OBSERVATIONS ON THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL STATE OF THE EUROPEAN PEOPLE IN 1848 AND 1849; BEING THE SECOND SERIES OF THE NOTES OF A TRAVELLER. BY SAMUEL LAING, ESQ. AUTHOR OF "A JOURNAL OF A RESIDENCE IN NORWAY; "A TOUR IN SWEDEN;" LONDON: PRINTED FOR LONGMAN, BROWN, GREEN, AND LONGMANS, PATERNOSTER-ROW. fibr. Tuttle 2.28·45 51723 PREFACE. EVERY generation naturally thinks the events of its own fifty years the most important that have occurred in history; as a straw close to the eye will hide an oak in the distance. It is no delusion, however, to regard the events of the present half century - the changes and improvements in the material, intellectual, and social condition of the European peopleas eminently important and influential on the future. generations of civilised society. Some of those changes and improvements may be valued too highly; the results may not come up to our expectations; some may be premature, and the people not in a state to profit by them, and some may be changes without being improvements; but still the present generation is entitled, above all which have preceded it, to consider its own times remarkably important,—and not merely from the great historical events and revolutions, the rise and fall of kings, dynasties, and governments of every form, which have distinguished these fifty years, but on account of the new social arrange ments and influences, the new elements of society which have sprung up and are overspreading all civilised lands. Royalty, aristocracy, church-power, and feudalism in legislation, or in administrative function, have lost root and are withering away on the Continent; and the communications and interchanges of ideas, tastes, and requirements between the people of different countries-one of the most important of the new elements in the social state of Europe—are now too frequent, intimate, and fully established, for one nation to remain far or permanently behind another in its social and political arrangements. All Europe is advancing towards one goal, a higher social and political condition, one more suitable than that into which feudality had settled in the 18th century, to the more enlightened, more civilised, and in mind and means more independent people of the 19th: and every country is throwing off, either gradually or by convulsive effort, the slough of ignorance and misgovernment in which it had been enveloped for the preceding thousand years. This half century is the transitionperiod of society from a lower to a higher state. The traveller who has watched the rise and progress of the struggle and process of social regeneration now going on in France and Germany, will observe some very important institutions and arrangements of a very equivocal character, which the rulers of those countries, whether democratic, liberal, or autocratic, have as if by common consent created or adopted from each other in the course of this half century, for the purpose of securing their own power, and of repressing the universal tendency to changes, PREFACE. reforms, and improvements real or imaginary. France and Belgium under liberal or popularly constituted governments, Austria and Prussia under autocratic governments, have equally adopted the centralisation of all social action in the hands of the state, the superintendence and control of all individual action, the functionary system, the Conscription or Landwehr system, and the educational system under government management. It may well be doubted whether these social arrangements and institutions, and new powers assumed by the state, be really conducive to freedom, constitutional government, and the social, material, and moral well-being of the people; or whether they are not of a retrograde rather than of a progressive tendency, oppressions, and restraints on individual free agency, not suited to the spirit and requirements of the age, fetters in reality imposed upon the Continental people in the name and guise of ornaments or of necessary appendages, and which will be shaken off ere long in some fearful struggle. It is proposed in this series of Notes of a Traveller to give the impressions and views of these new social elements which have from time to time occurred to the Author, in repeated visits to the Continent. The great diffusion of landed property through the social body in France and Germany, and its good and evil results and tendencies-the fall and extinction of aristocracy as a social power and support of monarchical government-the erection of functionarisin instead of aristocracy, to uphold the Continental thronesthe educational system of the Continental governinents centralising all tuition of the people in the hands of |