The rigour of the feudal system has been relaxed in Poland, but its spirit remains. The peasants are no longer the legal property of their lords, but they are in general as much bound by their necessities in his service, as they were by their obligation as vassals, before their formal emancipation in 1791, which has been confirmed on the various changes of masters their country has since undergone. They live in cottages, upon land which they are entitled to occupy on condition of performing certain stipulated services for the lord, and rendering him a sort of rent in kind, composed of various articles of the produce of their holdings, as 'poultry, eggs, yarn, and other things, in conformity with ancient usage.' If they are required to do more than the specified quantity of labour, they are entitled to wages. They are at liberty to leave the domain of the lord on discharging all that is due to him; but they are seldom able, and not often willing to avail themselves of this privilege. They usually remain upon the estates on which they and their fathers have been accustomed to live, unless the decline of their landlord's fortunes, in which the tenantry must necessarily share, compels them to seek elsewhere an easier or securer livelihood. The general poverty of the country cannot be better evinced than by the fact, that the want of peasantry is a general subject of complaint, especially among those (who are the far greater number) whose estates are loaded with mortgages or other incumbrances; such sometimes lose them, but cannot command the means of inducing others to settle on the land.' Their condition is miserable in the extreme.

These people live in wooden huts covered with thatch or shingles, consisting of one room with a stove, around which the inhabitants and their cattle crowd together, and where the most disgusting kinds of filthiness are to be seen. Their common food is cabbage, potatoes sometimes but not generally, pease, black bread, and soup or rather gruel, without the addition of butter or meat. Their chief drink is water, or the cheap whiskey of the country, which is the only luxury of the peasants; and is drunk, whenever they can obtain it, in enormous quantities. They use much salt with their vegetable food, and, in spite of the heavy tax on that commodity, can never dispense with the want of it at their meals. I was informed, and saw reason to credit the accounts, that when the peasants brought to the market towns their trifling quantities of produce, a part of the money was first used to purchase salt, and the rest spent in whiskey, in a state of intoxication that commonly endured till the exhaustion of the purse had restored them to sobriety. In their houses they have little that merits the name of furniture; and their clothing is coarse, ragged, and filthy, even to disgust.

"This representation of the condition and character of the peasantry, though general, cannot be considered so universal as to admit of no exceptions; some rare instances of perseverance in economy, industry, and temperance, are to be found; and, unfavourable as their circumstances may be for the creation of such habits, they are here attended by the usual correspondent results. Some few peasants have been enabled to gain three or four allotments, and to employ their sons or hired servants to

work for them; and there are, instances of such persons making a still further progress, and being enabled to purchase estates for themselves. Such cases as these, however, occur so rarely, that though they produce individual comfort and wealth, they have no perceptible influence on the general mass of society, or on the surplus quantity of agricultural productions.'-pp. 27, 28.

The estates in Poland are large, some of them of enormous extent; and as both lands and titles are descendible to all the sons in common, (unless in some cases where the estate is fettered by an entail), the number of nobles would be prodigious, but for a salutary regulation which controls their number by a reference to their income. Nobility, however, is cheap in Poland. The income requisite for a baron is equivalent to twenty-five pounds sterling. Seventy-five pounds a-year is the valuation of a count's title; and a man (duly born) may be a prince for one hundred and twenty-five pounds per annum. No Jew can be the owner of land; but people of that race become occasionally the subjects of very sudden conversions; and the mortgagee of a large property will sometimes (though the instances are not numerous) embrace Christianity in order to secure the estate.

The far greater number of proprietors are in great embarassment. A mortgage, indeed, is deemed so much an ordinary and proper appendage to an estate, that the owner will usually talk of the annual interest, as a farmer in this country would speak of his rent, rates, and taxes. These involvements have become so general, that a measure was lately adopted by the diet, which, for its singularity, deserves to be noticed.

