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producing in the social condition of the lower and middle classes of every country, the circumstances in their ancient institutions, laws, and governments, which are retarding or accelerating the progress these classes to a condition of higher moral and physical well-being, are objects particularly deserving the attention of the traveller. This field of observation, so important to the political philosopher, is scarcely entered into even at home. It is perhaps too homely to attract to it talent in proportion to its importance. To collect ordinary facts of common occurrence in a country, and to draw from them obvious conclusions on the state of its inhabitants, is not a work in which talent and genius are specially required, or from which much literary reputation can be gained. It is a field, however, in which the traveller, with the most ordinary intelligence and observation, may be eminently useful. In Norway and Sweden, such inquiries are peculiarly interesting at the present period, because these two nations, although the furthest removed from the agitation of the French revolution, have by a singular chance, been affected by it more permanently, and one of them more beneficially, than any others in Europe. Norway received a new and liberal constitution, and has started with the freshness of youth, a new nation, as it were, called suddenly into life from among the slumbering feudal populations of the

north. Sweden received a new dynasty, and slumbers on amidst ancient institutions, and social arrangements of darker ages. Having attempted, in a former work, to give a sketch of the present social condition of the Norwegian people, I considered it necessary, in order to complete the view of the present moral, political, and economical state of the inhabitants of the Scandinavian peninsula, to undertake the following sketch of the Swedish.

Edinburgh,

January 17th, 1839.

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