the ground from which the crock was to be removed. The Potter then became inspired, and said that the spirit of the deceased Doming had entered into him and must be appeased. The Devil he said had appeared to him in the shape of a Caffree who called himself Doming. I did not think the story at all improbable. For performing the necessary ceremonies my share was to be one-fifth of the contents of the pot, and the agreement between myself and Wittoo the Potter was, that Namdeo and I were to furnish the gold On the first necessary for making the cross.

day that I went to the Potter's hut I took nothing with me. The Potter gave me some rice and made me take an oath of secrecy. I told him I would inform Government of what occurred, because they have a right to all treasure-trove. When I next went to the Potter's hut, which was next day, I was again accompanied by Namdeo. We then all went to the place where the pot was deposited, which was situated about 200 paces from the hut. Namdeo and Wittoo shewed me the pot. This was in the night, and by means of a light Wittoo shewed me something in the hole in the side of it which looked like gold Mohurs. I was going to take out the Mohurs, when the Potter suddenly became inspired, and told me not to touch it. He did not allow me to touch the Mohurs, but seized hold of my hand and asked why I was in such a hurry. He said I must first bring him all that was wanted for the purpose of allaying the Caffree, or evil spirit of the defunct owner of the property. He then gave me a list of articles required for the first day's incantations, which came to Rupees 16. 4as. Amongst other articles enumerated were two pylees of bread, some butter and some brandy, besides Rs. 3 in cash. On the second day, I had to provide 12 bottles of brandy. Subsequently I gave him a bank note of 100 Rs. and 150 Rupees worth of gold ornaments belonging to my wife and daughter. It was decided, as much time would be lost in making the gold cross, that the ornaments, &c. should be buried in the hole where the pot was lying and that it should be at once removed. When we next went near the pot in pursuance of this decision, I gave all the articles I have enumerated to Namdeo, who added to it some gold ornaments of his own of the value of 150 Rupees. All the ornaments were placed together in a bag. The pot was then taken up, and the bag containing the ornaments was carefully placed in the hole in the ground from whence the pot was removed. The pot was placed on Wittoo's (the second prisoner) shoulders, and I and my son, who had accompanied me, walked behind muttering the incantations usual on such occasisons. Namdeo, the first prisoner, remained behind at the hole, and on my calling to him he said he was filling it up, and would make the ground even, so that it might not attract observation. Having walked on about two hundred paces

from where the pot had been removed, a short fat man, of a dark complexion, ran towards us from the East. His head was tied up in a handkerchief, after the fashion of the Malabar people. On passing me he gave me a push, passed on to the Potter who was walking in front of us, and threw him down and took away the pot with which he ran back to the spot from whence it had been taken. I saw the black man reach the spot and instantly disappear. I thought he was a devil and had passed into the ground. Namdeo, who had come up at this time to where I was standing overcome with amazement and fear, said, let us go back to the hole, the devil will now appear in the body of one of us. He immediately appeared in the body of Wittoo, the inspired Potter, and addressed us, saying, that the sweetmeats and the brandy had become impure in consequence of Wittoo having tasted them. This had made the devil very angry, and caused him to bring back the pot of gold. Namdeo calls himself a Mahratta, which is a higher caste than a Potter, but I have learned since this affair took place that the Potter's daughter has been given in marriage to the son of Namdeo. The devil, still speaking through Wittoo, said in reply to a question I put to him, that he was of no caste. He said he was a Christian Padre. He also said that Caffree devils were very cunning, and not to be put off with impure spirits in the shape of bad brandy. He, however, assured me that the pot was all right in its old place, and on stooping down I felt the edge of it, and became confident that I had made some mistake in my incantations. The devil then informed me that I could not expect to make myself master of the pot unless I increased the quantity of brandy and sweetmeats, and recommended that I should not trust the Potter again, but make the offering with my own hands. then all went away, and next day I purchased more brandy and sweetmeats, when Wittoo the Potter became again inspired, and pointed out another spot at some distance from where the Pot of Gold was buried, and desired me to make my offering there. The demon Caffree, who had again entered into the inspired Potter, told me that as Namdeo would be impure for twelve days owing to his sister having been confined of a daughter, we should all now go away and return again after the lapse of that period. I did as the evil spirit bid me, and on proceeding to the spot on the thirteenth day I found only Namdeo there, but no sign whatever of the inspired Potter and the pot of gold. I was put off in this sort of way from day to day for two months and a quarter, and after losing by the prisoners the sum of Rs. 266. 4 as. in bank notes, gold ornaments, brandy, and sweetmeats, in a vain endeavour to make myself master of the property so carefully guarded by the Caffree, I at last began to think the whole thing a deception, particularly as, when I remonstrated with Namdeo,

