Danish government. Forty years ago I travelled this road - my bones ache at the remembranceand from Hamburgh to this town was a journey requiring two days by extra post, in a miserable open waggon. Now an excellent diligence, not heavier than one of our six-inside coaches, driven four-in-hand by a smart fellow in a red coat, with a time-piece at his girdle, the horses and harness superior to any usually seen at our ordinary stages in England, brought us to Kiel in ten hours, over a road as well macadamized as any of our highways. These are improvements-but they are the work of the government, not of the people. It is the ruling principle of the governments of the continent, at present, to do every thing for the people and nothing by them. Roads, diligences, steamvessels, schools, savings' banks, all, as well as the laws, emanate from, or are controlled by government, and even ordinary branches of private industry, such as mines, iron-founderies, salt-works, are subject to the inspection and regulation of government functionaries, and all trades and handicrafts are exercised under licence. The consequence of this principle of interference in all things, is, that the people remain in a state of pupillage, are trained to an inert dependence on their governments for all things, like that of the soldier on his officer, and do nothing for themselves. They trust to government, not to their own industry and exertion for every improvement. What the governments do in this enlightened age, is generally well done, and really beneficial to the people; but the

hand of government cannot be applied to their mode of living, their supply of useful articles in their households, their manners, habits, morals, and in short, to all that is most important in their social condition. Improvement in these must proceed from a spirit of improvement among the people themselves; and this spirit is kept down and extinguished by the principle of the interference of government in all things, even in branches of private industry. I saw here this morning by the side of a new steam-vessel just fitted out by government, or with its permission and privilege, a canoe, not a boat but a canoe, formed apparently out of a hollowed trunk of a large tree, and as a work of art in no respect superior to the Omiak of the Esquimeaux, paddled by two women with shovels at the prow and stern, and conveying a party of peasants across the bay. Government may copy the beneficial improvements of other countries, but cannot penetrate beneath the surface, and effect any improvement in the condition of the mass of the people with all its efforts, not even in the most necessary of arts, that of their ordinary transport by water. The canoe exists by the side of the steamvessel, barbarism by the side of civilised appearances, because government does everything, and allows the people no interest or voice in what is done. The principle and spirit of a government has more influence than its acts upon the well-being and social condition of a country. This principle of doing everything for the people and nothing by them, keeps a nation behind in real civilisation,

appearances its go

notwithstanding the external vernment may display. Copenhagen, April. The voyage from Kiel to Wordenborg, a little town on the south-east end of the island of Zealand, was not very pleasant. It was the first trip of the steam-vessel; and with people evidently unacquainted with steam machinery, and with the coast. There is very little depth of water between the large flat islands of Langaland, Laaland, and Zealand, and from the want of a pilot we had to remain all night at anchor off the coast, with scarcely a foot of water more than the vessel drew. Wordenborg appears to be a little country village, of which the church has been in former days surrounded by some fortification of brickwork. The passengers were accommodated here with very good horses and carriages to Copenhagen, a distance of about fifty English miles over a good road. The country through which we passed is well cultivated, the fields large, and belonging apparently to farms of considerable extent; but no regular course of crops is kept, at least no distinct proportions of land under green crops, sown grasses, or fallow, are observable. The inclosures are generally banks of earth, either planted with dead wood, or faced with stones taken from the field. These stones strike the eye as strangers in the country, for they are rounded masses of gneiss, granite, hornblende, and other primary rock, and the ground rock where it can be seen, is of a totally different formation, a sandstone, claystone, or limestone, with nothing crystalline in the texture. A

shower of stones from Norway, falling on the surface of Norfolk, would not appear more out of their natural place. The face of the country is covered with a deep soil somewhat clayey, the under rock protruding but in few places, even on the sea bank, and is raised into gentle swells sufficient to drain it into little lakes or swamps, in the lowest hollows, and to keep the fields, even of clay soil, dry and free from surface water. Between winter and spring, a country looks its worst, but this is evidently a fertile land, easily farmed, being naturally drained, unincumbered with fast rock or swamps, and of a strong good soil, and sheltered by gentle eminences not too steep or rough for the plough, nor too high and exposed for corn crops. If these large Danish islands. had been joined into one, few countries could have shown such a tract of good soil, uninterrupted by wastes or barren land. But Denmark is a country dismembered by nature.

April. It is one of the most remarkable circumstances in modern history, that about the middle of the 17th century, when all other countries were advancing towards constitutional arrangements of some kind or other, for the security of civil and religious liberty, Denmark, by a formal act of her states or diet, abrogated even that shadow of a constitution, and invested her sovereigns with full despotic power to make and execute law without check or control on their absolute authority. Lord Molesworth, who wrote an account of Denmark in 1692, thirty-two years after this singular transaction, makes the curious

observation, "That in the Roman Catholic religion, there is a resisting principle to absolute civil power from the division of authority with the head of the church at Rome; but in the north, the Lutheran church is entirely subservient to the civil power, and the whole of the northern people of Protestant countries have lost their liberties ever since they changed their religion for a better." "The blind obedience which is destructive of national liberty is, he conceives, more firmly established in the northern kingdoms, by the entire and sole dependence of the clergy upon the prince, without the interference of any spiritual superior as that of the pope among Romanists, than in the countries which remained catholic." "The Lutheran clergy retained their political power as a chamber or state in the diets, although totally dependant on the crown as spiritual and temporal superior." It was the influence of the clergy and the crown upon the third estate in the diet, that of the burgesses wearied out with the oppressive privileges of the nobility, that carried the abolition of all restriction upon the absolute power of the monarch. When Frederic III. in 1660, obtained this absolute power, he established five colleges or departments for the public business, of which the presidents were the ministers for the affairs under each department. This was in fact establishing a check upon his own absolutism from its very birth, and was virtually a representation of the various interests of the people, by enlightened men who would abandon office rather than principle. The members of these colleges -the system remains with few alterations to