of their master, and with few of the merits that had redeemed his faults; and thus they contributed still further to degrade the tone of morals and manners. Emancipation happening under such circumstances tended not to raise the slave to the level of the freeman, but to lower the freeman to the level of the slave. These considerations, however, though they may serve to throw some light upon the problem, by no means meet all its difficulties, which are increased by the fact that we do not know how far the wickedness of the magnates who figure in history is a measure of the moral condition of the population at large. If we are justified in arguing from the Penitentials compiled in those times, that condition must have been a hideously depraved one; but it is possible that, like many similar manuals of later days, they were the offspring of a morbid ingenuity which desired to deal with every form of guilt, and are no fair sample of the ordinary work which a confessor had to discharge.

As the subject of the concluding chapter-the Condition of Women-is big enough for a separate treatise, it is scarcely fair to blame Mr. Lecky for having handled it inadequately; in his 104 pages he could not have done otherwise. What does surprise one is, that while he descants at needless length on the least agreeable parts of the question, he should have missed the two capital points which it presents: the change effected in the position of women, firstly by Christianity, and secondly by those Teutonic feelings and usages which expressed themselves in the institutions of feudalism and chivalry. He says a good deal, some part of which is true, about the recognition by Christianity of virtues belonging to the feminine type, falling, however, into the serious (although too characteristic) error of fancying the Christian ideal of character to be itself a feminine one. He dwells upon its services in inculcating chastity and monogamy. He has not seen that its influence was incomparably greater in another respect-in placing woman on an equality with man by representing her soul as no less than his the object of the divine favour, the receiver of spiritual gifts, the heir of eternal life. Although forbidden by the Apostle to teach publicly, woman was, in the New Testament, proclaimed to be, as respects her relations to the Divinity, altogether in the same position as man; she was, therefore, no longer what she had practically been before, a being of a lower order. Among the Germans the respect and the liberty accorded to women was from the first far greater than among any of the nations around the Mediterranean; and although it is certain that their morality did, in some respects, sink after the settlement in the Roman provinces, the dignity and importance of the wife does not seem

to

to have diminished. The necessities of a rude and military age made its laws bear hardly upon women as respects property; but the same necessities contributed to extend their personal power and influence. Living, not in a town like the noble families of antiquity, but in his solitary stronghold among the hills and woods, the chieftain of feudal times was, when at home, constantly in the society of his wife and daughters; and during his frequent absences on war or in the chase, she became the mistress of the castle, and ruled its inmates with a vigour that often equalled his. Female regents, like Ethelfled the daughter of Alfred, and Blanche the mother of St. Louis, heroines like Black Agnes of Dunbar, meet us in every page of mediaval history. And although the system of chivalry, as commonly spoken of now, was probably a mere fiction, still the ideas which it was supposed to express were real and powerful, nor any of them more so than that of the reverence and help which the true knight owed to the lady.

The changes due to these two influences, the Christian and the feudal, affected the condition of women in all its aspects; and his failure to appreciate them has therefore vitiated Mr. Lecky's account of that particular aspect which he has set himself to examine. His chapter, though entitled, "On the Position of Women,' is really a rambling essay upon martiage and prostitution; but as the conception of marriage was transformed by the teaching of the Church, and its actual character greatly modified by Germanic and feudal sentiment, he does not get anywhere near the bottom of this special question. Of minor omissions and errors in detail we do not care to speak.

It will be seen, from what has been said, that we cannot rate Mr. Lecky's book high as a contribution to human knowledge. As a piece of light reading, always agreeable, and often suggestive, it may take a respectable place among the books of the year; to the qualities which mark either a great history or a great philosophy it has no claim whatever. Its criticism is not sufficiently sound and careful to make it valuable as a repertory of facts; its thought is not sufficiently penetrating and mature to throw light upon the problems of human nature which it professes to deal with. An author who lacks the first condition of excellence, a sense of his own weakness and of the difficulties of his subject, seldom produces anything of substantial worth; and if Mr. Lecky aspires to be something more than a hero of the circulating libraries, he must set to work in a far more thorough and patient spirit than that to which these pages bear witness. If he will do this, if he will train and discipline

his mind, learn something of historical criticism, reflect more and sentimentalise less, his next book may probably deserve at the hands of serious students the same praise which his flowing style seems now to win for him from the general reader.

ART. IV.-1. Enquête Agricole. Rapport à Son Excellence Monsieur le Ministre Secrétaire d'Etat au Département de l'Agriculture, du Commerce et des Travaux Publics. Par le Directeur de l'Agriculture, Commissaire Général de l'Enquête. Paris, Imprimerie Impériale, 1868.

2. L'Agriculture et la Population. Par M. Léonce de Lavergne, Membre de l'Institut et de la Société Centrale d'Agriculture. 2o Edition, revue et augmentée. Paris, 1865.

3. Economie Rurale de la France depuis 1789. Par M. Léonce de Lavergne, &c. 3 Edition, revue et augmentée. Paris, 1866.

4. La Réforme Sociale en France, déduite de l'Observation comparée des Peuples Européens. Par M. F. Le Play, Auteur des 'Ouvriers Européens,' Commissaire Général aux Expositions Universelles de 1855, de 1862, et de 1867. 3o Edition, revue et corrigée. 3 vols. Paris, 1867.

