How to Observe

"Only I believe that this is not a bow for every man to shoot in that counts himself a teacher, but will require sinews almost equal to those which Homer gave Ulysses; yet I am withal persuaded that it may prove much more easy in the essay than it now seems at a distance."-Milton.

There are two parties to the work of observation on Morals and Manners-the observer and the observed. This is an important fact which the traveller seldom dwells upon as he ought; yet a moment's consideration shows that the mind of the observer-the instrument by which the work is done, is as essential as the material to be wrought. If the instrument be in bad order, it will furnish a bad product, be the material what it may. In this chapter I shall point out what requisites the traveller ought to make sure that he is possessed of before he undertakes to offer observations on the Morals and Manners of a people.

* * *

SECTION I.

He must have made up his mind as to what it is that he wants to know. In physical science, great results may be obtained by hap-hazard experiments; but this is not the case in Morals. A chemist can hardly fail of learning something by putting any substances together, under new circumstances, and seeing what will arise out of the combination; and some striking discoveries happened in this way, in the infancy of the science; though no one doubts that more knowledge may be gained by the chemist who has an aim in his mind, and who conducts his experiment on some principle. In Morals, the latter method is the only one which promises any useful results. In the workings of the social system, all the agents are known in the gross-all are determined. It is not their nature, but the proportions in which they are combined, which have to be ascertained.

What does the traveller want to know? He is aware that, wherever he goes, he will find men, women, and children; strong men and weak men; just men and selfish men. He knows that he will everywhere find a necessity for food, clothing, and shelter; and everywhere some mode of general agreement how to live together. He knows that he will everywhere find birth, marriage, and death; and therefore domestic affections. What results from all these elements of social life does he mean to look for?

For want of settling this question, one traveller sees nothing truly, because the state of things is not consistent with his speculations as to how human beings ought to live together; another views the whole with prejudice, because it is not like what he has been accustomed to see at home; yet each of these would shrink from the recognition of his folly, if it were fully placed before him. The first would be ashamed of having tried any existing community by an arbitrary standard of his own-an act much like going forth into the wilderness to see kings' houses full of men in soft raiment; and the other would perceive that different nations may go on judging one another by themselves till doomsday, without in any way improving the chance of self-advancement and mutual understanding. Going out with the disadvantage of a habit of mind uncounteracted by an intellectual aim, will never do. The traveller may as well stay at home, for anything he will gain in the way of social knowledge.

The two considerations just mentioned must be subordinated to the grand one,-the only general one,-of the relative amount of human happiness. Every element of social life derives its importance from this great consideration. The external conveniences of men, their internal emotions and affections, their social arrangements, graduate in importance precisely in proportion as they affect the general happiness of the section of the race among whom they exist. Here then is the wise traveller's aim,-to be kept in view to the exclusion of prejudice, both philosophical and national. He must not allow himself to be perplexed or disgusted by seeing the great ends of human association pursued by means which he could never have devised, and to the practice of which he could not reconcile himself. He is not to conclude unfavourably about the diet of the multitude because he sees them swallowing blubber, or scooping out water-melons, instead of regaling themselves with beef and beer. He is not to suppose their social meetings a failure because they eat with their fingers instead of with silver forks, or touch foreheads instead of making a bow. He is not to conclude against domestic morals, on account of a diversity of methods of entering upon marriage. He might as well judge of the minute transactions of manners all over the world by what he sees in his native village. There, to leave the door open or to shut it bears no relation to morals, and but little to manners; whereas, to shut the door is as cruel an act in a Hindoo hut as to leave it open in a Greenland cabin. In short, he is to prepare himself to bring whatever he may observe to the test of some high and broad principle, and not to that of a low comparative practice. To test one people by another, is to argue within a very small segment of a circle; and the observer can only pass backwards and forwards at an equal distance from the point of truth. To test the morals and manners of a nation by a reference to the essentials of human happiness, is to strike at once to the centre, and to see things as they are.

* * *

SECTION II.

Being provided with a conviction of what it is that he wants to know, the traveller must be furthermore furnished with the means of gaining the knowledge he wants. When he was a child, he was probably taught that eyes, ears, and understanding are all-sufficient to gain for him as much knowledge as he will have time to acquire; but his self-education has been a poor one, if he has not become convinced that something more is needful-the enlightenment and discipline of the understanding, as well as its immediate use. It is not enough for a traveller to have an active understanding, equal to an accurate perception of individual facts in themselves; he must also be in possession of principles which may serve as a rallying point for his observations, and without which he cannot determine their bearings, or be secure of putting a right interpretation upon them. A traveller may do better without eyes, or without ears, than without such principles, as there is evidence to prove. Holman, the blind traveller, gains a wonderful amount of information, though he is shut out from the evidence yielded by the human countenance, by way-side groups, by the aspect of cities, and the varying phenomena of country regions. In his motto, he indicates something of his method.

"Sightless to see, and judge thro' judgment's eyes,

To make four senses do the work of five,

To arm the mind for hopeful enterprise,

Are lights to him who doth in darkness live."

In order to "judge through judgment's eyes," those eyes must be made strong and clear; and a traveller may gain more without the bodily organ than with an untrained understanding. The case of the Deaf Traveller[A] leads us to say the same about the other great avenue of knowledge. His writings prove, to all who are acquainted with them, that, though to a great degree deprived of that inestimable commentary upon perceived facts-human discourse-the Deaf Traveller is able to furnish us with more knowledge of foreign people than Fine-Ear himself could have done without the accompaniments of analytical power and concentrative thought. All senses, and intellectual powers, and good habits, may be considered essential to a perfect observation of morals and manners; but almost any one might be better spared than a provision of principles which may serve as a rallying point and a test of facts. The blind and the deaf travellers must suffer under a deprivation or deficiency of certain classes of facts. The condition of the unphilosophical traveller is much worse. It is a chance whether he puts a right interpretation on any of the facts he perceives.

Many may object that I am making much too serious a matter of the department of the business of travelling under present notice. They do not pretend to be moral philosophers;-they do not desire to be oracles;-they attempt nothing more than to give a simple report of what has come under their notice. But what work on earth is more serious than this of giving an account of the most grave and important things which are transacted on this globe? Every true report is a great good; every untrue report is a great mischief. Therefore, let there be none given but by persons in some good degree qualified. Such travellers as will not take pains to provide themselves with the requisite thought and study should abstain from reporting at all.

It is a mistake, however, to suppose that the study shown to be requisite is vast and deep. Some knowledge of the principles of Morals and the rule of Manners is required, as in the case of other sciences to be brought into use on a similar occasion; but the principles are few and simple, and the rule easy of application.

The universal summary notions of Morals may serve a common traveller in his judgments as to whether he would like to live in any foreign country, and as to whether the people there are as agreeable to him as his own nation. For such an one it may be sufficient to bear about the general notions that lying, thieving, idleness, and licentiousness are bad; and that truth, honesty, industry, and sobriety are good; and for common purposes, such an one may be trusted to pronounce what is industry and what idleness; what is licentiousness and what sobriety. But vague notions, home prepossessions, even on these great points of morals, are not sufficient, in the eyes of an enlightened traveller, to warrant decisions on the moral state of nations who are reared under a wide diversity of circumstances. The true liberality which alone is worthy to contemplate all the nations of the earth, does not draw a broad line through the midst of human conduct, declaring all that falls on the one side vice, and all on the other virtue; such a liberality knows that actions and habits do not always carry their moral impress visibly to all eyes, and that the character of very many must be determined by a cautious application of a few deep principles. Is the Shaker of New England a good judge of the morals and manners of the Arab of the Desert? What sort of a verdict would the shrewdest gipsy pass upon the monk of La Trappe? What would the Scotch peasant think of the magical practices of Egypt? or the Russian soldier of a meeting of electors in the United States? The ideas of right and wrong in the minds of these people are not of the enlarged kind which would enable them to judge persons in situations the most opposite to their own. The true philosopher, the worthy observer, first contemplates in imagination the area of humanity, and then ascertains what principles of morals are applicable to them all, and judges by these.

The enlightened traveller, if he explore only one country, carries in his mind the image of all; for, only in its relation to the whole of the race can any one people be judged. Almost without exaggeration, he may be said to see what the rhapsodist in Volney saw.

"There, from above the atmosphere, looking down upon the earth I had quitted, I beheld a scene entirely new. Under my feet, floating in empty space, a globe similar to that of the moon, but less luminous, presented to me one of its faces.... 'What!' exclaimed I, 'is that the earth which is inhabited by human beings?'"[B]

The differences are, that, instead of "one of its faces," the moralist would see the whole of the earth in one contemplation; and that, instead of a nebulous expanse here, and a brown or grey speck there,-continents, seas, or volcanoes,-he would look into the homes and social assemblies of all lands. In the extreme North, there is the snow-hut of the Esquimaux, shining with the fire within, like an alabaster lamp left burning in a wide waste; within, the beardless father is mending his weapons made of fishbones, while the dwarfed mother swathes her infant in skins, and feeds it with oil and fat. In the extreme East, there is the Chinese family in their garden, treading its paved walks, or seated under the shade of its artificial rocks; the master displaying the claws of his left hand as he smokes his pipe, and his wife tottering on her deformed feet as she follows her child,-exulting over it if it be a boy; grave and full of sighs if heaven have sent her none but girls. In the extreme South, there is the Colonist of the Cape, lazily basking before his door, while he sends his labourer abroad with his bullock-waggon, devolves the business of the farm upon the women, and scares from his door any poor Hottentot who may have wandered hither over the plain. In the extreme West, there is the gathering together on the shores of the Pacific of the hunters laden with furs. The men are trading, or cleaning their arms, or sleeping; the squaws are cooking, or dyeing with vegetable juices the quills of the porcupine or the hair of the moose-deer. In the intervals between these extremities, there is a world of morals and manners, as diverse as the surface of the lands on which they are exhibited. Here is the Russian nobleman on his estate, the lord of the fate of his serfs, but hard pressed by the enmity of rival nobles, and silenced by the despotism of his prince; his wife leads a languid life among her spinning maidens; and his young sons talk of the wars in which they shall serve their emperor in time to come. There is the Frankfort trader, dwelling among equals, fixing his pride upon having wronged no man, or upon having a son distinguished at the university, or a daughter skilled in domestic accomplishments; while his wife emulates her neighbours in supporting the comfort and respectability of the household. Here is the French peasant returning from the field in total ignorance of what has taken place in the capital of late; and there is the English artizan discussing with his brother-workman the politics of the town, or carrying home to his wife some fresh hopes of the interference of parliament about labour and wages. Here is a conclave of Cardinals, consulting upon the interests of the Holy See; there a company of Brahmins setting an offering of rice before their idol. In one direction, there is a handful of citizens building a new town in the midst of a forest; in another, there is a troop of horsemen hovering on the horizon, while a caravan is traversing the Desert. Under the twinkling shadows of a German vineyard, national songs are sung; from the steep places of the Swiss mountains the Alp-horn resounds; in the coffee-house at Cairo, listeners hang upon the voice of the romance reciter; the churches of Italy echo with solemn hymns; and the soft tones of the child are heard, in the New England parlour, as the young scholar reads the Bible to parent or aged grandfather.

