and private morale, mingled with that theatrical taste, which we condense into the emphatic word foreign.

ENGLISH AND GERMAN GENTLEMEN.

This want of self-respect in the German character, produced by the educational and social system, and the undue importance in the German mind of rank, office, and conventional distinction, and the undue weight of these in the social economy of Germany, are strongly marked by the profusion of orders, stars, crosses, ribands, and empty titles, with which the people, both of civil and military station, adorn and gratify themselves. Every third man you meet in the streets has a label in his button-hole, telling all the world, "1 am a knight, look at me." No very young man among the Continental military can have ever heard a bullet whistle in the field; so that even by this class no very profound respect for the riband at the-button-hole can be claimed, and none at all by the ordinary civil classes who trick themselves out with it en tsilitaire. The feeling of personal worth—the pride it may be—seems unknown to them, which leads the British nobleman, gentleman of high station, or military officer, who may have been honoured with a British or foreign order, to wear it only on particular parade occasions. He feels that he is something without the external testimonial of it : the German takes the emblem for the thing itself. The English gentleman would think it quite as inconsistent with his personal dignity to walk about on ordinary occasions, in the ordinary circles of society, with his stars, crosses, and ribands plastered on his breast, as with the gazette of the actions in which he had won his distinctions plastered on his back. The German, again, ties his bit of red riband even to the buttonhole of his dressing-gown ; the merchant goes to his counting-house, the apothecary to the barber's shop to be shaved, the professor to his lecture-room, in crosses and ribands, as if they were going to the levee of the sovereign. The upper classes of society in all countries are said to be very much alike, and to show few of the peculiar distinctive differences which mark the national character in the middle and lower classes of each country. This is a mistake. The English gentleman, from the highest rank to the very lowest that assumes the appellation, is distinguished from the Continental gentleman by this peculiar trait of character—his dependence on himself for his social position, his self-esteem—call it pride, or call it a high-minded feeling of his own worth. There he stands, valuing himself upon something within himself, and not upon any outward testimonials of it conferred by others. This feeling goes very deep into society in England. • * • While every third man is lounging about as in Prussia, and generally on the Continent, with his orders of merit of some kind or other—and many whose general merits would apparently be nothing the worse of the addition of a little industry to earn a new coat to stick their honours upon—the people, be their forms of government what they may, are but in a low social and industrial condition—are ages behind us in their social economy, and in their true social education as fne agents and members of the community.

Wars and victories have passed away : tempora midantur, and so forth ; but one Englishman is still equal to three foreigners in the present arena.

RATIONALE OF MANUFACTURING INDUSTRY.

Human character also, in the large, is formed by human employment, and is only removable with it. The busy, active, industrious spirit of a population trained to quick work and energetic exertion of every power, in the competition of a manufacturing country, is an unchangeable moral element in its national prosperity, founded upon Fa-eductive industry. Look at an Englishman at his work, and at one of these Dutchmen, or at any other European man. It is no exaggeration to say, that one million of our working-men do more work in a twelvemonth, act more, think more, get through more, produce more, live more as active beings in this world, than any three millions in Europe, in the same space of time; and in this sense I hold it to be no vulgar exaggeration that the Englishman is equal to three or four of the men of any other country. Transplant these men to England; and under the same impulse to exertion and expeditious working habits, which quickens the English workingclass, they also would exceed their countrymen at home in productiveness. It is not in the human animal, but in the circumstances in which he is placed, that this most important element of national prosperity, this general habit of quick, energetic, persevering activity, resides; and these circumstances, formed by nature, are not to be forced into any country, independently of natural agency, by mere dint of capital.

The essay on the Prussian military system is a very remarkable paper ; though military observers are not so panegyrical as Mr. LAING supposes them, but have noticed that the time of training is too short to form a cavalry or artillery soldier. In the economical and political views of the question, Mr. LAING is penetrating, novel, and profound. The economy of the system he questions, or rather denies : more wealth is lost to the community, by taking the young producers of a country, at the most critical period of their industrial life, and keeping them playing at soldiers for three years besides infecting their habits for ever, than would be paid to maintain a regular army forming a separate class. On the political and physical views of the question Mr. LAING shall speak for himself.

THE PRUSSIAN ARMY DEFICIENT AS A POLITICAL POWER.

