position, for it may be doubted if all take advantage of it, show proper contentment for it, or zeal in its defence.

The English constitution disguises the severity of law under a fatherly discipline. This principle not only appears in head quarters, as a paternal regimen admits not of unlimited centralization, for it implies a certain range, within which personal influences may be felt. Thus the personal and parental authority of the Crown does not only use written law for the implements of its will, but it is represented in its personal character; an independent item of itself is allotted to every degree of authority depending on a royal commission. Even the judges themselves, who have to deal only with direct appeals to the law, do not hold merely an official secretaryship, to carry out the law with the mechanical irresponsibility of a railway clerk; but they personally represent the Crown, and have the outward semblance of royal dignity attached to them, which would obviously be out of place on the mechanical theory. Again, in the case of magistrates, though justice is administered by them in a less formal manner, still the necessity for a certain local character in a magistrate, with a high qualification of property, and the disinterested object for which he acts, does most completely represent the personal care and protection supposed to reside in the Crown. A magistrate is an independent free agent, he has elbow room for a large exercise of personal influence and discretion in his legal position. He is not made ostentatiously the slave of parliament, but he has authority given as if for the exercise of his own supposed innate sense of right, although safeguards of course are at hand to check, with a visitorial power, any mistake he falls into. From the magistrate, look to those officials, who, from the necessity of the case, are immediate servants of the crown, acting by no delegated authority, but doing certain work according to the letter of their instructions, such for instance as tax-gatherers. How quietly and unobtrusively do these unwelcome guests perform their work, invested with no state ceremonials, or anything to remind the public of their existence beyond what is necessary! The authority which is prominently put before English subjects, is always a personal delegation of royal power, not a physical and irresponsible acting on orders given. An exception to this rule may be adduced in the army; but the position which the military hold in our constitution, only proves the point at issue more fully. In the first place, the army is supposed to be immediately attached to the Crown, in the character of personal attendants to represent its dignity and strength and in the second place, it is not placed at all in connexion with acts of

parliament, nor does it interfere with private concerns, and is practically kept in absolute distinctness from civil affairs. These last affairs are left to the police, who have no acknowledged political status in our constitution. Freedom and liberty for the exercise of individual powers, both intellectual and moral, is the principle of our law. Our motions are not interfered with by police through any inquisitorial process, such as the passport system, or the octroi duty, and our consciences are not restrained otherwise than in a fatherly manner, or on very special occasions.

If such is the freedom of individuals, corporate bodies also enjoy the same by an equally binding charter of rights. They are not mechanical instruments of government any more than individuals. They have a power of free-will within themselves, and have a sphere of action wherein certain influence is allowed, as if responsible to no earthly authority,-for the visitorial power only comes in when that sphere is transgressed. This freedom of action is alike pleasant to live under, and philosophically correct as a principle of political economy; for, by it are enlisted a much larger range of human sympathies, and, therefore, of human energies in the great work of carrying on the affairs of a community, than is at all practicable under direct and absolute authority. The latter principle has no appeal to a large part of our nature, and therefore is wasteful of our powers.

This direct and constant superintendence of continental governments over the whole community, is illustrated in various ways by Mr. Laing. Starting from the condition of landed property, he first explains, as we have already considered, the absence of an independent middle class. The subdivision of land, and the small taste for those domestic comforts, which in England employ so many hands to supply, is then shown to have the effect of throwing on the world at large an immense number of young men, either waiting till their small inheritance comes to them, or without any expectations whatever; yet, with no advantageous employment-a burden thus on their neighbours. It follows from this, that such a state of society is necessarily warlike; for the material of war is always at hand in this unoccupied class of young men; and it also follows that, in one form or another, this same restless, irresponsible, active-minded, yet idle. class, are the middle influence between government and people. In part, they are the middle influence, as forming a civil army of functionaries, and the military force as well, through the Landwehr system, and partly because their general position gives them great opportunities of exciting discontent. They are a terror to government in disturbed times, as readily as they are servile officials and expectants in peace.