'A national bank is to be established, in which landowners who are in debt, whether on mortgage or on simple contracts, may deposit a schedule of their estates, and a valuation of them: this valuation is to be made by themselves, and it is calculated it will not be made too high, because as the present land tax is collected on the income, and future imposts are to be levied according to this valuation, few will be induced to give in more than the true value. On the valuation, an annual interest is to be paid to the bank, at the rate of six per cent. for twenty-eight years. This is to be considered as interest at the rate of four per cent.; and two per cent. is to form the means of discharging, by compound interest, the principal in twenty-eight years. The bank, on receiving the documents, is to deliver to the proprietors its debentures or certificates; when, twenty per cent. being deducted from them, they are made a legal tender for the payment of all debts; and on which four per cent. interest is to be paid by the bank. When the instalment of the first year is paid, the two per cent. is to be divided among all the holders of the bank debentures, by a lottery. The drawers of the fortunate numbers will then be paid in full. The others will receive their interest, at the rate of four per cent., till their numbers are drawn prizes, some of which must, of course, wait till the expiration of the twenty-eighth year; at which period, upon this plan, if it should work well, all the debts will be liquidated.'-p. 35.

Mr. Jacob, with no little colour of reason, thinks it at least pos

sible that the same embarrassments which led to the adoption of this measure will prevent its due execution; and that it gives a strong temptation to a needy proprietor to sacrifice his creditor to his present necessities. It is only a bad modification of a plan, which has been sometimes proposed, though fortunately without meeting much encouragement, within the last few years in this country.

In Poland, as in Prussia, Mr. Jacob found the cultivation of wheat manifestly on the decline. In various instances, which are stated both in the report and the valuable appendix annexed to it, the price of wheat, when sold, did not amount to the cost of its production. In case a demand for this grain should arise in England, it appears, that in addition to the increase of price which would accrue from the allotting to the cultivation of wheat, lands now devoted to other purposes, there would be a very great increase in the cost of carriage from the most fertile provinces along the Vistula, to Dantzic, and thence to England. Mr. Jacob states the expenses attendant on the conveyance of wheat from Warsaw to Dantzic, and its preparation for shipment there, at twelve shillings per quarter, and estimates at eight shillings the freight from Dantzic to London. From Cracow to Dantzic, the whole expenses would be fifteen shillings a quarter, including the charges at the place of exportation. But in the years from 1796 to 1799, when the exports from the harbours of the Vistula were very considerable, these charges, on wheat sent from Warsaw, amounted to sixteen shillings and sixpence, and a corresponding difference must have existed in the expenses of consignments from Cracow, though no exact account of these is given in the report. Mr. Jacob concludes his reasoning thus:

'If a duty in this country of ten shillings or twelve shillings per quarter was imposed, it would not allow of such a profit, on the supposition of the price being from sixty shillings to sixty-four shillings, as to induce any great exertions to increase cultivation in the districts bordering on the Vistula. The chance of a rise occasioned by war, by a winter so severe as to injure vegetation, or by a rainy harvest season, might induce those of a speculative turn, to increase their growth of wheat; but those who have that turn, and have the means of indulging it, are so few, that they would produce no sensible increase in the general surplus.'-p. 53.

We shall give but one more extract from this truly interesting document. It states the views of the intelligent writer on the progressive exhaustion of a corn-country engaged in a course of perpetual exportation. If these views be sound, the apprehension that England could, by any change of policy, be very largely supplied with bread-corn from the north of Europe, is little better than an idle day-dream. And we own that to our understanding the facts which Mr. Jacob has adduced in support of these views, both in the report and the appendix, appear perfectly irresistible.

'It has been frequently remarked, that the exportation of corn from

any country, if long continued, must tend to exhaust the soil, unless some articles, capable of becoming converted into manure, are introduced to compensate for the injury. Many parts of the north of Africa, and of Asia Minor, which formerly supplied large quantities of corn to Europe, have since become deserts. Perhaps one of the chief causes of the progress we have made in agriculture, and of the superior productiveness of our fields, has arisen from our exporting but few, and importing many of those articles which are capable, when decomposed, of becoming manure, and being applied to renovate the soil, as much or more as it is exhausted by cropping.

'From Poland, for nearly two centuries, according to the document in Appendix, No. 24, the exports of corn have been very large, whilst, on the other hand, nothing has been imported, deserving of notice, which could be converted into nutriment to the soil.

