XIV PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS. 



useful and literary education are taught, at an expense so moderate, that it is 

 placed within the reach of persons even of the most humble means. It has 

 every where places of religious worship, of such a variety that every man may 

 follow the dictates of his own conscience, where religious services are always 

 maintained with intelligence and decorum, sustained wholly by voluntary con 

 tributions ; and sects of the most discordant opinions live in perfect harmony, 

 recognizing in their mutual dependence the strongest grounds for mutual for 

 bearance and kindness. Taken as a community, they are the best-informed 

 people I have known; and they have numerous and well-chosen circulating- 

 libraries in almost every town. They have no connection with any large mar 

 ket ; and the produce which they have for sale goes through intermediate hands 

 to the great marts. They have few or no poor, and those only the emigrants 

 who may stroll there from neighboring provinces. The sobriety of the people 

 is remarkable ; they are every where a well-dressed people ; their houses abound 

 in all the substantial comforts and luxuries of life ; and their hospitality is un 

 bounded. They understand their rights and their duties, and have often dis 

 tinguished themselves by an extraordinary bravery and manliness in their 

 vindication and defence. No where is public order more maintained, or public 

 peace better preserved ; large portions of the inhabitants never bolt a door, nor 

 fasten a window, at night ; and in a village of some thousand inhabitants, I have 

 known a garden stored with delicious fruit, with no other fence than one which 

 served as a protection against cattle, as entirely secure from intrusion or plunder, 

 as if it had been surrounded even with a prison-wall bristled with clievaux-dc- 

 frise. In this state crimes are comparatively rare; courts of penal justice have 

 little occupation ; the prisons are often without a tenant, and there has been 

 scarcely a public execution for half a century. From such an example of EI 

 community almost exclusively agricultural, I have a right to claim for agricul 

 tural and rural life all the beneficial moral and social influences to which it* 

 enthusiastic admirers pretend. 



The present excited state of the civilized world ought more than ever to call 

 the attention of philanthropic individuals and of governments to the immense 

 importance of agriculture. I have been in France during the exciting scenes of 

 a political revolution, in which I have seen very many thousands of workmen with 

 out the means of support from their labor, and large bodies of them actually depend 

 ent upon public charity for their daily bread. It is not the dangers to public 

 liberty and order, growing out of such large unemployed and destitute multi 

 tudes, which so much disturb me, as the actual suffering to which they are 

 exposed, and the melancholy future that lies before them. In London I have 

 encountered, with an extreme depression of heart, thousands of squalid, ragged, 