All these, and more, will a traveller of the most enlightened order revolve before his mind's eye as he notes the groups which are presented to his senses. Of such travellers there are but too few; and vague and general, or merely traditional, notions of right and wrong must serve the purpose of the greater number. The chief evil of moral notions being vague or traditional is, that they are irreconcileable with liberality of judgment; and the great benefit of an ascertainment of the primary principles of morals is, that such an investigation dissolves prejudice, and casts a full light upon many things which cease to be fearful and painful when they are no longer obscure. We all know how different a Sunday in Paris appears to a sectarian, to whom the word of his priest is law; and to a philosopher, in whom religion is indigenous, who understands the narrowness of sects, and sees how much smaller even Christendom itself is than Humanity. We all know how offensive the prayers of Mahomedans at the corners of streets, and the pomp of catholic processions, are to those who know no other way than entering into their closet, and shutting the door when they pray; but how felt the deep thinker who wrote the Religio Medici? He was an orderly member of a Protestant church, yet he uncovered his head at the sight of a crucifix; he could not laugh at pilgrims walking with peas in their shoes, or despise a begging friar; he could "not hear an Ave Maria bell without an elevation;" and it is probable that even the Teraphim of the Arabs would not have been wholly absurd, or the car of Juggernaut itself altogether odious in his eyes. Such is the contrast between the sectary and the philosopher.

* * *

SECTION III.

As an instance of the advantage which a philosophical traveller has over an unprepared one, look at the difference which will enter into a man's judgment of nations, according as he carries about with him the vague popular notion of a Moral Sense, or has investigated the laws under which feelings of right and wrong grow up in all men. It is worth while to dwell a little on this important point.

Most persons who take no great pains to think for themselves, have a notion that every human being has feelings, or a conscience, born with him, by which he knows, if he will only attend to it, exactly what is right and wrong; and that, as right and wrong are fixed and immutable, all ought to agree as to what is sin and virtue in every case. Now, mankind are, and always have been, so far from agreeing as to right and wrong, that it is necessary to account in some manner for the wide differences in various ages, and among various nations. A great diversity of doctrines has been put forth for the purpose of lessening the difficulty; but they all leave certain portions of the race under the condemnation or compassion of the rest for their error, blindness, or sin. Moreover, no doctrines yet invented have accounted for some total revolutions in the ideas of right and wrong, which have occurred in the course of ages. A person who takes for granted that there is an universal Moral Sense among men, as unchanging as he who bestowed it, cannot reasonably explain how it was that those men were once esteemed the most virtuous who killed the most enemies in battle, while now it is considered far more noble to save life than to destroy it. They cannot but wonder how it was that it was once thought a great shame to live in misery, and an honour to commit suicide; while now the wisest and best men think exactly the reverse. And, with regard to the present age, it must puzzle men who suppose that all ought to think alike on moral subjects, that there are parts of the world where mothers believe it a duty to drown their children, and that eastern potentates openly deride the king of England for having only one wife instead of one hundred. There is no avoiding illiberality, under this belief,-as the philosopher understands illiberality. There is no avoiding the conclusion that the people who practice infanticide and polygamy are desperately wicked; and that minor differences of conduct are, abroad as at home, so many sins.

The observer who sets out with a more philosophical belief, not only escapes the affliction of seeing sin wherever he sees difference, and avoids the suffering of contempt and alienation from his species, but, by being prepared for what he witnesses, and aware of the causes, is free from the agitation of being shocked and alarmed, preserves his calmness, his hope, his sympathy; and is thus far better fitted to perceive, understand, and report upon the morals and manners of the people he visits. His more philosophical belief, derived from all fair evidence and just reflexion, is, that every man's feelings of right and wrong, instead of being born with him, grow up in him from the influences to which he is subjected. We see that in other cases,-with regard to science, to art, and to the appearances of nature,-feelings grow out of knowledge and experience; and there is every evidence that it is so with regard to morals. The feelings begin very early; and this is the reason why they are supposed to be born with men; but they are few and imperfect in childhood, and, in the case of those who are strongly exercised in morals, they go on enlarging and strengthening and refining through life. See the effect upon the traveller's observations of his holding this belief about conscience! Knowing that some influences act upon the minds of all people in all countries, he looks everywhere for certain feelings of right and wrong which are as sure to be in all men's minds as if they were born with them. For instance, to torment another without any reason, real or imaginary, is considered wrong all over the world. In the same manner, to make others happy is universally considered right. At the same time, the traveller is prepared to find an infinite variety of differences in smaller matters, and is relieved from the necessity of pronouncing each to be a vice in one party or another. His own moral education having been a more elevated and advanced one than that of some of the people he contemplates, he cannot but feel sorrow and disgust at various things that he witnesses; but it is ignorance and barbarism that he mourns, and not vice. When he sees the Arab or American Indian offer daughter or wife to the stranger, as a part of the hospitality which is, in the host's mind, the first of duties, the observer regards the fact as he regards the mode of education in old Sparta, where physical hardihood and moral slavery constituted a man most honourable. If he sees an American student spend the whole of his small fortune, on leaving college, in travelling in Europe, he will not blame him as he would blame a young Englishman for doing the same thing. The Englishman would be a spendthrift; the American is wise: and the reason is, that their circumstances, prospects, and therefore their views of duty, are different. The American, being sure of obtaining an independent maintenance, may make the enlargement of his mind, and the cultivation of his tastes by travel, his first object; while the conscientious Englishman must fulfil the hard conditions of independence before he can travel. Capital is to him one of the chief requisites of honest independence; while to the American it is in the outset no requisite at all. To go without clothing was, till lately, perfectly innocent in the South Sea Islands; but now that civilization has been fairly established by the missionaries, it has become a sin. To let an enemy escape with his life is a disgrace in some countries of the world; while in others it is held more honourable to forgive than to punish him. Instances of such varieties and oppositions of conscience might be multiplied till they filled a volume, to the perplexity and grief of the unphilosophical, and the serene instruction of the philosophical observer.

The general influences under which universal ideas and feelings of right and wrong are formed, are dispensed by the Providence under which all are educated. That man should be happy is so evidently the intention of his Creator, the contrivances to that end are so multitudinous and so striking, that the perception of the aim may be called universal. Whatever tends to make men happy, becomes a fulfilment of the will of God. Whatever tends to make them miserable, becomes opposition to his will. There are, and must be, a host of obstacles to the express recognition of, and practical obedience to, these great principles; but they may be discovered as the root of religion and morals in all countries. There are impediments from ignorance, and consequent error, selfishness, and passion: the most infantile men mistake the means of human happiness, and the wisest have but a dim and fluctuating perception of them: but yet all men entertain one common conviction, that what makes people happy is good and right, and that what makes them miserable is evil and wrong. This conviction is at the bottom of practices which seem the most inconsistent with it. When the Ashantee offers a human sacrifice, it is in order to secure blessings from his gods. When the Hindoo exposes his sick parent in the Ganges, he thinks he is putting him out of pain by a charmed death. When Sand stabbed Kotzebue, he believed he was punishing and getting rid of an enemy and an obstacle to the welfare of his nation. When the Georgian planter buys and sells slaves, he goes on the supposition that he is preserving the order and due subordination of society. All these notions are shown by philosophy to be narrow, superficial, and mistaken. They have been outgrown by many, and are doubtless destined to be outgrown by all; but, acted upon by the ignorant and deluded, they are very different from the wickedness which is perpetrated against better knowledge. But these things would be wickedness, perpetrated against better knowledge, if the supposition of a universal, infallible Moral Sense were true. The traveller who should consistently adhere to the notion of a Moral Sense, must pronounce the Ashantee worshipper as guilty as Greenacre: the Hindoo son a parricide, not only in fact, but in the most revolting sense of the term: Sand, a Thurtell: and the Georgian planter such a monster of tyranny as a Sussex farmer would be if he set up a whipping-post for his labourers, and sold their little ones to gipsies. Such judgments would be cruelly illiberal. The traveller who is furnished with the more accurate philosophy of Conscience would arrive at conclusions, not only more correct, but far less painful; and, without any laxity of principle, far more charitable.

So much for one instance of the advantage to the traveller of being provided with definite principles, to be used as a rallying point and test of his observations, instead of mere vague moral notions and general prepossessions, which can serve only as a false medium, by which much that he sees must necessarily be perverted or obscured.

* * *

SECTION IV.

The traveller having satisfied himself that there are some universal feelings about right and wrong, and that in consequence some parts of human conduct are guided by general rules, must next give his attention to modes of conduct, which seem to him good or bad, prevalent in a nation, or district, or society of smaller limits. His first general principle is, that the law of nature is the only one by which mankind at large can be judged. His second must be, that every prevalent virtue or vice is the result of the particular circumstances amidst which the society exists.

The circumstances in which a prevalent virtue or vice originates, may or may not be traceable by a traveller. If traceable, he should spare no pains to make himself acquainted with the whole case. If obscure, he must beware of imputing disgraces to individuals, as if those individuals were living under the influences which have made himself what he is. He will not blame a deficiency of moral independence in a citizen of Philadelphia so severely as in a citizen of London; seeing, as he must do, that the want of moral independence is a prevalent fault in the United States, and that there must be some reason for it. Again, he will not look to the Polish peasant for the political intelligence, activity, and principle which delight him in the log-house of the American farmer. He sees that Polish peasants are generally supine, and American farmers usually interested about politics; and that there must be reasons for the difference.