We will first explain this with reference to the Landwehr system. The Prussian army is most differently constituted to the English, inasmuch as it is not a separate interest, but it is the whole population, and so far traces its origin to feudal times, with the important difference, that in those times, the barons were sufficiently independent to prevent their serfs being entirely at the call of a central government :

'The Prussian army consists of regiments of the line, or standing troops. This is considered the formation-school of the military force or army of the whole population of the country. Every male, without exception, in the whole population is bound to serve three years, between his twentieth and his twenty-fifth years, as a private in the ranks of a regiment of the line. The only exceptions are cases of bodily infirmity, and the clergy, schoolmasters, only sons of widows, and a few others; and the liability to serve is rather suspended than altogether abandoned by government in those exceptions. Property, rank, occupation, business, give no claim to exemption, and no substitutes or remplaçants are accepted of, as in the French conscription system. Every man must serve as a private in the ranks of a regiment of the line, whatever be his social position. The only allowance made is, that young men of property or of the higher classes and professions, who provide their own clothing, arms, and equipment at their own expense, may be permitted to serve in certain rifle or chasseur corps for one year only, instead of three, on a petition with sufficient reasons given for the indulgence required. After the three years' service in the line, the young man is turned over to his district Landwehr regiment of the ersten Aufgeboth, or, as we would call it, first for service. This division of the Landwehr force is considered the proper army; the troops of the line being its formation-school. It is liable, like the standing army, to serve in or out of the country; but in time of peace to save expense it is only embodied for manoeuvre and exercise for a few weeks yearly. Its staff only is in constant pay. The division of the second Aufgeboth, or second for service, consists of all who have served their three years in the line, and their two years in the Landwehr of the first Aufgeboth, and are under forty years of age. These are considered trained soldiers, and men settled in occupations, and are therefore, in time of peace, only assembled in small divisions, and in their own localities, for a few days' exercise. The Landsturm consists of all not in the service, or discharged from it by the completion of their terms of service in the other divisions; and it is mustered and organized as well as the other divisions of the Landwehr force. The principle of the system is, that every Prussian subject, without exception, shall pass through a military training of three years, in the ranks of a regiment of the line, and shall then be available during his whole life as a trained soldier, in one or other of the divisions of the Landwehr force, according to his age and fitness for any military duty. A whole nation, with scarcely the exception of a single able-bodied man, and without exemption of class or station, passing through a military training of three years in the ranks of regiments of the line, and then formed into regiments from which, when engaged in civil occupations, the men are only as it were on furlough, or like soldiers in cantonments, and are called together, mustered, and exercised for several weeks in field manœuvres, gives an imposing im pression of this military force. The perfection also of all the arrangements of this vast and complicated system, and the general fairness, impartiality, and economy with which it is worked, must raise the admiration of every traveller who inquires about the Landwehr. But is it a good military system? Is it a good social system?

'The military and social results are so blended together that they cannot be separately considered. The whole nation is an army; the army is not merely a class in the nation, more or less numerous according to the financial resources and political position of the state. The first observation that will occur to the social economist, on the slightest consideration of the Landwehr system, is that the system counteracts its own object. Here is an immense army on paper; but the means to move this immense army is in an inverse ratio to its numbers. The means of the state to bring this vast body of trained soldiers, or any considerable portion of them, into the field in actual warfare, are the financial resources of the country; money being the sinews of war. But the financial resources of every country depend upon the productive industry of the people, out of which alone taxes to the state proceed; and if the productive industry of the people be diminished by three years of their time and labour being taken up in military service, by so much is the means of the state to move this vast force in military operations diminished. The productive as well as the military time of life of the industrious man begins about twenty, and ends about fifty years of age. These thirty years are his capital stock; and whatever he contributes, directly or indirectly, to the finances of the state, must be earned within these thirty years, by the application of his time and labour to some kind of productive industry. If one-tenth of this time be taken from him, and consumed in military services, he is so much poorer, and the state is so much poorer. The indirect loss to both is probably as great as the direct loss; for a man cannot turn at once from the habits of military life to the habits of steady industry, and to the sedentary occupations of civil life. If he has gone through an apprenticeship, and learned a trade, before beginning his three years' service in a regiment, he must almost have to learn it over again after three years' disuse of his working tools and working habits. He can never become an expert quick workman in any handicraft, But besides his three years of continuous service at the age most important to form the habits of a working man, his time is broken in upon and his habits deranged every year by his military service of six or eight weeks in his Landwehr regiment. One-sixth probably of his working year is consumed before he can return to his working habits. All this is a dead loss to the state, as well as to the individual. It diminishes the capability of the aggregate body of individuals the nation-to furnish the taxes necessary to move the numbers embodied and kept up as a Landwehr, in any military operation. If every war were, like that of 1813-15, a war to shake off the oppression of a foreign invader, in which every interest and feeling was roused to a mighty and enthusiastic effort to drive the oppressors across the Rhine, and in which English subsidies furnished to Prussia and the Continental powers the financial means for military operations, the Landwehr system might be the best and most suitable; but it appears a mistaken policy to continue in time of peace a military organization of the whole people, adapted only to the extreme and rarely occurring case of a struggle on the native soil, with the aid of foreign financial means, for property and all that men hold dear, and to establish it as the ordinary state of the whole population in time of peace and when the exigence is past in which it arose.

