for one-fourth of the children in every class are already trained to espionage. This is highly creditable to their supreme chief, General Okonieff, President of the board of Public Instruction. Russian gold has acquired such power in this country that some of the members of the clergy have been already induced to perform the vilest of offices, and the government has introduced into the ecclesiastical seminaries a number of individuals entirely devoted to it. As to our administration both here and in the provinces, we may safely assert that one half of the officers are spies on the other. The loi des suspects may be said to be in full force. Citizens are daily imprisoned under the slightest pretext; the town prisons and the dungeons of the citadels are incumbered with victims, of whom the greatest number are transported to the mines of Siberia. Upwards of one hundred persons, to my own knowledge, have been arrested at Warsaw. From this fact you may judge of the state of things in the provinces. The enlightened portion of the youth is denounced, in preference, as professing communist and liberal doctrines, and being engaged in conspiracies. If a citizen absent himself from his home, and the report goes abroad that he has been arrested, he is sure to be thrown into prison. Every forbidden book found in his possession becomes a crime of high treason. A traveller returning from a foreign country who has been denounced as having frequented the houses of refugees, even if they were his relatives, is immediately imprisoned. The young Count Kwas arrested on his arrival at Kieff for having visited once or twice Prince Czartoryski in Paris. You cannot form an idea of the tortures to which the Russian inquisitors have recourse to exact confessions. They sometimes pour burning wax on the hands of the persons undergoing examination, one hundred lashes have been inflicted daily on others during a fortnight, until an avowal, which was often false, was extorted. The general of the police, Abramovitch, displays the greater activity, as also do his worthy satellites, Major Sirvinski and others, to discover or invent conspiracies and arrest innocent men. Those two individuals bear on their countenances the stamp of their ignoble functions. The most conspicuous of the inquisitors is a Prince Serge Gallitzin, who, animated with a furious hatred of the Poles, resembles by his athletic form and cruelty the butcher Legendre, of Terrorist memory. Lately there arrived from all parts of Russia a host of inquisitors, of functionaries sent to Russify all public offices, and ignorant priests, mostly drunkards, who, escorted by subaltern police agents, traverse the country and resort to unheard of arbitrary means to convert the Catholic peasantry to the Greek religion. The clergy and bishops have been enjoined not to oppose this diabolical work of proselytism, and I know several parish priests who are now groaning in dungeons for no other crime than that of praying the Almighty, during mass, to protect his church. Nothing is wanted but an ukase directing that hereafter all the new-born Catholic children shall be baptized according to the Greek rite.

"Among the late manifestations of the Czar's bad temper and misanthropy the following deserves an especial notice :-On the same

day as his Majesty was to review the troops, the students of the different higher schools were to be inspected by the autocrat, who, under Russian sway, are also dressed in a sort of regimentals, and are ranged in rank and file. The review of the soldiers lasted an unusually long time, during which the poor lads had to wait for the Emperor under the rays of a burning sun. Several of them fainted, and the chief of the scholastic establishment considered it his duty to respect fully report this to the rude barbarian. His Majesty, however, did not pay any attention to that representation, and the youngsters had to wait for some time longer. When the Czar finally arrived he addressed them in the following brutal manner :-'I know that you are a pack of disobedient and unruly young men; I know that you are imbibing the revolutionary and seditious feelings of your fathers; but beware of what you are about. Any one of you who shall betray his sentiments by acts, shall have reason to think of me at Siberia all his life.' We need hardly add that no (constitutional) monarch of any country would have had the unblushing madness to address a number of lads, some of them of tender age, in such a manner."

For a long time the progress and civilization of Russia have been the theme of numerous works, even the reign of Nicholas came in for a large share in it; yet we cannot forbear saying that most of those publications were but vague and inconclusive crudities, drawn up from fancy rather than based on reality. The only true test of the advancement of Russia, and of the real value of it as concerns the welfare and the happiness of the people, is her legislation-the character and the working of it. Unless the principles of this be duly examined, and their consequences fairly weighed, all observations on what is supposed to be the progress of that empire, must be devoid of all solidity and truth, and be a mere tissue of delusions.

ART. VIII.-Speculation in America and Great Britain. By a Commercial Traveller. Perkins and Williams. New York, 1845.

AMONG the most curious anomalies resulting from parliamentary interference is that which has received the epithet of" railway legislation." During the last session it occupied the whole columns of the press and the mornings of our legislators. Peer and commoner were alike pressed into the service; plans, maps, sections, traverses, broad and narrow gauges were the absorbing topics of parliamentary society. The interest of the Maynooth discussion was rivalled by that upon the London and York; the excitement within the walls was well responded to by those without; railways occupied all public attention; there were festivals to promote lines-festivals to celebrate their completion. The South Sea Bubble or Law's Mississippi Scheme revived in the present century.