In a majority of cases such reasons are, to a great extent, ascertainable. In Spain, for instance, there is a large class of wretched and irretrievable beggars; and their idleness, dirt, and lying trouble the very soul of the traveller. What is the reason of the prevalence of this degraded class and of its vices? A Court Lady[C] wrote, in ancient days, piteous complaints of the poverty of the sovereign, the nobility, the army, and the destitute ladies who waited upon the queen. The sovereign could not give his attendants their dinners; the nobility melted down their plate and sold their jewels; the soldiers were famishing in garrison, so that the young deserted, and the aged and invalids wasted away, actually starved to death. The lady mentions with surprise, that a particularly large amount of gold and silver had arrived from the foreign possessions of Spain that year, and tries to account for the universal misery by saying that a great proportion of these riches was appropriated by merchants who supplied the Spaniards with the necessaries of life from abroad; and she speaks of this as an evil. She is an example of an unphilosophical observer,-one who could not be trusted to report-much less to account for-the morals and manners of the people before her eyes. What says a philosophical observer?[D] "Spain and Portugal, the countries which possess the mines, are, after Poland, perhaps the two most beggarly countries in Europe."-"Their trade to their colonies is carried on in their own ships, and is much greater" (than their foreign commerce,) "on account of the great riches and extent of those colonies. But it has never introduced any considerable manufactures for distant sale into either of those countries, and the greater part of both remains uncultivated."-"The proportion of gold and silver to the annual produce of the land and labour of Spain is said to be very considerable, and that you frequently find there a profusion of plate in houses where there is nothing else which would in other countries be thought suitable or correspondent to this sort of magnificence. The cheapness of gold and silver, or, what is the same thing, the dearness of all commodities, which is the necessary effect of this redundance of the precious metals, discourages both the agriculture and manufactures of Spain and Portugal, and enables foreign nations to supply them with many sorts of rude, and with almost all sorts of manufactured produce, for a smaller quantity of gold and silver than what they themselves can either raise or make them for at home."-When it is considered that in Spain gold and silver are called wealth, and that there is little other; that manufactures and commerce scarcely exist; that agriculture is discouraged, and that therefore there is a lack of occupation for the lower classes, it may be fairly concluded that the idle upper orders will be found lazy, proud, and poor; the idle lower classes in a state of beggary; and that the most virtuous and happy part of the population will be those who are engaged in tilling the soil, and in the occupations which are absolutely necessary in towns. One may see with the mind's eye the groups of intriguing grandees, who have no business on their estates to occupy their time and thoughts; or the crowd of hungry beggars, thronging round the door of a convent, to receive the daily alms; or the hospitable and courteous peasants, of whom a traveller[E] says, "There is a civility to strangers, and an easy style of behaviour familiar to this class of Spanish society, which is very remote from the churlish and awkward manners of the English and German peasantry. Their sobriety and endurance of fatigue are very remarkable; and there is a constant cheerfulness in their demeanour which strongly prepossesses a stranger in their favour."-"I should be glad if I could, with justice, give as favourable a picture of the higher orders of society in this country; but, perhaps, when we consider their wretched education, and their early habits of indolence and dissipation, we ought not to wonder at the state of contempt and degradation to which they are reduced. I am not speaking the language of prejudice, but the result of the observations I have made, in which every accurate observer among our countrymen has concurred with me, in saying that the figures and countenances of the higher orders are as much inferior to those of the peasants, as their moral qualities are in the view I have given of them."-All this might be foreseen to be unavoidable in a country where the means of living are passively derived from abroad, and where the honour and rewards of successful industry are confined to a class of the community. The mines should bear the blame of the prevalent faults of the saucy beggars and beggarly grandees of Spain.

To any one who has at all considered at home the bearings of a social system which is grounded upon physical force, or those of the opposite arrangements which rely upon moral power, it can be no mystery abroad that there should be prevalent moral characteristics among the subjects of such systems; and the vices which exist under them will be, however mourned, leniently judged. Take the Feudal System as an instance, first, and then its opposite. A little thought makes it clear what virtues and vices will be almost certain to subsist under the influences of each.

The baron lives in his castle, on a rock or some other eminence, whence he can overlook his domains, or where his ancestor reared his abode for purposes of safety. During this stage of society there is little domestic refinement and comfort. The furniture is coarse; the library is not tempting; and the luxurious ease of cities is out of the question. The pleasures of the owner lie abroad. There he devotes himself to rough sports, and enjoys his darling luxury,-the exercise of power. Within the dwelling the wife and her attendants spend their lives in handiworks, in playing with the children and keeping them in order, in endless conversation on the few events which come under their notice, and in obedience to and companionship with the priest. While the master is hunting, or gathering together his retainers for the feast, the women are spinning or sewing, gossiping, confessing, or doing penance; while the priest studies in his apartment, shares in the mirth, or soothes the troubles of the household, and rules the mind of the noble by securing the confidence of his wife. Out of doors, there are the retainers, by whatever name they may be called. Their poor dwellings are crowded round the castle of the lord; their patches of arable land lie nearest, and the pastures beyond; that, at least, the supply of human food may be secured from any enemy. These portions of land are held on a tenure of service; and, as the retainers have no property in them, and no interest in their improvement, and are, moreover, liable to be called away from their tillage at any moment, to perform military or other service, the soil yields sorry harvests, and the lean cattle are not very ornamental to the pastures. The wives of the peasantry are often left, at an hour's warning, in the unprotected charge of their half-clothed and untaught children, as well as of the cattle and the field.-The festivals of the people are on holy days, and on the return of the chief from war, or from a pre-eminent chase.

Now, what must be the morals of such a district as this? and, it may be added, of the whole country of which it forms a part? for, if there be one feudal settlement of the kind, there must be more; and the society is in fact made up of a certain number of complete sets of persons,-of establishments like this.-There is no need to go back some centuries for an original to the picture: it exists in more than one country in Europe now.

This kind of society is composed of two classes only; those who have something, and those who have nothing. The chief has property, some knowledge, and great power. With individual differences, the chiefs may be expected to be imperious, from their liberty and indulgence of will; brave, from their exposure to toil and danger; contemptuous of men, from their own supremacy; superstitious, from the influence of the priest in the household; lavish, from the permanency of their property; vain of rank and personal distinction, from the absence of pursuits unconnected with self; and hospitable, partly from the same cause, and partly from their own hospitality being the only means of gratifying their social dispositions.

The clergy will be politic, subservient, studious, or indolent, kind-hearted, effeminate, with a strong tendency to spiritual pride, and love of spiritual dominion. It will be surprising, too, if they are not driven into infidelity by the credulity of their pupils.

The women will be ignorant and superstitious, for want of varied instruction; brave, from the frequent presence or promise of danger; efficient, from the small division of labour which is practicable in the superintendence of such a family; given to gossip and uncertainty of temper, from the sameness of their lives; devoted to their husbands and children, from the absence of all other important objects; and vain of such accomplishments as they have, from an ignorance of what remains to be achieved.

The retainers must be ignorant,-physically strong and imposing, perhaps, but infants in mind, and slaves in morals. Their worship is idolatry-of their chief. The virtues permitted to them are fidelity, industry, domestic attachment, and sobriety. It is difficult to see what others are possible. Their faults are all comprehended in the word barbarism.

These characteristics may be extended to the divisions of the nation corresponding to those of the household: for the sovereign is only a higher feudal chief: his nobles are a more exalted sort of serfs; and those who are masters at home become slaves at court. Under this system, who would be so hardy as to treat brutality in a serf, cunning in a priest, prejudice in a lady, and imperiousness in a lord, as any thing but the results-inevitable as mournful-of the state of society?

Feudalism is founded upon physical force, and therefore bears a relation to the past alone. Right begins in might, and all the social relations of men have originated in physical superiority. The most prevalent ideas of the feudal period arise out of the past; what has been longest honoured is held most honourable; and the understanding of men, unexercised by learning, and undisciplined by society and political action, falls back upon precedent, and reposes there. The tastes, and even the passions, of the feudal period bear a relation to antiquity. Ambition, prospective as it is in its very nature, has, in this case, a strong retrospective character. The glory that the descendant derives from his fathers, he burns to transmit. The past is everything: the future, except in as far as it may resemble the past, is nothing.

Such, with modifications, have been the prevalent ideas, tastes, and passions of the civilized world, till lately. The opposite state of society, which has begun to be realized, occasions prevalent ideas, and therefore prevalent virtues and vices, of an opposite character.

As commerce enlarges, as other professions besides the clerical arise, as trades become profitable, as cities swell in importance, as communication improves, raising villages into towns, and hamlets into villages, and the affairs of central communities become spread through the circumference, the lower classes rise, the chiefs lose much of their importance, the value of men for their intrinsic qualifications is discovered, and such men take the lead in managing the affairs of associated citizens. Instead of all being done by orders issued from a central power,-commands carrying forth an imperious will, and bringing back undoubting obedience,-social affairs begin to be managed by the heads and hands of the parties immediately interested. Self-government in municipal affairs takes place; and, having taken place in any one set of circumstances, it appears likely to be employed within a wider and a wider range, till all the government of the community is of that character. The United States are the most remarkable examples now before the world of the reverse of the feudal system,-its principles, its methods, its virtues and vices. In as far as the Americans revert, in ideas and tastes, to the past, this may be attributed to the transition being not yet perfected,-to the generation which organized the republic having been educated amidst the remains of feudalism. There are still Americans who boast of ancestors high in the order of birth rather than of merit; who in talking of rank have ideas of birth in their minds, and whose tastes lie in the past. But such will be the case while the literature of the world breathes the spirit of former ages, and softens the transition to an opposite social state. A new literature, new modes of thought, are daily arising, which point more and more towards the future. We have already records of the immediate state of the minds and fortunes of men and of communities, and not a few speculations which stretch far forward into the future. Every year is the admission more extensively entered into that moral power is nobler than physical force; there is more earnestness in the conferences of nations, and less proneness to war. The highest creations of literature itself, however long ago produced, are now discovered to bear as close a relation to the future as the past. They are for all time, through all its changes. While pillars of light in the dim regions of antiquity, they pass over in the dawn, and are still before us, casting their shadows to our feet as guides into the dazzling future. Pre-eminent among them is the Book which never had any retrospective character in it. It never sanctioned physical force, pride of ancestry, of valour, of influence, or any other pride. It never sanctioned arbitrary division of ranks. It never lauded the virtues of feudalism in their disconnection with other virtues; it never spared the faults of feudalism, on the ground of their being the necessary product of feudal circumstances; neither does it now laud and tolerate the virtues and vices developed by democracy. This guide has never yet taken up its rest. It is in advance of all existing democracies, as it ever was of all despotisms. The fact is, that, while all manifestations of eminent intellectual and moral force have an imperishable quality, this supreme book has not only an immortal freshness, but bears no relation to time:-to it "one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day."

What are the prevalent virtues and faults which are to be looked for in the future,-or in those countries which represent somewhat of the future, as others afford a weakened image of the past? What allowance is the traveller in America to make? Almost precisely the reverse of what he would make in Russia.

In-door luxury has succeeded to out-door sports: the mechanical arts flourish from the elevation of the lower classes, and prowess is gone out of fashion. The consequence of this is that the traveller sees ostentation of personal luxury instead of retinue. In the course of transition to the time when merit will constitute the highest claim to rank, wealth succeeds to birth: but even already, the claims of wealth give way before those of intellect. The popular author has more observance than the millionaire in the United States. This is honourable, and yields promise of a still better graduation of ranks. Where moral force is recognized as the moving power of society, it seems to follow that the condition of Woman must be elevated; that new pursuits will be opened to her, and a wider and stronger discipline be afforded to her powers. It is not so in America; but this is owing to the interference of other circumstances with the full operation of democratic principles. The absence of an aristocratic or a sovereign will impels men to find some other will on which to repose their individual weakness, and with which to employ their human veneration. The will of the majority becomes their refuge and unwritten law. The few free-minded resist this will, when it is in opposition to their own, and the slavish many submit. This is accordingly found to be the most conspicuous fault of the Americans. Their cautious subservience to public opinion,-their deficiency of moral independence,-is the crying sin of their society. Again, the social equality by which the whole of life is laid open to all in a democratic republic, in which every man who has power in him may attain all to which that power is a requisite, cannot but enhance the importance of each in the eyes of all; and the consequence is a mutual respect and deference, and also a mutual helpfulness, which are in themselves virtues of a high order, and preparatives for others. In these the Americans are exercised and accomplished to a degree never generally attained in any other country. This class of virtues constitutes their distinguishing honour, their crowning grace in the company of nations.-Activity and ingenuity are a matter of course where every man's lot is in his own hands. Unostentatious hospitality and charity might, in some democracies, be likely to languish; but the Americans have the wealth of a young country, and the warmth of a young national existence, as stimulus and warrant for pecuniary liberality of every kind.-Popular vanity, and the subservience of political representatives, are the chief dangers which remain to be alluded to; and there will probably be no republic for ages where these will not be found in the form of prevalent vices.-If, under a feudal system, there is a wholesome exercise of reverence in the worship of ancestry, there is, under the opposite system, a no less salutary and perpetual impulse to generosity in the care for posterity. The one has been, doubtless, a benignant influence, tempering the ruggedness and violence of despotism; the other will prove an elevating force, lifting men above the personal selfishness and mutual subservience which are the besetting perils of equals who unite to govern by their common will.