We

he told me he did not care if I complained to the Police. This convinced me that I had been defrauded, because at first they had bound me by an oath of secrecy not to divulge what was to happen.

"In reply to a question from the Judge, the prosecutor said that although it was true that he belonged to the learned and intelligent caste of Brahmins, and the prisoners to the low and ignominious caste of Potters, who are mere grubbers of the soil, he could not satisfactorily account for being thus brought into companionship with them. It was he said a fact, that he had been de

frauded as he described, and this had probably happened to him as a punishment for sins committed by him in a former life.

"Much of the testimony of the prosecutor was corroborated by other witnesses, and it appeared that the prisoners had made a false charge of assault against him at the Mazagon Police Office, which had been dismissed by the magistrate, thinking probably to deter him from prosecuting them for the robbery.

"The jury found both the prisoners guilty, and they were each sentenced to be imprisoned for twelve months in the House of Correction with hard labour."

THE works of Mr. Laing and of Mr. Kay are already numbered amongst the most successful of the past year; and they owe this high distinction, not alone to their native vigour, or to the industry which they attest, but very materially to that deep interest which the public takes in what is, in fact, their common subject-the social condition of Europe, as compared to that of England. It may be regarded as fortunate that they have, as the phrase is, come out together. In examining their leading topics, these intrepid writ ers have had to deal with questions which are, perhaps, the most vexed and perplexed of our stormy day. These are, by both, discussed with such obvious earnestness, so clearly, and with such a skilful array of what are called facts, that either would, were his work alone, go far towards impressing the public with his own convictions. But, happily, philosophers, as well as doctors, differ; and these gentlemen are, to a great extent, at variance on almost every matter of moment to which they refer. Mr. Kay, for example, views only the advantages of the Landwehr system, while Mr. Laing points out its oppressive working and injurious effects. The former sees the Continental systems of national education all coleur de rose. The latter, admit

ting their partial good, maintains that their results are far from satisfactory; that there is no millennium of moral and social improvement; that it is more than ever evident that knowledge is not mental power; that this school-room training don't do; and that free trade in education, as well as in political opinion, is the best for every people, and the safest for every government. Mr. Laing and Mr. Kay concur in estimating the beneficial attributes of the peasant proprietor, or small estate system, as developed in many parts of the Continent; but the latter dwells solely on its attendant good-sees in it only Arcadian innocence and primitive content, while its imperfections, failures, and resulting evil, as well as its unsuitability to the condition of England, are forcibly put forward by Mr. Laing. It is, therefore, as we conceive, fortu

nate that these authors have come before the public at the same moment. The reader who avails himself of their mutual aid, may profit by their disagreement, while disenthralled from all separate influence, and seeing their strong opinions in striking contrast, he the more easily decides between them.

We shall first open Mr. Laing's work, as being the more popular of the two, and, before we close it, shall have many

opportunities of noticing Mr. Kay's longer volumes.