'The system of rotation by which two crops of corn are raised in succession, and nothing is administered to refresh the land but a fallow, would exhaust the best soil with which we are acquainted.

'In every part of my journey through Poland, the impression communicated, in looking at the fields, whether with growing crops, in stubble, or under the operations of the plough, was, that they were approaching to a state of exhaustion from excessive cropping.

This view, which the rotation of crops and the face of the country suggests, is confirmed by the statistical facts, which shew that its power of supplying the wants of other countries is greatly diminished. The return of peace, after more than twenty years of extensive warfare, is commonly supposed to have increased the productions of the soil, and to be the cause of the depreciation of prices, which has been the general subject of complaint in every part of Europe. In Poland there has been no sensible increase of numbers, except within the last six years, when Germans, emigrant work people, to the number of 250,000, have established themselves in the different trades to which they have been accustomed in their native country.

'On comparing the surplus quantity of bread corn which Poland has exported in a series of the same number of years, we shall see what has been the falling off.

'In the eleven years (see Appendix, No. 15) beginning with 1795, and ending with 1805, the exports of wheat from the mouths of the Vistula, were 5,059,163 quarters or 438,263 a-year, on the average of the period. In the eleven years, beginning in 1815 and ending with 1825, the exports from the same ports were 1,669,027 quarters, or on the average of the period, 151,729 quarters per year. In the latter period, indeed, 78,265 barrels of flour were exported, supposing them to be all wheaten flour, it will increase the quantity 39,132 quarters, reckoning that two barrels are the produce of one quarter of wheat. In the first of these two series of years, the rye shipped at the same ports was 1,680,096 quarters; and that in the last series only 456,192 quarters.'-p. 42.

The picture which Mr. Jacob draws of the condition of a people, depending upon agriculture alone for employment and subsistence, may operate as a useful lesson to those fanciful speculators on the destiny of nations, who decry cheap food from an apprehension that the growth of manufactures may, some day or other, convert

England into "one great town." That wealth and civilization, the comforts, the enjoyments, and the dignity of man in social existence, can only advance in company with those arts which give employment to classes consuming the produce without engaging in the cultivation of the soil, is a truth of which it would be difficult to find a better illustration, than a contrast between commercial and manufacturing England, and agricultural Prussia and Poland. There is no magic in the name, no peculiar virtue in the soil of this island. It was once a barren, woody, and thinly peopled country. To ingenuity and enterprise, the children of free institutions, the parents and nurses of trade, commerce, and manufactures, we owe those very proud and princely fortunes, drawn, indeed, apparently directly from the produce of the soil, but, in truth, derived from those complex causes which make up the value of the nation's income. Without cattle to manure the soil, it would soon become poor, like that of exhausted Poland. Without a commercial population, these means of fertility would be denied to us, as to the Poles and Prussians. We smile at the idea of a prince with an income of £125 a-year. We, too, would have our pauper princes, if England had not long since ceased to be what Poland yet remains an agricultural nation.

ART. II. The Lives of the Right Hon. Francis North, Baron Guilford, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal under Charles II. and James II. ; the Hon. Sir Dudley North, Commissioner of the Customs, &c.; and the Hon. and Rev. Dr. John North, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, &c. By the Hon. Roger North. A new Edition, with Notes and Illustrations, Historical and Biographical. 3 Vols. 8vo. 36s. London. Colburn. 1826.

THIS is a most amusing cabinet of family portraits. For here we may be said to have four whole length pictures of as many brothers of the house of North, besides many less elaborated heads and outline sketches of the secondary worthies of the same race: the curiosity of the collection consisting in this, that while a strong family resemblance pervades the whole, a separate and even opposite character has been given to each subject by extraneous circumstances, by difference of pursuits, and accidents of fortune. Hence there is full as much variety and individual contrast, as there is general conformity in the series. The habits of thought and action, engendered by the different professions and stations in which these brothers moved, have thrown peculiar shades of expression over their several characters and dispositions; while there is still discernible throughout them all those habitual lines of deliberation and wariness, which were the common features of the race. Thus, of our four "whole lengths," we have, first, the Lord Keeper, beyond all dispute the greatest and most distinguished personage in the generation:-a man of talent and goodness, a