Whatever may be his philosophy of individual character, the reflective observer cannot travel, with his mind awake, without admitting that there can be no question but that national character is formed, or largely influenced, by the gigantic circumstances which, being the product of no individual mind, are directly attributable to the great Moral Governor of the human race. Every successive act of research or travel will impress him more and more deeply with this truth, which, for the sake of his own peace and liberality, it would be well that he should carry about with him from the outset. He will not visit individuals with any bitterness of censure for participating in prevalent faults. He will regard social virtues and graces as shedding honour on all whom they overshadow, from the loftiest to the lowliest; while he is not disposed to indulge contempt, or anything but a mild compassion, for any social depravity or deformity which, being the clear result of circumstances, and itself a circumstance, may be considered as surely destined to be remedied, as the wisdom of associated, like that of individual man, grows with his growth, and strengthens with his strength.

* * *

"I respect knowledge; but I do not despise ignorance. They think only as their fathers thought, worship as they worshipped. They do no more."-Rogers.

"He was alive

To all that was enjoyed where'er he went,

And all that was endured."

Wordsworth.

* * *

The traveller, being furnished with the philosophical requisites for the observation of morals and manners,

1stly. With a certainty of what it is that he wants to know,-

2ndly. With principles which may serve as a rallying point and test of his observations,-

3rdly. With, for instance, a philosophical and definite, instead of a popular and vague, notion about the origin of human feelings of right and wrong,-

4thly. And with a settled conviction that prevalent virtues and vices are the result of gigantic general influences,-is yet not fitted for his object if certain moral requisites be wanting in him.

An observer, to be perfectly accurate, should be himself perfect. Every prejudice, every moral perversion, dims or distorts whatever the eye looks upon. But as we do not wait to be perfect before we travel, we must content ourselves with discovering, in order to avoidance, what would make our task hopeless, and how we may put ourselves in a state to learn at least something truly. We cannot suddenly make ourselves a great deal better than we have been, for such an object as observing Morals and Manners; but, by clearly ascertaining what it is that the most commonly, or the most grossly, vitiates foreign observation, we may put a check upon our spirit of prejudice, and carry with us restoratives of temper and spirits which may be of essential service to us in our task.

The observer must have sympathy; and his sympathy must be untrammelled and unreserved. If a traveller be a geological inquirer, he may have a heart as hard as the rocks he shivers, and yet succeed in his immediate objects: if he be a student of the fine arts, he may be as silent as a picture, and yet gain his ends: if he be a statistical investigator, he may be as abstract as a column of figures, and yet learn what he wants to know: but an observer of morals and manners will be liable to deception at every turn, if he does not find his way to hearts and minds. Nothing was ever more true than that "as face answers to face in water, so is the heart of man." To the traveller there are two meanings in this wise saying, both worthy of his best attention. It means that the action of the heart will meet a corresponding action, and that the nature of the heart will meet a corresponding nature. Openness and warmth of heart will be greeted with openness and warmth:-this is one truth. Hearts, generous or selfish, pure or gross, gay or sad, will understand, and therefore be likely to report of, only their like:-this is another truth.

There is the same human heart everywhere,-the universal growth of mind and life,-ready to open to the sunshine of sympathy, flourishing in the enclosures of cities, and blossoming wherever dropped in the wilderness; but folding up when touched by chill, and drooping in gloom. As well might the Erl-king go and play the florist in the groves and plains of the tropics, as an unsympathizing man render an account of society. It will all turn to stubble and sapless rigidity before his eyes.

There is the same human heart everywhere; and, if the traveller has a good one himself, he will presently find this out, whatever may have been his fears at home of checks to his sympathy from difference of education, objects in life, &c. There is no place where people do not suffer and enjoy; where love is not the high festival of life; where birth and death are not occasions of emotion; where parents are not proud of their boy-children; where thoughtful minds do not speculate upon the two eternities; where, in short, there is not broad ground on which any two human beings may meet and clasp hands, if they have but unsophisticated hearts. If a man have not sympathy, there is no point of the universe-none so wide even as the Mahomedan bridge over the bottomless pit-where he can meet with his fellow. Such an one is indeed floundering in the bottomless pit, with only the shadows of men ever flitting about him.

I have mentioned elsewhere, what will well bear repetition,-that an American merchant, who had made several voyages to China, dropped a remark by his own fire-side on the narrowness which causes us to conclude, avowedly or silently, that, however well men may use the light they have, they cannot be more than nominally our brethren, unless they have our religion, our philosophy, and our methods of attaining both. He said he often recurred, with delight, to the conversations he had enjoyed with his Chinese friends on some of the highest speculative, and some of the deepest and widest practical subjects, which his fellow-citizens of New England were apt to think could be the business only of Protestant Christians. This American merchant's observations on oriental morals and manners had an incalculable weight after he had said this; for it was known that he had seen into hearts, as well as met faces, and discovered what people's minds were busy about, as their hands were pursuing the universal employment of earning their subsistence.

Unless a traveller interprets by his sympathies what he sees, he cannot but misunderstand the greater part of that which comes under his observation. He will not be admitted with freedom into the retirements of domestic life; the instructive commentary on all the facts of life,-discourse,-will be of a slight and superficial character. People will talk to him of the things they care least about, instead of seeking his sympathy about the affairs which are deepest in their hearts. He will be amused with public spectacles, and informed of historical and chronological facts; but he will not be invited to weddings and christenings; he will hear no love-tales; domestic sorrows will be kept as secrets from him; the old folks will not pour out their stories to him, nor the children bring him their prattle. Such a traveller will be no more fitted to report on morals and manners than he would be to give an account of the silver mines of Siberia by walking over the surface, and seeing the entrance and the product.

"Human conduct," says a philosopher, "is guided by rules." Without these rules, men could not live together, and they are also necessary to the repose of individual minds. Robinson Crusoe could not have endured his life for a month without rules to live by. A life without purpose is uncomfortable enough; but a life without rules would be a wretchedness which, happily, man is not constituted to bear. The rules by which men live are chiefly drawn from the universal convictions about right and wrong which I have mentioned as being formed everywhere, under strong general influences. When sentiment is connected with these rules, they become religion; and this religion is the animating spirit of all that is said and done. If the stranger cannot sympathize in the sentiment, he cannot understand the religion; and without understanding the religion, he cannot appreciate the spirit of words and acts. A stranger who has never felt any strong political interest, and cannot sympathize with American sentiment about the majesty of social equality, and the beauty of mutual government, can never understand the political religion of the United States; and the sayings of the citizens by their own fire-sides, the perorations of orators in town-halls, the installations of public servants, and the process of election, will all be empty sound and grimace to him. He will be tempted to laugh,-to call the world about him mad,-like one who, without hearing the music, sees a room-full of people begin to dance. The case is the same with certain Americans who have no antiquarian sympathies, and who think our sovereigns mad for riding to St. Stephen's in the royal state-coach, with eight horses covered with trappings, and a tribe of grotesque footmen. I have found it an effort of condescension to inform such observers that we should not think of inventing such a coach and appurtenances at the present day, any more than we should the dress of the Christ-Hospital boys. If an unsympathizing stranger is so perplexed by a mere matter of external arrangement,-a royal procession, or a popular election,-what can he be expected to make of that which is far more important, more intricate, more mysterious,-neighbourly and domestic life? If he knows and feels nothing of the religion of these, he could learn but little about them, even if the roofs of all the houses of a city were made transparent to him, and he could watch all that is done in every parlour, kitchen, and nursery in a circuit of five miles.

What strange scenes and transactions must such an one think that there are in the world! What would he have thought of the spectacle one day seen in Hayti, when Toussaint L'Ouverture ranged his negro forces before him, called out thirteen men from the ranks by name, and ordered them to repair to a certain spot to be immediately shot? What would he have thought of these thirteen men for crossing their arms upon their breasts, bowing their heads submissively, and yielding instant obedience? He might have pronounced Toussaint a ferocious despot, and the thirteen so many craven fools: while the facts wear a very different aspect to one who knows the minds of the men. It was necessary to the good-will of a society but lately organized out of chaos, to make no distinction between negro and other insurgents; and these thirteen men were ringleaders in a revolt, Toussaint's nephew being one of them. This accounts for the general's share in the transaction. As for the negroes, the General was also the Deliverer,-an object of worship to people of his colour. Obedience to him was a rule, exalted by every sentiment of gratitude, awe, admiration, pride, and love, into a religion; and a Haytian of that day would no more have thought of resisting a command of Toussaint, than of disputing a thunder-stroke or an earthquake.-What would an unsympathizing observer make of the Paschal supper, as celebrated in the houses of Hebrews throughout the world,-of the care not to break a bone of the lamb,-of the company all standing, the men girded and shod as for a journey, and the youngest child of the household invariably asking what this is all for? What would the observer call it but mummery, if he had no feeling for the awful traditional and religious emotion involved in the symbol?-What would such an one think of the terrified flight of two Spanish nobles from the wrath of their sovereign, incurred by their having saved his beloved queen from being killed by a fall from her horse? What a puzzle is here,-even when all the facts of the case are known;-that the king was looking from a balcony to see his queen mount her Andalusian horse: that the horse reared, plunged, and bolted, throwing the queen, whose foot was entangled in the stirrup: that she was surrounded with gentlemen who stood aloof, because by the law of Spain it was death to any but her little pages to touch the person, and especially the foot of the queen, and her pages were too young to rescue her; that these two gentlemen devoted themselves to save her; and having caught the horse, and extricated the royal foot, fled for their lives from the legal wrath of the king! Whence such a law? From the rule that the queen of Spain has no legs. Whence such a rule? From the meaning that the queen of Spain is a being too lofty to touch the earth. Here we come at last to the sentiment of loyal admiration and veneration which sanctifies the law and the rule, and interprets the incident. To a heartless stranger the whole appears a mere solemn absurdity, fit only to be set aside, as it was apparently by pardon from the king being obtained by the instant intercession of the queen. But in the eyes of every Spaniard the transaction was, in all its parts, as far from absurdity as the danger of the two nobles was real and pressing.-Again, what can a heartless observer understand by the practice, almost universal in the world, of celebrating the naming of children? The Christian parent employs a form by which the infant is admitted as a lamb of Christ's flock: the Chinese father calls his kindred together to witness the conferring first of the surname, and then of "the milk-name,"-some endearing diminutive, to cease with infancy: the Moslem consults an astrologer before giving a name to his child: and the savage selects a name-sake for his infant from among the beasts or birds, with whose characteristic quality he would fain endow his offspring. What a general rule is here, exalted by a universal sentiment into an act of religion! The ceremonial observed in each case is widely different in its aspect to one who sees in it merely a cumbrous way of transacting a matter of convenience, and to another who perceives in it the initiation of a new member into the family of mankind, and a looking forward to,-an attempt to make provision for, the future destiny of an unconscious and helpless being.