The distinctive features of these able "Notes" are originality and good sense; and the originality, as may be inferred from the safe company in which we find it, has nothing of that ambitious straining for effect which has brought such just discredit on German neology, but is the simple result of honest observation. Chiefly, and above anything, we prize this book because we derive from it a well-founded assurance that England is the most free, the most virtuous, and the least taxed of all the countries of Europe. The last of this triad of averments may strike the reader as being somewhat too boldly made, but let him read the book and he will admit it to be well made out.

Highly, however, as we deem of Mr. Laing, he is, in our minds, no pope in politics, no infallible authority in religion, morals, or æsthetics. His leanings are democratic, he has a proclivity to paradox, and he is less suggestive of remedies than of defects. He is a steady opponent to the union of Church and State. He is heretical on the subject of church music and psalmody, and holds questionable views on the nature of capital punishments. On these and on other grounds many may differ from him, but the ripe, right, and vigorous judgment exhibited in all his works, and in this more fully than in any of its predecessors, must secure to him a high rank amongst the sound thinkers of his day.

Before discussing the agencies which are catalogued by Mr. Laing, we may observe that no one of them, and none, perhaps, of recent times, has been so influential as steam. This, more than dynastic change or political revolution, has tended and is tending to regenerate the nations of Europe. The intercommunication of ideas and of tastes, of mental and material wants, is now becoming so rapid and so well established, that, notwithstanding some serious impediments to present progress, every nation must advance, and all are tending towards the common goal of a higher civilisation. In connexion with this view, we transcribe the opening passage of Mr. Laing's book. It is also one of the few samples which we can afford to give of his skill in sketching by the way, and livelier manner.

"What a world of passengers in our steamer! Princes, dukes, gentlemen, ladies,

tailors, milliners, people of every rank and calling, all jumbled together. The power of steam is not confined to material objects. Its influences extend over the social and moral arrangements of mankind. Steam is the great democratic power of the age, annihilating the conventional distinctions, differences, and social distance between man and man, as well as the natural distances between place and place. Observe that high and mighty exclusive, sitting all by himself on the bench of the steamer's quarterdeck, wrapped up in his own self-importance, and his blue travelling-cloak lined with white, and casting his looks of superiority around him. He is an English gentleman, no doubt, of family and fortune. What a great personage this I-by-myself-I traveller would have been in the days of post-chaises-andfour, and sailing packets! Now, in the steamboat, not a soul, not even the ship-dog, takes the least notice of his touch-me-not dignity. He looks grand, he looks my lord in vain. Worse than want of respect is this want of notice at all, the being absolutely overlooked. The dinner-bell rings, and down must this great personage scramble with the rest of us; must eat, and drink, and carve, and ask and help, or be helped; and talk, listen, and live with the other passengers, or go without dinner, and starve; and nobody cares, or puts himself out of the way for him. His grocer's clerk, perhaps, or his tailor's heir-apparent, outshines him; or it may be puts down, in a cavalier tone, his assumption of superiority, in the hail-fellowwell-met circle of passengers, who are whisked along by this democratic power of steam, at equal pace, and equal price, with equal rights and equal consideration. It is not the English nobility and gentry only who are cut down, by the steam demon, to the dimensions of ordinary mortals. The German potentate, who at home sits in whiskered magnificence at the window of his schloss, and may count every sheet laid on the green to bleach within the circle of his hereditary dominions and territorial sway, condescends, in these days of speed and economy, to save his state revenues, and travel by steam, to visit his crowned cousins. Seated in the saloon of a Rhine steamboat, he stares over his tawny moustachios, like an owl in a withered beech-hedge, at the free-and-easy crowd of passengers, of all ranks and countries, who seem quite insensible of their proximity to so much grandeur. He discovers, perhaps, in his all-engrossing talkative vis-a-vis neighbour, at dinner, whom the waiters fly to serve, the thriving draper of his own village-metropolis, returning from Manchester, with a fresh stock of goods and assurance, with which he feels quite at his ease, and sits altogether unannihilated by the sublime presence. Nay, horror of horrors, the fellow calls for a bottle of higher-priced wine than his Serene Highness is drinking; nods, actually nods to the

thrice illustrious Herr; tells him they must have seen each other somewhere before, and proposes a glass to their better acquaintance! Where will the influences of steam power end? They began with the physical, and are extending over the social, political, and moral world."-pp. 1-3.

