126 
STATE AGRICULTUEAL SOCIETY. 
means, the sweetest and neatest of all German towns, and I am glad to be on 
the railway cars, dashing westward. 
COLOGNE TO BRUSSELS. 
Between Cologne and Aix la Chapelle, the country is quite flat and culti¬ 
vated in good German style. Wheat, rye, oats, barley, hemp and the sugar 
beet are looking well. 
The engine whistles, and the agents announce “ Aachen ! ” from which I 
know that we approach the old imperial city of Aix la Chapelle, on the fron¬ 
tier between Rhenish Prussia and Belgium, and about 40 miles from Cologne. 
A handsome, well built city, with at least one broad, beautiful street, 
through which, as I look upward towards the summit of the slope on which the 
town is built, the eye is charmed by the magnificence and beauty of city and 
suburbs. A stirring place too, with modern improvements and a manifest 
disposition to get back as much as possible of the prosperity and importance 
it once enjoyed. But it’s of no use, 0, ye Chapellers ; it was Charlemagne 
who made your hill-girdled city once so famous, and Charlemagne has 
been dead a thousand and forty-nine years ! Yon may vigorously carry on 
your numerous factories for the making of needles, of kerseymere, of files, 
and of copper and brass wires, and so make your goodly city a greater bless¬ 
ing to the province than before, but the great emperors will no more come 
to you for coronation and burial. 
The warm sulphur springs of Aix la Chapelle are noted, and large numbers 
of foreigners annually come here for their health. 
—So much of Prussia and the other German States. Famous for its litera¬ 
ture, its science and its admirable systems of education, Germany is never¬ 
theless, behind in the arts, and especially in the mechanics ot agriculture and 
the breeding of cattle and horses. What the German States lack is unity. 
That secured, with their extensive mineral resources, their qu^-ter of a mil¬ 
lion square miles of productive lands, their facilities for manufacturing and 
commerce, what may not their forty-four millions of intelligent, industrious 
and liberty-loving people accomplish within the next century ! * * * 
And now I touch the soil of Little Belgium—th^ garden of Europe. 
Famous for the fertility of its soil and the perfection of its system of 
agriculture ; for the extent and great value of its mines of coal, iron, 
lead, zinc and manganese; for the magnificence of its forests of timber; 
for its teeming factories, whence are obtained the best linens, laces, 
cloths, carpets, porcelains, cutlerly and fire-arms known to the commerce of 
the world ; for the extent of its internal improvements ; for its fine old cities 
noted for the magnificence of their buildings, the productions of their industry, 
and the number of their institutions of learning and public libraries, for the 
denseness of its thriving, happy population, and for its heroic history. 
From Aix la Chapelle to Liege the country is mountainous—the people 
largely devoted to mining and manufactures. Verviers, on the way, is a 
stirring town, noted for its cloth factories; and Liege, at the confluence of 
the Neuse and the Ourthe, both navigable rivers, and at the point of inter¬ 
section of several of the most important railroads of the kingdom, is known 
the w'orld over for its superior fire-arms and cutlery—as the place where the 
Belgian rifles are made. Located in the very heart of the mining section of 
the country, where iron and coal are both inexhaustible, of superior quality 
and easily obtained, it is natural that it should be the great Birmingham of 
this kingdom. 
Passing through Liege to the wesw^ard, the railway rises by one of the 
steepest grades known in the world—so steep that the trains are obliged to 
be drawn up the incline by a stationary engine at the summit; froth which 
point the view of the valley and of the great smoking, thundering city is 
truly magnificent. 
Thence to Brussels, the brilliant capital of the kingdom, and distant about 
seventy miles, the surface of the country slopes ocean-ward, and is distin¬ 
guished alike for its mines and its^ agriculture. The farms are not only gar¬ 
den patches in size, but gardens in reality. Crops grown, as in France, with¬ 
out fences between. All the cereal grains, meadows, and various root crops, 