Thus it will be through the whole range of the traveller's observation. If he be full of sympathy, every thing he sees will be instructive, and the most important matters will be the most clearly revealed. If he be unsympathizing, the most important things will be hidden from him, and symbols (in which every society abounds) will be only absurd or trivial forms. The stranger will be wise to conclude, when he sees anything seriously done which appears to him insignificant or ludicrous, that there is more in it than he perceives, from some deficiency of knowledge or feeling of his own.

The other way in which heart is found to answer to heart is too obvious to require to be long dwelt upon. Men not only see according to the light they shed from their own breasts,-whether it be the sunshine of generosity or the hell-flames of bad passions,-but they attract to themselves spirits like their own. The very same persons appear very differently to a traveller who calls into exercise all their best qualities, and to one who has an affinity with their worst: but it is a yet more important consideration that actually different elements of society will range themselves round the observer according to the scepticism or faith of his temper, the purity or depravity of his tastes, and the elevation or insignificance of his objects. The Americans, somewhat nettled with the injustice of English travellers' reports of their country, have jokingly proposed to take lodgings in Wapping for some thorough-bred American vixen, of low tastes and coarse manners, and employ her to write an account of English morals and manners from what she might see in a year's abode in the choice locality selected for her. This would be no great exaggeration of the process of observation of foreigners which is perpetually going on.

What should gamesters know of the philanthropists of the society they pass through? or the profligate, of the real state of domestic life? What can the moral sceptic report of religious or philosophical confessorship in any nation? or the sordid trader, of the higher kinds of intellectual cultivation? or the dandy, of the extent and administration of charity? It may be said that neither can the philanthropic traveller-the missionary-see otherwise than partially for want of "knowledge of the world;" that persons of sober habits can learn nothing that is going on in the moral depths of society; and the good are actually scoffed at for their absence from many scenes of human life, and their supposed ignorance of many things in human nature. But it is certain that the best part of every man's mind is far more a specimen of himself than the worst; and that the characteristics of a society, in like manner, are to be traced in the wisest and most genial of its pervading ideas and common transactions, instead of those disgraceful ones which are common to all. Swindlers, drunkards, people of low tastes and bad passions, are found in every country, and nowhere characterise a nation; while the reverence of man in America, the pursuit of speculative truth in Germany, philanthropic enterprise in France, love of freedom in Switzerland, popular education in China, domestic purity in Norway,-each of these great moral beauties is a star on the forehead of a nation. Goodness and simplicity are indissolubly united. The bad are the most sophisticated, all the world over; and the good the least. It may be taken as a rule that the best qualities of a people, as of an individual, are the most characteristic-(what is really best being tested, not by prejudice, but principle). He has the best chance of ascertaining these best qualities who has them in himself; and he who has them not may as well pretend to give a picture of a metropolitan city by showing a map of its drainage, as report of a nation after an intercourse with its knaves and its profligates. To stand on the highest pinnacle is the best way of obtaining an accurate general view, in contemplating a society as well as a city.

* * *

"Dieu nous a dit, Peuples, je vous attends."

De Beranger.

* * *

Of religion, in its widest sense, (the sense in which the traveller must recognize it,) there are three kinds; not in all cases minutely distinguishable, but bearing different general impress; viz. the Licentious, the Ascetic, and the Moderate. These kinds are not divided from each other by the boundaries of sects. We cannot say that pagan religions come under one head, and Mahomedanism under another, and Christianity under a third. The difference lies not in creeds, but in spirit. Many pagans have been as moderate as any Christians; many Christians as licentious as any pagans; many Mahomedans as licentious, and many as ascetic, as any pagans or Christians. The truer distinction seems to be that the licentious religions of the world worship unspiritualized nature,-material objects and their movements, and the primitive passions of man: that the ascetic despises nature, and worships its artificial restraints: and that the moderate worships spiritualized nature,-God in his works, both in the material universe and in the disciplined human mind, with its regulated affections.

The Licentious religion is always a ritual one. Its gods are natural phenomena and human passions personified; and, when once the power of doing good or harm is attributed to them, the idea of propitiation enters, and a ritual worship begins. Earthquakes, inundations, the chase, love, revenge,-all these agents of evil and good are to be propitiated, and sacrifices and prayers are to be offered to them; in these rites alone religious acts are supposed to be performed. This, however modified, is a low state of religious sentiment. It may show itself among the Hindoos dipping in the Ganges, or among Christians who accept absolution in its grossest sense. In either case its tendency is to render the worshipper satisfied with a low moral state, and to perpetuate his taste for selfish indulgence.

The Ascetic religions are ritual also. The Pharisees of old need but be cited to show why; and there is a set of people in the Society Islands now who seem to be spiritually descended from the ascetic priests of Judaism. The inhabitants of the Society Islands are excluded from many innocent privileges and natural pleasures by the Tabu; and the Pharisees in just the same manner laid burdens upon men's shoulders too heavy to be borne, ordaining irksome ceremonies to be proofs of holiness, and extravagant self-denial to be required by devotion. Spiritual licence has always kept pace with this extravagance of self-denial. Spiritual vices,-pride, vanity, and hypocrisy,-are as fatal to high morals under this state of religious sentiment as sensual indulgence under the other: and it does not matter much to the moral welfare of the people sunk in it, whether they exist under a profession of Christianity, or of Mahomedanism, or of paganism. The morals of those people are low who engage themselves to serve God by a slothful life in monastic celibacy, no less than those of the Fak?rs, who let their nails grow through the backs of their hands, or those of the wretched mothers in the islands of the Pacific, who strangle their infants, and cast them at the feet of their grinning idol.

The Moderate is the least of a ritual religion of the three, and drops such rites as it has in proportion to its advance towards purity. Religion in its purity is not a pursuit, but a temper; and its expression is not by sacrifices, by prayers in the corners of the streets, by fasts or public exhibitions. The highest manifestations of this order of religion are found in Christian countries; though in others there are individuals, and even orders of men, who understand that the orderly enjoyment of all blessings that Providence has bestowed, and the regulated workings of all human affections, are the truest homage to the Maker of all. As there are Christians whose reliance is upon their ritual worship, and who enter upon a monastic life, so there are Mahomedans and pagans whose high religious aim is self-perfection, sought through the free but disciplined exercise of their whole nature.

The dependence of morals upon the character of the religion is clear. It is clear that among a people whose gods are supposed to be licentious, whose priests are licentious, and where worship is associated with the indulgence of the passions, political and domestic morals must be very low. What purity can be expected of a people whose women are demanded in turn for the obscene service of the Buddhist temple; and what humanity from the inhabitants of districts whose dwellings are necessarily closed against the multitudes flocking to the festivals of Juggernaut,-multitudes from amidst which thousands annually drop down dead, so that their skeletons strew the road to the abominable temple?-Where asceticism is the character of the religion, the natural and irrepressible exercise of human affections becomes licentiousness, so called; and, of consequence, it soon becomes licentiousness in fact, according to the general rule that a bad name changes that to which it is affixed into a bad quality.-Hannah and Philip grew up in a Moravian settlement; and, Moravians as they were, they loved. The days came when the destiny of each was decided by lot. It was scarcely possible that they should draw a lot to marry each other; yet both secretly hoped to the last. Philip drew a missionary lot, and Hannah another husband. They were allowed to shake hands once before parting. "Good-bye, Hannah!" "Good-bye, Philip!" was all that was said. If Hannah had gone off with Philip, it would have been called a profligate act; and, if they were sound Moravians, it would in fact have been so: whereas, in a community of really high morals, the profligacy would have been seen to lie in Hannah's marrying a man she did not love.

To proceed with the dependence of the morals on the character of the religion,-it is clear that in proportion as any religion encourages licentiousness, either positively or negatively,-encourages, that is to say, the excess of the passions, might will have the victory over right; the weak will succumb to the strong; and thus the condition of the poorer classes depends on the character of the religion of their country. In proportion as the religion tends to licentiousness, will the poorer classes be liable to slavery. In proportion as the religion tends to asceticism, will be the amount (other things being equal) of the hardship and want which they must sustain. In proportion as the religion approximates to the moderate, (the use without the abuse of means of enjoyment,) will the poorer classes rise to a condition of freedom and comfort.

The character of the religion serves, in like manner, as an index to that of the government. A licentious religion cannot be adopted by a people who are so moderate in their passions as to be able to govern themselves. One would not look for a display of meats offered to idols in the Capitol of the American Congress. An ascetic religion, too, inflicts personal and mutual wrongs which could never be endured among a people who agree to govern one another. There is no power which could induce such to submit to privations and sufferings which can be tolerable to none but devotees,-a small fraction of every society. Absolutism is commonly the character of the government of any country where either of these religions prevails;-a despotism more or less tempered by a variety of influences. It is the observer's business to bring the religion and the government into comparison, and to see how the latter is modified by the coexistence of the former.

The friendly, no less than the domestic and political relations of society, are dependent upon the prevailing religion. Under the licentious, the manners will be made up of the conventional and the gross. A Burmese minister was sitting on the poop of a steam-vessel when a squall came on. "I suggested to his Excellency," says Mr. Crawford, "the convenience of going below, which he long resisted, under the apprehension of committing his dignity by placing himself in a situation where persons might tread over his head; for this singular antipathy is common both to the Burmese and Siamese. The prejudice is more especially directed against the fair sex,-a pretty conclusive proof of the estimation in which they are held. His Excellency seriously demanded to know whether any woman had ever trod upon the poop; and, being assured in the negative, he consented at length to enter the cabin." The house fixed for the residence of an American missionary was not allowed to be fitted up, as it stood on ground which was higher than the king's barge as it lay in the river; and such a spectacle would not become the king's dignity. The prime minister of this same king was one day, for absence from his post at a fire, "spread out in the hot sun." He was extended on his back in the public road for some hours in the most sultry part of the day, with a heavy weight upon his chest,-the public executioners being employed to administer the punishment. Nor is the king alone authorized to perpetrate such barbarisms. A creditor is permitted to seize the wife, children, and slaves of a debtor, and bind them at his door to broil in the sun of Ava. Here we see in perfection the union of the conventional and the gross in manners; and such manners cannot be conceived to coexist with any religion of a higher character than Buddhism.