The South Sea Scheme, Mr. Law, and railway legislationthe analogy may hereafter perhaps be rendered still more striking; meanwhile let us discover what has been the result of these Herculean tasks imposed upon parliament. History would imagine that gentlemen who so nobly devote themselves to the good of their country in the close atmosphere of committee rooms, whose noctes diesque laborum have been dedicated to one subject, would at least have retained some control over those whose proceedings they affected to regulate. Not in the least here is the strange anomaly,--that railway companies, which derive their existence from parliament, are, by parliament, created the most arbitrary authorities in the united kingdom.

If railways be of sufficient importance to occupy so much of the time of the legislature, and if they, as they assuredly do, involve great principles commercial and social, we may certainly claim something more from our representatives than merely to decide between the pretensions of rival lines-between the claims of conflicting avarice; we may require them to consider whether the advantages of rapid communication are not purchased at too high a price by the sacrifice of all local interests to one great scheme; by the total destruction of the first principles of property and possession, and the loss of that competition which is at all times the best security for the safety and the treatment of the public.

These are among the most undeniable of the evils which accompany the extension of railways; all that even a Mr. Hudson can assert is, that the public benefit in other respects is sufficient

to counterbalance them; but there are other evils which result from them, which, not being so susceptible of positive demonstration, may of course be questioned by those who will admit nothing but the evidence of their own senses, and who are even disposed to doubt that evidence when it is opposed to their interests; but we would appeal to any unprejudiced mind, and ask, whether a spirit of gambling, in too many instances of dishonest gambling, has not spread throughout the country? whether the great facilities of intercourse have not tended to unsettle the minds of all classes, to draw the rich man from his estates and duties to the metropolis, and the poor man from his cottage to the neighbouring town? whether, by bringing every thing within the influence of the capital, primitive habits have not in some degree been uprooted, and the seeds of those vices which luxuriate in great cities been sown in their stead? whether, while great gains have been realized, those gains have not given

"that increase of appetite

Which grows with what it feeds on ?"

Great gains-great avarice-great speculation; all evidences of a great Plutocracy.

These evils will be more or less readily conceded according to the amount of bias and self-interest, but in the less degree they can be denied by none. The effect of railway communication upon the welfare and the happiness of the people was therefore a subject well worthy the attention of parliament, whereas the principle appears to have been at once conceded; and the considerations which occupied the committees, and all the hours of private business, were not of the grave nature which the importance of the question demands, but whether the interest of A. should be preferred to that of B., or which of two or three proposed lines should have its exorbitant pretensions admitted.

We know that the proposition is commonly asserted that nothing can resist the progress of what some term "improvements in machinery." Political economists tell us that we must develope our resources, extend the intercourse between mind and mind; that the engineer is abroad, and we must move forward in his society, or be left far behind as living memorials of bygone days. There may be great truth in this assertion of the law of necessity-of those experiences which all nations are destined to undergo; but we deny that "whatever is, is right;" the knowledge that an event must take place is no evidence that it ought to do so, or that we should not oppose obstacles to its accomplishment. If this were the case, right or wrong would indeed be confounded; if the principle were admissible in one instance it

would be so in all places and at all epochs: for example, we shall have the whole of England intersected by railways, while the German princes endeavour to discountenance them; they see, with happier perception, the evils which such unrestrained intercourse may entail upon them. Who shall then decide which country is acting in the spirit of true wisdom-which is embarking in a rash venture-which is sacrificing an advantage?

Every periodical of the day informs us that we are a great nation-a nation of infinite resource, of patient industry; a race of successful speculators; that no man should venture to stand between this industry and its fields of employment, nay, not though it were to stay a moral pestilence, to stand between the living good and the perishing evil. It is asserted that the greatest of all interests is that represented by commerce, that the capitalists own the wealth of the country, and the wealth of a nation is its glory. We pride ourselves on possessing the carrying trade of the world; we call our merchants" the seigneurs of the seas," and treat them accordingly. And so it is that wealth has become an idol; a golden idol, but truly an idol. It has been well said, "that those who mistake the wealth of a nation for its prosperity, and in pursuit of it lose sight of their virtue and happiness, are wofully ignorant of all upon which the strength of nations and the stability of governments must be founded." Wealth may be fatal to nations as it sometimes is to individuals. The "auri sacra fames" is the great vice of the day; and thus it is that any invention which promotes this excessive love of gain, and which induces that restlessness of disposition which is ever seeking for a hiding-place and finding none, should, in our opinion, be most carefully watched over by some superior authority in the State.

Undoubtedly it is difficult to determine what should be the precise limit of parliamentary interference. We hear it very commonly asserted, as an unquestionable principle, that the employment of capital should be unrestricted; that the hand of authority checks, while it pretends to direct, the spirit of commercial enterprise; these pretensions on the part of the capitalists have always appeared to us opposed to the principles of good government, to that parental authority, which must be exercised by some party in the state, whether by the sovereign as supreme, or by the executive as representing the sovereign will. At the present time, when the monarch does little more than enact a part in the state pageant,-when symbols replace the reality of power,-when the ministers of the crown live by the breath of the people, and the navies and armies of the queen are the paid instruments of parliament, when in point of fact parliament has usurped all