The new and distinctive elements in the social condition of Continental Europe, since the period of the French revolution, are these. The general

distribution of the land into small estates of peasant proprietors; the consequent extinction or diminution of the importance of aristocracy, and the substitution of another system, functionarism, as an aid to monarchy; the conscription or Landwehr institution, by which all the male population, fit for arms, are trained, and obliged to serve for three years in the ranks of a regiment of the line, and are afterwards counted as part of the military force of the country. To these must be added a fourth element, which, in most of the countries of Europe, is now exhibiting as marked an influence as any of the others: that is, a national system of education, compulsory, and under the management of Government. These topics are all treated of by Mr. Laing; and all, but the second, by Mr. Kay. In Mr. Laing's book they are intermingled with many others; in Mr. Kay's they form, except as we have said, the second, the sole staple of his work. We shall endeavour to examine this array of questions in as popular a manner as we easily can, and as rapidly as, because of the limits of a single notice, we must. Their interest and importance may be estimated by the emphatic observation of Mr. Laing, that, in consequence of the absence of these features from our own institutions, we are, in our social life and arrangements, much more distinct and widely apart from the Continental people, since the peace and settlement of Europe in 1815, than we ever were at any former part of our history. "The philanthropists," he adds, "who are flattering themselves that a peace of thirty years, and an unexampled extension of commercial affairs and personal relations between individuals of different countries, are rapidly assimilating all nations to one common type of civilization, and are bringing on a happy period when war will cease, conventional differences will no longer

divide nations, and all disputes between countries will be settled by arbitration at a Peace Congress, are not looking at the different demands of society which have been growing up on the Continent since the last peaceelements sown in war, and which are only adapted to and preparative of war, and a military organization and spirit of society. We are in reality now, in the nineteenth century, more the toto divisi orbe Britannic than we were in the fourth or fourteenth. The spirit and principle of our social institutions are more different now than they were, from those of the Continental people.

The first then of those new elements in the social condition of the Continent which we have to examine, is that of the distribution of land into small estates of working peasant-proprietors; and there is not, we believe, within the range of the political topics of our time, any question of deeper interest or greater importance. This distribution of the land among the mass of the population is, as Mr. Laing observes, the greatest of the social revolutions in Europe since the establishment of the feudal system. "The overthrow of dynasties and governments, the rise and fall of kings, and the revolutions of states, in the course of these last eventful fifty years, will be considered, by the future historian, as but secondary events-consequences, not causes-compared to this great and radical change in the spirit and elements of society itself." This change has, for the last half-century, been silently but steadily progressing in every country in Europe except our own, and is in fact the great revolution of modern Earope. We shall endeavour to point out succinctly the undeniable advantages of this small estate system in the countries to which it is adapted; we shall next exhibit its attendant defects; and shall close our observations on the subject by showthe unsuitability of such a system to our social condition; its impracticability in a manufacturing empire, which must mainly depend for its prosperity on its home market.

The advantages of the small estate system are, as may be expected, most apparent in those countries where it has been of old established, and where the modes of life and the industry of the people have become adjusted to it.