A Prussian army could be assembled for annual exercise and manoeuvre on the frontier, for purposes of demonstration, and even of occupation of adjoining parishes in Luxemburg ; but, however brilliant, expert, and well-disciplined such an army might be, and however ready and eager to engage in actual warfare its officers and its men might he, it is obviously so constituted, that it cannot be freely used in the field by its Government as a political machine. The property, the industry, the intelligence, the influence of the country, are in its ranks—all that is valuable in a nation is in its ranks, and not merely a class given up to military service, as scapegoats for the rest of the community, and composed generally of the least valuable and most isolated members in it, whose loss is simply the loss of soldiers. Here, the loss would be the loss of the owners or heirs of the property of the country—the loss of fathers, husbands, sons—of men on whom the interests and industry of the country hinges—of the most useful and influential classes in it ; not of the unconnected, idle, and outcast only, of whom an ordinary standing army is composed. The loss by a victory would be greater to Prussia, in a political and economical view, than the loss by three defeats of ordinary troops. The affairs of society would be more deranged ; more useful life would be destroyed. An army composed of such materials cannot be risked, unless on the rare occasions, as during the last war, when national existence and safety are visibly at stake. The loss even of time and labour to all the productive classes, the destruction of all manufacturing industry and enterprise, by calling out the army of reserve, composed, as it is, for actual service for a campaign or two, would be such a sacrifice of all social interests as only the most imminent danger could justify.

THE GENTLEMAN-ELEMENT AND WORKING-ILAN-ELEMENT IN WAR.

Two distinct elements may enter into the construction of a military force in modern times. The rough peasant, or working-man-element, may compose not only the main body of the soldiery and non-commissioned officers, but may be mixed pretty high up even in the class of commissioned officers ; or the gentleman-element, that of the educated, refined, delicately bred and broughtup classes, may, by the formation of the military force out of the social body, be found preponderating, if not in numbers, at least in example and influence, in the ranks of an army. Which of the two, as military machines, would a Wellington prefer to work in a campaign ? It is possible that a certain delicacy of mind and body, a certain impatience of fatigue and discomfort, a certain over-refinement for the work of the common soldier, may creep in and pervade too generally the mass of an army, assimilating the rougher material, of which soldiery, to be effective, must be composed, too much to itself. The soldier, like the horse, may be too finely bred, too delicately reared for his Work, too soft, too refined, too much used to comforts. The composition of the Prussian army, drawn indiscriminately from all classes, from the middle and comfortable as well as the roughly-living classes, has this defect evidently in it. The common labouring man lumsdf on the Continent is, from the nature of the climate and his in-door employments for half the year, much less exposed -to and less hardened against wet, cold, fatigue, and privation, than our common people. Those above the mere labouring class, the peasantry, the artisans, the middle class, and higher classes, all of whom are in the ranks, are so comfortably brought up, so wont to their regular meals, their cup of coffee, their pipe, their warm clothing, warm rooms, and are so cold-catching and sensible of weather, wet, fatigue, and discomfort, that even our highest classes of nobility and gentry are much more hardy, and, as every traveller remarks, far more robust in constitution and capability of enduring great fatigue and privation, than the very servants they hire on the Continent to attend them. A military force composed of such a material may be very brilliant for a single field-day, a battle, or a short campaign even, and very effective for home defence, but is not of the atuff for long rough fatigue and persevering endurance of all discomfort and privation, which in all ordinary military conjunctures are the military qualities that insure success. Something of this want of the rougher material, and of this excess of the finer material, appears, even to the nn-military eye, about the Prussian soldiery. They are light, well-made, even elegant figures—youths evidently formed upon the standard of a higher class of society than the common men in other services. They have not only the use of their limbs, but the kind of grace of movement which such exercises as dancing, fencing, and gymnastics give. They attitudinize well on sentry, dress individually well, and with a certain degree of dandyism, pantalooned, padded, and laced in, and which bcseems the soldier. But still, the unmilitary English eye of the common traveller misses the giant frame, strength and -vigour, of the front-rank men of our good regiments of the Line. The Guards even, and Cuirassiers, compared to the British, appear—can it be prejudice, or is it reality 2—of ordinary infantry and ordinary dragoon make and size. Put them in the uniforms of Riflemen, or of Hussars, and they would pass for such on ordinary unmilitary people ; but put one of our Horse Guards or Cuirassiers on the horse and in the accoutrements of a Light Cavalry man, or one of our -grenadiers, not of the Guards alone but of any of our good regiments, into a light infantry company, and there is not a grocer in Marylebone parish who would not find out at once that this kind of man was misplaced. Now this kind of man—the strong, sinewy, bony, muscular, grenadier frame of man, such as composes the front-ranks at least of all our good regiments of the Line—is a very scarce kind of man in Germany probably from the natural growth and make of the people, and also from their softer and more delicate, more sedentary, more in-door life in boyhood when the frame is forming. If you see a stout man, he is generallyfleshy, with more weight than strength. A tendency to grow corpulent, and with what generally accompanies that tendency of the frame, a shortness of the arm-bones as compared to men of the same size of lean, spare constitutions, is very common in Germany. This tendency to a lusty roundabout rather than a muscular growth, strikes the eye in the Prussian soldiery ; and is no doubt derived from the easy, regular, good living to which the classes from whom the ranks are filled have been accustomed from infancy. If a doubt may be permitted to a traveller, not certainly qualified to judge of such military matters, it would be—Is this so good a material to form an army of, this admixture of a class more delicately bred than the common