5. Des Privilégiés de l'Ancien Régime en France et des Privilégiés du Nouveau. Par M. d'Esterno. 2 vols. Paris, 1867-68.

HE Enquête Agricole, instituted by the French Government in 1866, The results of which are now in course of publication, was one of its earlier tentative recurrences to the principle of 'Parliamentarism'-the principle, namely, of taking the sense of the country itself on the grievances it feels, the interests it asserts, and the reforms it demands. And the Emperor's speech, on opening his Chambers in January, 1869, contained the following sentence of conditional encouragement to that important interest, by the suffrage of whose labouring millions he was mainly raised to power, and with which he has always expressed especial sympathy:

'If, as I firmly hope, nothing shall arise to disturb the general harmony, it will be our fortune to realise many projected improvements, and we shall endeavour to solve all the practical questions raised by the agricultural investigations.'

Something certainly has arisen, though not from without, 'to disturb the general harmony,' and it may be feared that practical economical and social questions will, for the time, be shelved in Vol. 128.-No. 255.

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the new period of political agitations which appears opened in France. However that may be, the subject before us cannot lose its interest for those who are accustomed to probe below the surface of the shifting politics of the day for the permanent sources of national well or ill-being. No documents have issued from the official press of France since the cahiers of instruction from the electoral assemblies of 1789 to their deputies to the StatesGeneral, which have set forth in such detail the complaints and claims of the most important interest in the country as the voluminous returns and depositions now in process of printing, as appendices to the official Report before us, which is addressed to the head of his department by M. Monny de Mornay, 'Director of Agriculture.' The instructed champions of the French agricultural interest (for the masses of cultivators of the soil have hitherto shown themselves impressible only through their popular instincts) had long proclaimed loudly that agriculture, regarded as a national productive interest, was playing somewhat the part of dupe in the grand military, financial, and commercial drama of the Second Empire. It is now placed on official record as a fact, that land in France has fallen in value during the last twenty years, amidst the fabulous and factitious rise of so many speculative undertakings.* To us in England there is nothing new in the spectacle of the sort of prosperity (and its collapse) which builds itself up on overstrained credit and anticipated resources. What is new in France, at least since the days of Law and the Mississippi scheme, is the degree in which the speculative spirit in all classes has been stimulated to excess by the patronage given and the initiative assumed in high places. What is newer still, and may inspire some hope of seeing the modern Idomeneus yet reign over the modern Salentum in his second manner, is the implied acknowledgment we have now before us, on the part of the governing power itself, of the false direction hitherto given to much of its past action, and the official recognition, in the successive chapters of M. de Mornay's Report, of all the principal agricultural wants and grievances which the ablest representatives of French agriculture had been

*M. Monny de Mornay, in his Report, while admitting the fall of value sustained within the last twenty years by landed properties, of large or middling size, in France, asserts—but cites no evidence and an experienced inquirer (M. Léonce de Lavergne) says that all the evidence he has himself collected is against it-that the value of small properties has not ceased to advance during that period. It is not very easy to understand how this should be, while the value of landed property in the larger portion of its bulk has fallen, and while the numbers of competitors for the smaller lots of landed property have been in rapid course of reduction during the same period, in consequence of the artificially stimulated migration of the rural population to the towns, and the not less artificially stimulated diversion of their savings to other than landed investments.

setting

setting forth, seemingly to no purpose, for these ten or fifteen years.

There are some points of parallelism, though more of contrast, in the past and present situation of the English and French agricultural interests. Their position is so far parallel, in relation to other productive and industrial interests, that they have both touched bottom-have both lost, and have both at length acquiesced in losing, every privilege for their products that could be represented in the invidious light of monopoly. The most marked point of contrast between the history and fortunes of English and French agriculture is that, though the French more than the English have been specially a people of cultivators, the agricultural interest had ceased, in modern times, in France, while it has continued through every age in England, to be a power in the country. This was the effect of that perverted policy which transformed the nobles of France into courtiers, and severed every link of the natural relations between the lords of the soil and its cultivators. The former may be said to have sold their birthright for a mess of pottage, when they submitted to share the servile prodigalities of the court rather than the prosperity of the country. The latter were completely severed and isolated-except in some remoter provinces, such as Anjou, where commenced the peasant war of La Vendée,-from those who should have felt it their honour, no less than their interest, to act the part of their natural patrons and protectors; and found thrown on their shoulders the double weight of the public burthens of the state, and the local dues and feudal services to the nobles. The rural classes were, in fact, the helpless and hopeless helots of the whole privileged classes above them. These latter consisted, not only of old nobles and new anoblis, but of all who had scraped together sufficient capital to take refuge in the towns:and here it may be noticed that France abounded in towns, and especially in small towns, more than most other countries of Europe, mainly owing to the manifold oppressions of the country. The refugees from the rural districts-their tailles and corvéesinvested the capital they brought with them, which never found its way back to the soil, in the purchase of some small office. Whenever your Majesty,' said a courtier to Louis XIV., ' creates an office, God creates a fool to buy it.' One tribute only to the primary importance of agriculture was paid by the Physiocrats or Economists of the last century-a tribute which that poor down-trodden interest might well have spared, or might well have regarded as insult heaped on injury. Quesnay and his followers considered agriculture as the sole source of real and substantial wealth, and inferred from that assumption that it should be the

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