The great deal that can be said in its favour is, accordingly, nowhere more visible than in Norway and Sweden, in Flanders, Belgium, Holland, Friesland, and Holstein. The more perfect husbandry is, in all these countries, obvious to every traveller. "The whole expanse," says Mr. Laing, speaking of Flanders, is like a carpet divided into small compartments of different shades and hues of green, according to the different crops, of which each farmer has a different patch on his little estate. Two different kinds of crop may often be seen on one ridge or bed; and five or six acres together under one kind of crop are not uncommon. There being no hedges or inclosures, no grass fields for pasture, and no uncultivated corners or patches, the whole country looks like one vast bleach-field, covered with long webs of various colours and shades." The ordinary size of these properties is from ten to twelve acres; the soil is not better than the average good soils of England and Scotland, the climate is similar, and the agricultural products nearly the same. The comparisons therefore, between the garden culture of Flanders, and our large farm system, in regard to agricultural improvement and productiveness, may be fairly made, and must be, as Mr. Laing states, in favour of the former :

"Will any Scotch farmer of capital and skill, from the Lothians, venture to say that he has his farm of 200 or 300 acres, in such good heart, in such a clear garden-like con. dition, so free from weeds, and carrying, all over it, such luxuriant crops, and producing so much food per acre for man and beast, as an equal number of acres now before me in this tract of country? Has any farmer in Scotland or England such crops of red clover, lucerne, and other green successioncrops, as are now in spring; being cut, in succession, on these small patches of farms for the summer stall-feeding of cattle in the house? There are no cattle in the fields, and no pasture for them, in the ordinary course of husbandry, on these small estates. All are kept indoors, in summer as well as in winter; and all the land, not in grain crops, is under green crops for their support. The fodder is cut and carried to the cattle fresh twice a day, and the cutting and carrying employs the whole family. The stall-feeding of cattle all summer indoors, and the saving thereby of the manure, which is the object of it, during six months of the year in which the manure is positively thrown away by our system of pasturage in fields of permanent, or of second, or third year's

sown grass, is a husbandry scarcely known among our large farmers. It may indeed be reasonably doubted if it would be practicable on a large farm. To cut and carry green fodder for half a dozen cattle is an operation very different in expense from hiring labourers to cut and carry the whole summer-fodder of the cattle stock of a large farm. In gardening and husbandry, and even in trade and manufactures, there are operations which are practicable and profitable on a small scale, but which would not be so on a great scale; and many answer well on a great scale, which would not answer at all in a small way. It will not be denied that this summer stall-feeding, whether practicable or not on a great scale, produces more manure from the land than if the land were given up to pasture every fourth or fifth year, or oftener, according to the rotation of crops on the farm. Except the portion of its grass made into hay for winter fodder, none of the produce of the pastureland of a large farm is converted into manure that is profitable; for the manure dropped about by cattle grazing over a field, is altogether lost and unprofitable for the land. On every large farm, under what is called a good rotation of crops, one-fourth or onefifth of its arable land is out of cultivation every year for want of manure, and yet is producing none. Manure, abundance of manure, is allowed by all to be the basis of agricultural prosperity, either to the individual farm or to the country; and although lime, bone-dust, or guano, may raise great crops, unless the crops so raised produce manure, additional manure to the dung-hill and the fields, the land of a farm, or of a garden, or of a country, cannot be kept in heart, and these expensive applications turn out a shortlived delusion. If the farmer were to apply bone-dust or guano to raise a turnip crop, and instead of converting his fine turnip crop into manure for his farm, by keeping a suitable winter stock of cattle to consume it, if he were to cast one-fourth of his turnips into the sea, would not his neighbours pronounce the man mad? Yet in what is he more mad than the farmer who has one-fourth of his farm every year under grass, and instead of turning the whole of the produce of this area of land into manure, by stall-feeding cattle with the green crops which might be raised in succession upon it, throws away one-half, or two-thirds of its surface by pasturing cattle over it all the summer? Excepting the portion of it cut for hay, as the first year's sown grass, the whole produce of the rest, that is of the fields in second and third years' grass, might as well be carted into the sea, as far as regards the production of manure for the farm. It may be practically true that the sowing of a succession of green crops for summer fodder for cattle in the stall, the cutting, carrying, tending, cleaning, may not be profitable, nor even possible, unless we are talking of a cow-feeder's stock of half a