Under ascetic forms, what grossness there is will be partially concealed; but there will be no nearer an approach to simplicity than under the licentious. The religion being made still to consist much in observances, the society becomes formal in proportion as it believes itself growing pure. We must again take an extreme case for an example. The Shakers of America are as sophisticated a set of persons as can be found; with their minds, and even their public discourses, full of the one subject of their celibacy, and their intercourse with each other graduated according to strict rules of etiquette. So extreme an asceticism can never now spread in any nation to such an extent as to bear a relation to its general government: but it is observable that such societies of ascetics live under a despotism;-one of their own appointment, if the general will has not furnished them with one.

Under the moderate aspect of religion is an approximation towards simplicity of social manners alone to be found. There is as yet only a remote anticipation of it in any country in the world; only a remote anticipation of that ease of social manners which must exist there alone where the enjoyments of life are freely used without abuse. It matters not that the licentious and the ascetic parties each boast of having attained this consummation,-the one under the name of ease, and the other of simplicity. There is too much pain attendant upon grossness to justify the boast of ease; and too much effort in asceticism to admit of the grace of simplicity. It is the observer's business to mark, wherever he goes, the degree in which the one is chastened and the other relaxed, giving place to the higher form of the moderate, which, if society learns from experience, as the individual does, must finally prevail. When many individuals of a society attain that self-forgetfulness which is promoted by a high and free religious sentiment, but which is incompatible with either licentious or ascetic tendencies, the tone of manners in that society will be much raised. When, free from the grossness of self-indulgence, and from the constraint of self-denial, every one spontaneously thinks more of his neighbour than of himself, the world will witness, at last, the perfection of manners. It is clear that the high morals of which such refined manners will be the expression, must greatly depend on the exaltation of the religious sentiment from which they emanate.

The traveller may possibly object the difficulty of classing societies by their religious tendencies, and ask whether minds of every sort are not to be found in all numerous assemblages of persons. This is true: but yet there is a prevailing religious sentiment in all communities. Religious, like other sentiment, is modified by the strong general influences under which each society lives; and in it, as in other kinds, there will be general resemblance, with particular differences under it. It is well known that even sects, exclusive in their opinions and straitened by forms, differ in different countries almost as much as if there were no common bond. Not only is episcopacy not the same religion among born East Indians as in England, but the Quakers of the United States, though like the English in doctrine and in manners, are easily distinguishable from them in religious sentiment: and even the Jews, who might be expected to be the same all over the world, differ in Russia, Persia, and Great Britain as much as if a spirit of division had been sent among them. They not only appear here in furs, there in cotton or silk, and elsewhere in broadcloth; but the hearts they bear beneath the garments, the thoughts that stir under the cap, the turban, and the hat, are modified in their action as the skies under which they move are in aspect. They are strongly tinctured with the national sentiment of Russia, Persia, and England; and if the fond dream of some of them (in which, by the way, large numbers of their body have ceased to sympathize,) could come true, and they should ever be brought together within their ancient borders, they would find that their religion, so unique in its fixedness, though one in word, is many in spirit.-Much more easy is the assimilation between different forms of Christianity, and between Christianity and an elevated natural religion: and the search can never therefore be in vain for a pervading religious sentiment among the various religious institutions of any and every people.

It is, of course, more difficult to discover this religious sentiment among a nation enlightened enough to be divided in theological matters, than among a rude people who regulate their devotions by the bidding of a single order of priests. The African traveller, passing up the Niger, sees at a glance what all the worshippers on the banks feel, and must feel, towards the deities to whom their temples are erected. A rude shed, with a doll,-an image of deformity,-perched on a stand, and supposed to be enjoying the fumes of the cooking going on before his face;-a place of worship like this, in its character of the habitation of a deity, and of a sensual deity, leaves no doubt as to what the religious sentiment of a country must be where there is no dissent from such a worship. In such a society there are absolutely none to feel that their deep palm groves are a nobler temple than human hands can rear. There are none who see that it is by a large divine benignity that all the living creatures of that region are made happy in their rank seclusion. There is no feeling of gratitude in the minds of those who see the myriads of gay butterflies that flit in the glare of noon, and the river-horse which bathes in the shady places of the mysterious great stream. There a god is seen only in his temple, and there is nothing known of any works of his. That he is great, is learned only through the word of his priests, who say that yams are too common a food for him, and that nothing less than hippopotamus' flesh must be cooked beneath his shrine. That he is good is an idea which has not yet entered any mind.-In other places, the religious sentiment is almost equally unquestionable; as when every man in Cairo is seen in his turn to put on the dress of pilgrimage, and direct his steps to Mount Arafat. Here the sentiment is of a higher order, but equally evident and uniform.-A further advance, with somewhat less uniformity of sentiment, is found among the followers of the Greek church in a Russian province. The peasants there make a great point of having time for their devotions; and those who have the wherewithal to offer some showy present at a shrine are complacent. They make the sign of the cross, and have therein done their whole duty: and if some speculative worshipper of the Virgin with Three Hands is not satisfied about the way in which his patroness came by her third hand, he keeps his doubts to himself when he tells his sins to his confessor.-A still further advance, with an increased diversity, may be met with among the simple Vaudois, the general characteristics of whose faith are alike, but who entertain it, some more in the spirit of fear, others more in the spirit of love. The prevailing sentiment among them is of the ascetic character, as the stranger may perceive, who sees the peasantry marching in serene gravity to their plain places of worship on the mountain pinnacle, or under the shelter yielded by a clump of black pines amidst a waste of snow: but here the clergy are more guides than dictators; and not a few may be found who doubt their opinions, and find matter for thoughtless delight, rather than religious awe, when they follow the echoes from steep to steep, and watch for the gleams of the summer lightning playing among the defiles.-The diversity grows more striking as civilization advances; but it has not yet become perplexing in the most enlightened nations in the world. In England, in France, in America, there is a distinct religious sentiment: in England, where there is every variety of dissent from the established faith; in America, where there is every variety of opinion, and no establishment at all; and in France, now in that state which most baffles observation,-a state of transition from an exaggerated superstition to a religious faith which is being groped for, but is not yet found. Even in this uncertain state, no one can confound the religious sentiment of New England and of France; and an observation of their places of worship will indicate their differences. In New England, the populous towns have their churches in the midst, spacious and conspicuous,-not exhibiting any of the signs of antique origin which are impressed on those of Europe, and to be accounted for only by the immediate religious tastes of the people. In new settlements, the church rises side by side with the house of entertainment, and is obviously considered one of the necessaries of social life. The first thing to be learned about a fresh inhabitant is, how he stands disposed towards the church, whatever may be its denomination. In France, such of the old churches as are still used for their ancient purpose, bespeak a ritual religion, and therefore a religion light and gay in its spirit; all religions being so which cast responsibility into outward observances, especially where the outward observances are not of a very burdensome character. If nuns in their cloister, and Jews in their synagogues, have been characterized by the lightness of their religious spirit, well may the Catholics of an enlightened country be so, discarding the grossest and most burdensome of their rites, and retaining the ritual principle. The searchers after a new faith in France must increase by millions before they can change the character of the religious sentiment of the country; and perhaps before that which is now gross can be elevated into what is genial, and before a mixture of levity and fear can be changed into the cheerful earnestness of a moderate or truly catholic religious conviction, the ancient churches of France may be standing in ruins,-objects for the research of the antiquary.

The rule of examining things before persons must be observed in ascertaining the religious sentiment of any country. A stranger in England might interrogate everybody he saw, and be little wiser at the end of a year. He might meet a fanatic one day, an indifferent person the next, and a calmly convinced one the third: he might go from a Churchman to a Jew; from a Jew to a Quaker; from a Quaker to a Catholic; and every day be farther from understanding the prevailing religious sentiment of the country. A much shorter and surer method is, to examine the Places of Worship, the condition of the Clergy, the Popular Superstitions, the observance of Holy Days, and some other particulars of the kind.

* * *

First, for the Churches. There is that about all places of worship which may tell nearly as plain a tale as the carved idols, with messes of rice before them, in Hindoo temples; or as the human bones hung round the hut of an African god. The proportion and resemblance of modern places of worship to those which were built in dark times of superstition; the suitability or incongruity of all that is of late introduction into their furniture and worship with what had its origin in those dim ages;-such circumstances as these cannot but indicate whether the common religious sentiment is as nearly as possible the same as in centuries past, or whether it is approximating, slowly or rapidly, towards the ascetic or the moderate.

There is evidence in the very forms of churches. The early Christian churches were in the basilica form,-bearing a resemblance to the Roman courts of justice. This is supposed to have arisen from the churches being, in fact, the courts of spiritual justice, where penance was awarded by the priest to the guilty, and absolution granted to the penitent. From imitation, the Christian churches of all Europe for centuries bore this form; and even some built since the Reformation preserve it. But they have something of their own which serves as a record of their own times. The history of the Crusades does not present a more vivid picture of feudal society than shines out from the nooks of our own cathedrals. The spirit of monachism is as distinguishable as if the cowled ghosts of the victims were actually seen flitting along the aisles. What say the chantries ranged along the sides? There perpetual prayers were to be kept up for the prosperity of a wealthy family and its retainers in life, and for their welfare after death. What says the chapter-house? There the powerful members of the church hierarchy were wont to assemble, to use and confirm their rule. What say the cloisters? Under their shelter did the monks go to and fro in life; and in the plot of ground enclosed by these sombre passages were they laid in death. What says the Ladye chapel? What say the niches with their stone basins? They tell of the intercessory character of the sentiment, and of the ritual character of the worship of the times when they were set up. The handful of worshippers here collected from among the tens of thousands of a cathedral town also testify to the fact that such establishments could not be originated now, and are no longer in harmony with the spirit of the multitude.-The contrast of the most modern sacred buildings tells as plain a tale:-the red-brick meeting-house of the Friends; the stone chapel of the less rigid dissenters, standing back from the noise of the busy street; the aristocratic chapel nestling amidst the shades of the nobleman's park; and the village church in the meadow, with its neighbouring parsonage. These all tell of a diversity of opinion; but also of something else. The more ancient buildings are scantily attended; the more modern are thronged;-and indeed, if they had not been wanted by numbers, they would not have been built. This speaks the decline of a ritual religion, and the preference of one which is more exclusively spiritual in its action.

In Scotland the kirks look exactly suitable to the population which throngs towards them, with sober dress and gait, and countenances of solemnity. These edifices stand in severe simplicity, whether on the green shore of a lake, or in the narrow street of a town; and asceticism is marked on every stone of the walls, and every article of their decorations.

No one who has travelled in Ireland can forget the aspect of its places of worship,-the lowly Catholic chapels, with their beggarly ornaments of lace and crucifixes, placed in the midst of villages, the whole of whose inhabitants crowd within those four walls; and a little way off, in a field, or on an eminence by the road side, the Protestant church, one end in ruins, and with ample harbourage for the owl, while the rest is encompassed with nettles and thorns, and the mossy grave-stones are half hidden by rank grass. In a country where the sun rises upon contrasts like these, it is clear in what direction the religious sentiment of the people is indulged.