• labouring man, and giving its own habits, wants, and tastes, to the whole mass ? Is this gentleman-element so well adapted to stand privation, fatigue, discomfort, and all that assails the common soldier, as the rougher material, the common working-man-element, out of which our army is composed ?

We have not left ourselves space to go into Mr. LAING'S discussion on the Corn-laws ; which, indeed, is a subject of itself. He advocates the abolition upon broad principles ; but is of opinion that it would not produce such a demand for our manufactures as the League people assert. In the first place, the mere abolition would not ex necessitate open Continental markets to us; we should still be-shut out by duties. In the next, if those duties were got rislog the people of Germany and Prussian Poland are not ex, .elmagers of industry; they do not produce to exchange, but to consume; and no mere acts of legislation or of diplomacy could alter this natural habit. The pith of this view will be found in the following passage from the German League; whose eventual nonsuccess he attributes to a similar cause.

"In our social system, every man buys all he uses and sells all he produces; there is a perpetual exchange of industry for industry. A home-spun and home-woven shirt, jacket, and trousers, would certainly not be found with us upon the body of one labouring man in forty thousand. All he wears, all he eats, all he drinks, must be produced for him by the industry of others, and bought by the price of his own industry. The very bread of our labourers in husbandry is often bought at the manufacturer's shop. In Germany the economy of society is directly the reverse; not one labouring man, farmer, or tradesman pretty high up even in the middle class of the small towns, uses in clothing, food, furniture, what is not produced at home by his own family. In the centre even of German manufacturing industry, in the provinces on the Rhine, you will not see among twenty labouring people the value of twenty shillings altogether in clothing articles not produced at home by the application of their own time, labour, and industry. They are not badly clothed' but on the contrary, as well, if not better, than our own labourers—in very good shirts, good jackets trousers, stockings, shoes, and caps, but all home-made, or at the utmost village-made—not made by a class of manufacturer doing no other work, and bought with the wearer's money. These are not consumers for whose demands the operative labours, and the master manufacturer and mechanician invent, calculate, and combine. Tobacco, coffee, sugar, wine and spirits, cotton-yarns for home weaving, and dye-stuffs for home-made cloth, take a large proportion of what these twenty-six millions of people have to expend in foreign articles. It is little comparatively, they have to expend, because much of their time and labour is applied to the direct production and manufacturing of what they use; much, a great deal more than with us, goes in eating, drinking, cooking, social enjoyment, and in fuel-preparing, and such small household work in which there are no earnings or reproduction ; and, above all, much of the workman's means of earning, much of his time,

labour, and productivess, is taken by the Government, in the shape of military and other duties, from the working-man. The small proprietors occupying and living from the land have no surplus earnings to lay out in products of manufacturing industry. Having the rude necessaries of life very much within themselves, they are not forced into the market by any necessity ; and being bred in the rough simplicity of the common soldier's life at the age when a man's tastes and habits are forming, they have no very refined indulgences or tastes to gratify, no habits or usages of a mode of living requiring the aid of much manufacturing industry. It is more difficult, perhaps, to bring a nation

to consume, than to produce."

That is, if they are to pay for it.