'The Landwehr system is probably a great mistake in military as well as social policy. Three years' continuous service in the ranks of a regiment may, no doubt, be quite sufficient to form the soldier in all that regards drill, manoeuvre, appearance, and what may be called the bodily or physical attainments; but what is of more importance, the morale of the soldier, his habits, mind, character, if formed, cannot be kept up in civil life after his three years of service expire. He may go through all his military

exercises and duties of his new Landwehr regiment, during the six weeks it is embodied, as well as ever; but the soul and spirit of military life, the tie between soldier and officer, the knowledge of and confidence in each other, the tie of comradeship between soldier and soldier, the ties of attachment to the corps, its character, its honour, its colours, cannot be formed, or kept up if formed, by six weeks' parade and review exercise. The regiments of the line even, by their connexion with the Landwehr as its formation school, must be composed of a shifting soldiery, threefourths of them either recruits in their first or second years' service, or men about leaving the regiment for ever, and returning, at the end of three years of service, to their homes and civil occupations.'-Pp. 239-244.

An army with political and great social influence, independent of its superior physical strength as a body of armed men, is most dangerous to liberty, and subversive of all true government. It was the imperial army that governed Rome, and the Prussian and French armies have assumed a tone of authority of late years, which threatens to hinder those countries for some time to come from attaining any great amount of social freedom.

Under a system such as the Landwehr the whole army may be classed as functionaries of the state; but the civil officers in every compartment are a special grievance, from the prominence into which they are brought, in consequence of being the only connecting link between the top and bottom of society. We refer however to Mr. Laing:

'The Continental sovereigns, after the peace, and settlement of Europe in 1816, appear to have felt, as by a common instinct, that their kingly power was in a false position in the new social state which the general diffusion of landed property had produced. It wanted a barrier and a support. They all attempted, as by common accord, to create a third element in the social structure, and to replace the class of nobles possessing large landed property with more or less of the social influence belonging to such property, by substituting functionarism for aristocracy as a support of their thrones. A numerous body, a civil army of functionaries organized, and in subordination to chiefs of various departments, was quartered, like a military body, all over the country, although not required for any useful purpose or public benefit. Every imaginable and real social interest, religion, education, law, police, every branch of public or private business, personal liberty to move from place to place, even from parish to parish within the same jurisdiction, liberty to engage in any branch of trade or industry on a small or large scale, all the objects, in short, in which body, mind, and capital can be employed in civilised society, were gradually laid hold of for the employment and support of functionaries, were centralised in bureaux, were superintended, licensed, inspected, reported upon, and interfered with by a host of officials scattered over the land and maintained at the public expense, yet with no conceivable utility in their duties. They are not, however, gentlemen at large, enjoying salary without service. They are under a semi-military discipline. In Bavaria, for instance, the superior civil functionary can place his inferior functionary under house-arrest, for neglect of duty, or other offence against civil functionary discipline. In Würtemberg, the functionary cannot marry without leave from his superior. Voltaire says, somewhere, that, "the art of govern