What the stranger may thus learn in our own country, we may learn in his, whatever it be. The large plain churches of Massachusetts, their democratic benches (in the absence of aristocratic pews) silently filled for long hours of a Sabbath, as still as a summer noon, by hundreds and thousands who restore the tones of their pilgrim ancestors in their hymn-singing, and seem to carry about their likeness in their faces, cannot fail to instruct the observer.-Then there is the mosque at Cairo, with its great tank or fountain of ablution in the midst; and its broad pavement spread out for men of every degree to kneel on together; its doors standing wide from sunrise to sunset, for the admission of all but women and strangers; its outside galleries, from which the summons to prayer is sounded;-these things testify to the ritual character of the worship, and to the low type of the morals of a faith which despises women and strangers, giving privileges to the strong from which the weak are excluded.-Then there is the Buddhist temple, rearing its tapering form in a recess of the hills, with its colossal stone figures guarding the entrance, and others sanctifying the interior,-all eloquently explaining that physical force is worshipped here: its images of saints show that the intercessory superstition exists; and the drum and gong, employed to awaken the attention of the gods, can leave little danger of misapprehension to the observer. There are lanterns continually burning, and consecrated water, sanctified to the cure of diseased eyes.-Such places of worship tell a very plain tale; while there is not perhaps a church on earth which does not convey one that is far from obscure.

The traveller must diligently visit the temples of nations; he must mark their locality, whether placed among men's dwellings or apart from them; their number, whether multiplied by diversity of theological opinion; and their aspect, whether they are designed for the service of a ritual or a spiritual religion. Thus he may, at the same time, ascertain the character of the most prominent form of religion, and that of the dissent from it; which must always illustrate each other.

* * *

Next to the Churches comes the consideration of the Clergy. The clergy are usually the secondary potentates of a young country. In a young country, physical force, and that which comes to represent it, is the first great power; and knowledge is the next. The clergy are the first learned men of every nation; and when the streams of knowledge are only just issuing from the fountain, and the key is in the hands of the clergy, they enjoy, rightly and unavoidably, a high degree of consequence. Knowledge spreads abroad; and it is as impossible for man to dam it up as for the fool to stop the Danube by filling the narrow channel at its source with his great boots,-crying out the while, "How the people will wonder when the Danube does not come!" As knowledge becomes diffused, the consequence of the clergy declines. If that consequence is to be preserved, it must be by their attaining the same superiority in morals which they once held in intellect. Where the clergy are now a cherished class, it is, in fact, on the supposition of this moral superiority,-a claim for whose justification it would be unreasonable to look, and for the forfeiture of which the clergy should be less blamed than those who expect that, in virtue of a profession, any class of men should be better than others. Moral excellence has no regard to classes and professions; and religion, being not a pursuit but a temper, cannot, in fact, be professionally cultivated with personal advantage. It will be for the traveller to note whether this is more or less understood where he travels; whether the clergy are viewed with indifference as mere professional men; or whether they are reverenced for their supposed holiness; or for their real superiority in learning; or whether the case wears the lowest aspect of all-when the clergy are merely the jugglers and puppet-masters of the multitude. A patient consideration of this will lead to a pretty safe conclusion as to the progress the people have made in knowledge, and the spiritual freedom which it brings;-a freedom which is at once a virtue and a cause of virtue.

The observer must note what the clergy themselves consider their function to be;-whether to guide individual minds; or to cultivate theological and other studies, in order to place their results at the disposal of the minds with which they have to deal; or to express in worship the feelings of those minds; or to influence the social institutions by which the minds of the people are modified; or to do any other of the many things which the priests of different countries, and ages, and faiths, have in turn included in their function. He will note whether they are most like the tyrannical Brahmins, who at one stroke-by declaring the institution of Caste to be of divine authority-obtained boundless control over a thousand generations, subjecting all intellects and all hands to a routine which could be easily superintended by the forty thousand of the favoured priestly race; or whether they are like the Christian clergy of the dark ages, a part of whose duty it was to learn the deepest secrets of the proudest and lowliest,-thus obtaining the means of bringing to pass what events they wished, both in public and private life;-or whether they are like such students as have been known in the theological world,-men who have not crossed the threshold of their libraries for eighteen years, and who are satisfied with their lives, if they have been able to elevate Biblical science, and to throw any new light on sacred history;-or whether they are like the American clergy of the present day, whose exertions are directed towards the art of preaching;-or whether they are like the ministers of the Established Church in England, who are politically represented, and large numbers of whom employ their influence for political purposes. Each of these kinds of clergy must be yielded by a particular state of society, and could not belong to any other. The Hindoos must be in a low degree of civilization, and sunk in a deadly superstition, or they would tolerate no Brahmins. The people of four centuries ago must have depended solely upon their priests for knowledge and direction, or they would not have submitted to their inquisitorial practices. Germany must have advanced far in her appreciation of philosophical and critical research in theology, or she would not have such devoted students as she can boast of. The Americans cannot have attained to any high practice of spiritual liberty, or they could not follow preaching so zealously as they do. The English cannot have fully understood, or taken to heart the principles of the Reformation, which have so long been their theme of eulogy, or they would not foster a political hierarchy within the bosom of their church.

As the studies of the clergy lie in the past, as the days of their strongest influence are behind, and as the religious feelings of men have hitherto reposed on the antique, and are but just beginning to point towards the future, it is natural, it is unavoidable, that the clergy should retard rather than aid the progress of society. A disposition to assist in the improvement of institutions is what ought not to be looked for from any priestly class; and, if looked for, it will not be found. Such a mode of operation must appear to them suicidal. But much may be learned by comparing the degree of clerical resistance to progression with the proportion of favour in which the clergy are held by the people. Where that resistance is greatest, and a clerical life is one of peculiar worldly ease, the state of morals and manners must be low. Where that resistance is least, where any social improvement whatever is found to originate with the clergy, and where they bear a just share of toil, the condition of morals and manners cannot be very much depressed. Where there is an undue partition of labour and its rewards among the clergy themselves,-where some do the work and others reap the recompence,-the fair inference is that morals and manners are in a state of transition. Such a position of affairs cannot be a permanent one; and the observer may be assured that the morals and manners of the people are about to be better than they have been.-The characteristics of the clergy will indicate, or at least direct attention to, the characteristics of dissent: and any extensive form of dissent is no other than the most recent exposition of the latest condition of morals among a large, active, and influential portion of the people. A foreign traveller in Germany, in Luther's time, could learn but little of the moral state of that empire, if he shut his eyes to the philosophy and the deeds of the reformers. If he saw nothing in the train of nuns winding down into the valleys from their now unconsecrated convent on the steep; if the tidings of the marriage of Catherine de Boria came to him like any other wedding news; if he did not mark the subdued triumph in family faces when the Book-Luther's Bible-was brought out for the daily lecture; if the decrees of Worms seemed to him like the common orders of the church, and the levelling of altars and unroofing of crypts was in his eyes but masons' work, he was not qualified to observe the people of Germany, and had no more title to report of them than if he had never left home. Thus it is now, in less extreme cases. The traveller in Spain knows little of the Spaniards unless he is aware of the theological studies, and the worship without forms, which are carried on in private by those who are keeping alive the fires of liberty in that priest and tyrant-ridden country. The foreigner in England will carry away but a partial knowledge of the religious sentiment of the people if he enters only the cathedrals of cities and the steepled churches in the villages, passing by the square meeting-houses in the manufacturing towns, and hearing nothing of the conferences, the assemblies, and the missionary enterprises of the dissenters. The same may be said of observation in every country enlightened enough to have shaken off its subservience to an unquestioned and irresponsible priesthood: that is, of every country advanced enough to maintain dissent.

The expressions of established forms of prayer convey more information as to the state of the clergy than of the people; since these expressions are furnished by the clergy, and continue to be prompted by them, while the people have no means of dismissing or changing the words of their framed prayers for long after the words may have ceased to represent the feeling. The traveller will receive such objectionable expressions as he may hear, not as indications of the then present sentiments of the crowd of worshippers, but rather as evidencing the disinclination of the clergy to change. It would be hard, for instance, to impute to Moslem worshippers in general the formation of such desires as are uttered by the school-boys of Cairo at the close of their daily attendance. "O God! destroy the infidels and polytheists, thine enemies, the enemies of the religion! O God! make their children orphans, and defile their abodes, and cause their feet to slip, and give them and their families, and their households, and their women, and their children, and their relations by marriage, and their brothers, and their friends, and their possessions, and their race, and their wealth, and their lands, as booty to the Moslems! O Lord of all creatures!"-It would be unjust to impute a horror of "sudden death" to all who use the words of prayer against it which are found in the Litany of the Church of England. Sudden death deserved to be classed among the most deadly evils when the Litany was framed,-in the days of the viaticum; but now it would be unjust to a multitude of worshippers who use the Litany to suppose that they are afraid to commit themselves to the hands of their Father without a passport from a priest; and that they are not willing to die in the way which pleases God,-some rather preferring, probably, a mode which will save those who are nearest and dearest to them the anguish of suspense, or of witnessing hopeless decline. In all antique forms of devotion there must be expressions which are inconsistent with the philosophy and the tastes of the time; and these are to be regarded therefore as no indications of such philosophy and taste, but as an evidence, more or less distinct, of the condition of the clergy in enlightenment and temper.

* * *

The splendid topic of human Superstitions can be only just touched upon here. In this boundless field, strewn with all the blossoms of all philosophy, the human observer may wander for ever. He can never have done culling the evidence that it presents, or enjoying the promise which it yields. All that we can now do is just to suggest that as the superstitions of all nations are the embodiment of their idealized convictions, the state of religious sentiment may be learned from them almost without danger of mistake.

No society is without its superstitions, any more than it is without its convictions and its imaginations. Even under the moderate form of religion, there is room for superstition; and the ascetic, which glories in having put away the superstitions of the licentious forms, has superstitions of its own.-The followers of an ascetic religion have more or less belief in judgments,-in retributive evils, arbitrarily inflicted. Among them may be gathered a harvest of tales of divine interference,-from the bee stinging the tip of the swearer's tongue to the sudden death of false witnesses. Among them do superstitions about times and seasons flourish, even to the forgetfulness that the Sabbath is made for man, and not man for the Sabbath. Some ascetics have faith in the lot,-like the Moravians in ordering marriage, or Wesley in opening his Bible to light upon texts. Others believe in warnings of evil; and most dread the commission of ritual fully as much as of moral sins. To play even a hymn tune on the piano on Sundays is an offence in the Highlands of Scotland; and to miss prayers is a matter of penance in a convent. The superstitions of the ascetic are scarcely fewer or more moderate than those of the licentious form of religion; the chief difference between the two lies in the spirit from which they emanate. The superstitions of the ascetic arise from the spirit of fear; those of the heathen arise perhaps equally from the spirit of love and the spirit of fear.

