Freedom of social action, freedom to teach and to be taught, freedom of the press, freedom of opinion, embrace all that a government can do, or ought to do, for the promotion of education. With these a nation will educate itself according to its requirements, and according to its natural advance in material wellbeing. Intellectual progress can only follow material progress. If the former outstrip the latter, either in the case of individuals or of nations; if a man is studying useful knowledge in the encyclopædia, while his week's income is still unearned; or if a nation is cultivating its taste at the opera, or in the picture gallery, while its fields are neglected, and its workshops deserted, the results are not so happy that a wise government should go out of its way to legislate for promoting the premature advance of intellectual culture. They will go hand-in-hand if left to themselves. The social, political, moral, and religious state of Germany and France, now, after half-a-century almost of national education by government machinery, is not so very encouraging that our legislature should hasten to adopt any similar system, or our social philosophers to recommend it. CHAP. VI. SIMI DUCHY OF SLESWICK, — APPEARANCE OF THE COUNTRY. GETTORF, 1851.-I have been for some time in this village, in the duchy of Sleswick, near the frontier of Holstein. It is only two or three miles from the boundary of the two duchies, and of Germany and Denmark, the river Eyder, or rather the canal which here occupies its original bed. I lodge in the house of a widow of a Bonde, or peasant proprietor, not uncomfortably, and very much in the way of seeing and hearing what interests the traveller. The country along the coast of the Baltic, and of its fiords, and for a short way back from the shore-side into the interior, is English all over-a country of small irregular fields, of various shapes and sizes, surrounded by hedges, and with hedges and hedgerow trees on each side of the country roads, the gently swelling grounds not rising any where to the elevation of hills, but cultivated to the summits and crowned with woods; the main roads good, and macadamised, the cross country roads bad, and many of them, the soil a light loam, rather inclining to sand than clay, and with foot paths across the fields, stiles, gates, single houses, hamlets, duck ponds, village greens, fields of old grass, old trees, oak, elm, beech, and few of the fir tribe, and with English-like cattle, horses, pigs, people, houses, farming implements—in short, like a slice of old England cut out of one of her best midland or southern counties, and transported across the North Sea. The country is so like England, and so unlike any other part of the Continent, and not merely in its shape, soil, or other natural features, but in what man has done upon its face in settling, cultivating, and taking it out of its primæval state of waste or forest, that the traveller views it with an immediate impression that this country and England have been one, and that the Anglo-Saxons, or pagan inhabitants of this peninsula, have been in a much higher state of civilisation when they invaded England in the fifth century than our monkish historians admit; and have imported into England the husbandry, cattle, style of dwellings, implements of husbandry, division of the land by hedges, and other peculiarities common at this day to both countries, and to be seen in no other. Nor does the account of our early historians contradict the supposition of a higher social state, and civilisation, than they describe, or admit. The invaders came by sea, and they must necessarily have had at home the use of iron, and, as the country produces none, the means, the natural or artificial products, and the commerce to buy, barter, and procure iron with, for weapons, and tools to construct ships. Husbandry they must have had to raise provisions for bodies of men embarking on a voyage of uncertain duration. They could not go to sea with less than a fortnight's supply of victuals, and of water secured in casks, or other water-tight vessels. They must have been able to raise and prepare flax or hemp to weave sail cloth, and to manufacture ropes. They must, in short, have had a very considerable diffusion among them of the useful arts, such as carpentry, smithwork, weaving, seamanship, as well as husbandry, to have fitted out ships filled with men to cross the ocean. The aspect of the land, the form of the dwellings and implements, and the diffusion of the arts and trades necessary among an agricultural and seafaring population, may not have been so very different, and inferior, fourteen centuries ago, as we suppose. People who could build ships, however sınall or rude, had certainly dwelling houses, the material, wood, being the same for both; and having necessarily sails, ropes, and provisions for a voyage, could neither have been naked, nor clothed in skins, nor dependent on hunting and fishing for their daily food; nor could they have been without the arts and trades of a considerably advanced stage of civilisation, when they embarked on voyages from the mouth of the Eyder to the mouth of the Thames. It is not on the face of the country only, but in the almost equally indelible features and spirit of its social institutions, that a similarity may be traced between this country and England. This peninsula, like England, has never been entirely feudalised. Large tracts of it, especially on the ocean coast, have always been occupied by peasant proprietors, or yeomen, holding their lands of no feudal superior, and retaining civil rights and privileges unknown among the same class in Germany. In Eyderstedt, Ditmarsh, Angeln, and other districts, both on the ocean and Baltic coasts, the owners of the land, the peasant proprietors, are very much in the social state in which their ancestors may have been in England before the Norman conquest partially introduced feudal usages. Feudality here has been superinduced, as in England, over an older and more free Germanic or Anglo-Saxon groundwork; but until lately it has not, as in England, become blended with the older institutions and one free social system formed out of both. Here, until the beginning of the present century, the feudal state of society, with its most aggravated abuses, serfage, hereditary jurisdictions, and a Ritterschaft, or body of nobles, noted, even in Germany, for arrogance and abuse of power over their leibeigen serfs, stood side by side with a social state in which peasant proprietors occupied entire districts of the most valuable land, and maintained an independent social existence with rights, and civil freedom, and the management of their own affairs in their own hands, and acknowledging no feudal authority over them. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the peasantry of the west coast resisted with the sword all encroachments on their free institutions. These still exist, and form a kind of republic of small landowners by the side of a feudal nobility which is rapidly declining in opulence and social influence. The expense of living in modern times has reduced the old feudal nobility in this country to a poor and indebted condition. What could be sold of their estates has been very generally disposed of, and, in many cases, to peasant proprietors who have clubbed together and divided their purchase; and what could not be sold on account of mortgages, entails, life-rents, or other interests involved, is let and managed by trustees. The social |