It seems as if the portents which present themselves to ascetic minds must necessarily be of evil, since the only good which their imaginations admit is supposed to be secured by grace, and by acts of service or self-denial. To the Fak?r, to the Shaker, to the nun, no good remains over and above what has been long claimed, while punishment may follow any breach of observance. On the other hand, before one who makes himself gods of the movements of inanimate nature and human passions, the two worlds of evil and good lie open, and he is perpetually on the watch for messengers from both. The poor pagan looks for tokens of his gods being pleased or angry; of their intentions of giving him a good or a bad harvest; or of their sending him a rich present or afflicting him with a bereavement. Whatever he wants to know, he seeks for in portents;-whether he shall live again,-whether his departed friends think of him,-whether his child shall be fortunate or wretched,-whether his enemy or he shall prevail. It is open to the traveller's observation whether these superstitions are of a generous or selfish kind,-whether they elevate the mind with hope, or depress it with fear,-whether they nourish the faith of the spirit, or extort merely the service of the lip and hand.

The Swiss herdsmen believe that the three deliverers (the founders of the Helvetic Confederacy) sleep calmly in a cave near the Lake of Lucerne; and that, whenever their country is in her utmost need, they will come forth in their antique garb, and assuredly save her. This is a superstition full of veneration and hope.-When the Arabs see a falling star, they believe it to be a dart thrown by God at a wanderer of the race of the genii, and they exclaim, "May God transfix the enemy of the faith!" Here we find in brief the spirit of their religion.-In Brazil, a bird which sings plaintively at night is listened to with intent emotion, from its being supposed to be sent with tidings from the dead to the living. The choice of a bird with a mournful instead of a lively note speaks volumes.-The three angels in white that come to give presents to good children in Germany at Christmas, come in a good spirit.-There is a superstition in China which has a world of tenderness in it. A father collects a hundred copper coins from a hundred families, and makes the metal into a lock which he hangs, as a charm, round his child's neck, believing that he locks his child to life by this connection with a hundred persons in full vigour.-But, as is natural, death is the region of the Unseen to which the larger number of portents relates. The belief of the return of the dead has been held almost universally among the nations; and their unseen life is the grand theme of speculation wherever there are men to speculate. The Norwegians lay the warrior's horse, and armour, and weapons, beside him. The Hindoos burn the widow. The Malabar Indians release caged birds on the newly-made grave, to sanction the flight of the soul. The Buccaneers (according to Penrose) concealed any large booty that fell into their hands, till they should have leisure to remove it,-murdering and burying near it any helpless wretch whom they might be able to capture, in order that his spirit might watch over the treasure, and drive from the spot all but the parties who had signed their names in a round-robin, in claim of proprietorship. The professors of many faiths resemble each other in practices of propitiation or atonement laboriously executed on behalf of the departed. Some classes of mourners act towards their dead friends in a spirit of awe; some in fear; but very many in love. The trust in the immortality of the affections is the most general feature in superstitions of this class; and it is a fact eloquent to the mind of the observer.-An only child of two poor savages died. The parents appeared inconsolable; and the father soon sank under his grief. From the moment of his death, the mother was cheerful. On being asked what had cheered her, she said she had mourned for her child's loneliness in the world of spirits: now he had his father with him, and she was happy for them both. What a divine spirit of self-sacrifice is here! but there is scarcely a superstition sincerely entertained which does not tell as plain a tale. Those which express fear indicate moral abasement, greater or less. Those which express trust and love indicate greater or less moral elevation and purity.

* * *

The practice of Suicide is worth the contemplation of a traveller, as affording some clear indications as to religious sentiment. Suicide in the largest sense is here intended,-the voluntary surrender of life from any cause.

There has been a stage in the moral advancement of every nation when suicide, in one form or another, has been considered a duty; and it is impossible to foresee the time when it will cease to be so considered. It was a necessary result from the idea of honour once prevalent in the most civilized societies, when men and women destroyed themselves to avoid disgrace. The defeated warrior, the baffled statesman, the injured woman, destroyed themselves when the hope of honour was gone. In the same age, as in every succeeding one, there have been suicides who have devoted themselves for others, presenting a series of tales which may almost redeem the disgraces which darken the annals of the race.-The most illustrious of the Christian Fathers, immersed in the superstitions about the transcendent excellence of the virtue of chastity which have extinguished so many other virtues, and injured the morals of society to this day, by sacrificing other principles to fanaticism on this, permitted women to kill themselves to escape from violence which left the mind in its purity, and the will in its rectitude.-Martyrdom for the truth existed also before the venerating eyes of men,-the noblest kind of suicide: it attracted glory to itself from the faithful heart of the race; and, from its thus attracting glory, it became a means of gaining glory, and sank from being martyrdom to be a mere fanatical self-seeking. While the spirit of persecution was roaming abroad, seeking whom it might devour, there were St. Theresas roaming abroad, seeking to be devoured, from a spirit of cupidity after the crown of martyrdom.-Soldiers, in all times and circumstances, pledge themselves to the possible duty of suicide by the very act of becoming soldiers. They engage to make the first charge, and to mount a breach if called upon. And there have been found soldiers for every perilous service that has been required, throughout all wars. There have been volunteers to mount the breach, solitary men or small bands to hold narrow bridges and passes, from the first incursion of tribe upon tribe in barbarous conflict, up to the suicide of Van Speyk, whose monument is still fresh from the chisel in the Nieuw Kerk of Amsterdam. Van Speyk commanded a gun-boat which was stranded in a heavy gale, and boarded by the Belgians,-the foe. Van Speyk had sworn never to surrender his boat, and his suicide was a point of military honour. He seems to have considered the matter thus; for he prayed for pardon of his crime of self-destruction after laying his lighted cigar on the open barrel of powder which blew up the boat. The remaining suicides (except, of course, the insane,) are justified by none. Persons who shrink from suffering so far as to withdraw from their duties, and to forsake those to whom their exertions are due, are objects of contemptuous compassion in the present day, when, moral having succeeded to physical force in men's esteem, it is seen to be nobler to endure evils than to hide one's spirit from them.

Every society has its suicides, and much may be learned from their character and number, both as to the notions on morals which prevail, and the religious sentiment which animates to or controls the act. It is with the last that we now have to do.-The act of laying down life is one thing among a people who have dim and mournful anticipations of a future life, like the ancient Greeks; and quite another among those who, like the first Christians, have a clear vision of bliss and triumph in the world on which they rush. Suicide is one thing to a man who is certain of entering immediately upon purgatory; and to another whose first step is to be upon the necks of his enemies; and to a third who believes that he is to lie conscious in his grave for some thousands of years; and to a fourth who has no idea that he shall survive or revive at all. When Curtius leaped into the gulf, he probably leaped into utter darkness, other than physical; but when Guyon of Marseilles sunned himself for the last time in the balcony of the house where he was shut up with the plague-spotted body which he was to die in dissecting, he had faith that he should step out of a waxing and waning sunlight into a region which "had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it, the glory of God being the light of it." The sick Moslem who, falling behind his troop, and fearing to lie unburied, scoops his grave and lies down in it, wrapped in his grave-clothes, and covers himself up, except the face, leaving it to the winds to heap sand upon it, trembles the while at the thought of the two examining angels, who are this night to prove and perhaps torture him. The English lady who took laudanum on learning that she had a fatal disease, from fear of becoming loathsome to a husband for whom she had lived, had before her the prominent idea of reunion with him; so that life in one world presented as much of hope as in the other of despair.-Nations share in differences like these, according to the prevalent religious sentiment; and from this species of act may the sentiment be more or less correctly inferred.

Suicide is very common among a race of Africans who prefer it to slavery. They believe in a life of tropical ease and freedom after death, and rush into it so eagerly on being reduced to slavery, that the planters of Cuba refuse them in the market, knowing that after a few hours, or days, in spite of all precautions, nothing but their dead bodies will remain in the hands of their masters. The French have, of late years, abounded in suicides, while there are few or none in Ireland. The most vain and the most sympathetic part of the French multitude were found to be the classes which yielded the victims. If a young lady and her lover shot one another with pistols tied with pink ribbons, two or three suicides amidst blue and green ribbons were sure to follow the announcement of the first in the newspaper, till a sensible physician suggested that suicides should not be noticed in newspapers, or should be treated with ridicule: the advice was acted upon, and proved by the result to be sound. This profusion of self-murders could not have taken place amidst a serious belief of an immediate entrance upon purgatory, such as is held by the majority of the Irish. Only in a state of vague speculation as to another life could the future have operated as so slight a check upon the rash impulses of the present. The Irish, an impetuous race, like the French, and with a good share of vanity, of sympathy, and of sentiment, are probably deterred from throwing away life by those religious convictions and sentiments which the French once held in an equal degree, but from which they are now passing over into another state.

A single act of suicide is often indicative, negatively or positively, of a state of prevalent sentiment. A single instance of the Suttee testifies to the power of Brahmins, and the condition of Hindoo worshippers, in a way which cannot be mistaken. An American child of six years old accidentally witnessed in India such a spectacle. On returning home, she told her mother she had seen hell, and was whipped for saying so,-not knowing why, for she spoke in all earnestness, and, as it seems to us, with eloquent truth.-The somewhat recent self-destruction of an estimable English officer, on the eve of a court-martial, might fully instruct a stranger on the subject of military honour in this country. This officer fell in the collision of universal and professional principles. His justice and humanity had led him to offer a kindly bearing towards an irresolute mob of rioters, in the absence of authority to act otherwise than as he did, and of all co-operation from the civil power; his military honour was placed in jeopardy, and the innocent man preferred self-destruction to meeting the risk; thus testifying that numbers here sustain an idea of honour which is at variance with that which they expect to prevail elsewhere and hereafter.-Every act of self-devotion for others, extending to death, testifies to the existence of philanthropy, and to its being regarded as an honour and a good. Every voluntary martyrdom tells a national tale as plain as that written in blood and spirit by Arnold Von Winkelried, in 1386. When the Swiss met their oppressors at the battle of Sempach, it appeared impossible for the Swiss to charge with effect, so thick was the hedge of Austrian lances. Arnold Von Winkelried cried, "I will make a lane for you! Dear companions, remember my family!" He clasped an armful of the enemy's lances, and made a sheaf of them in his body. His comrades entered the breach, and won the battle. They remembered his family, and their descendants commemorate the sacrifice to this day; thus bearing testimony to the act being a trait of the national spirit.

By observations such as these, may the religious sentiment of a people be ascertained. While making them, or struggling with the difficulties of opposing evidence, the observer has to bear in mind,-first, that the religious sentiment does everywhere exist, however low its tone, and however uncouth its expression; secondly, that personal morals must greatly depend on the low or high character of the religious sentiment; and, thirdly, that the philosophy and morals of government accord with both,-despotism of some sort being the natural rule where licentious and ascetic religions prevail; and democratic government being possible only under a moderate form of religion, where the use without the abuse of all blessings is the spirit of the religion of the majority.

* * *