cost six millions sterling in the first thirty-four years; during which, about 25,000 convicts had been transported thither; costing, therefore (if we do not reckon the stock on hand, which we have no means of doing) about £240 each. Now the Home Colonies (if we, in like manner, do not reckon the stock on hand) of Belgium, caused a total loss of only about £66,000 in ten years, during which, M. Ducpétiaux states the numbers of colonists admitted (free and delinquents) to be about 9,700; costing, therefore, not quite seven pounds each, instead of £240jah e et mox

Before quittting the subject of agricultural colonies, it is especially necessary to insist on a principle which has been wholly overlooked both by the government and societies of Holland and of Belgium, and by M. de Pommeuse, in his earnest recommendation of their system for adoption in France we mean the allimportant distinction between cottage gardens and cottage farms. A cottage garden may be considered such an extent of ground as å labourer can manage at his spare hours, after and before his ordinary day's work; and if it induce him so to employ such hours, and teach his family similar habits of industry, the addition to their physical comfort may be much, yet trifling compared with the moral blessings it will bring. A cottage farm, on the contrary, is such a portion of land as he can manage only by withdrawing himself, more or less, according to its extent, from his regular employment as a labourer. This produces a gap in the general labour-market, which gives encouragement to marriages in the labouring class there; and that market is soon supplied fully up to the demand. In the mean time, a race of labourers is raised on the cottage farms, who can find no employment on them, and therefore swarm off on the general market, where their competition reduces the general price of labour, and the means of comfortable subsistence in the labouring classes. Their habits become necessarily more sordid, and prepare them to sink lower still, as a fresh influx is supplied from the rear-ranks bred on the cottage farms; which, therefore, acts on the general labourmarket precisely as Ireland does now on England, sending forth hordes of labourers, habituated to the want of every comfort and

in Guadaloupe; the execution of which, by the voluntary labour of the men, is detailed with all the interest of a Robinson Crusoe romance. Colonel Light has applied the practical knowledge acquired there, and from some experiments in England, to form a plan of extensive operations for the improvement of wastes, with a laborious minuteness of detail, which no other author recommending like systems has had the moral courage to undertake. And though we do not admit sanguine anticipations of the may form a nucleus, round which facts and opinions we are full estimates, or concur in all the

which, like an ingenious theory,

will

arrange themselves, and truth be at last elicited.

sensible of the value of his work,

decency, and willing to work for any wages that will but give them the means of satisfying lust and hunger.

On these principles it is obvious, that in any agricultural colonies formed at home, the land should either be let to individuals, or held by the government or public societies, in such comparatively large farms as may occupy as much as possible single men domesticated with the manager, in order not to increase the population beyond the demand for labour on those farms,

In direct opposition to these principles, the colonies of Holland and Belgium, whose practice is recommended by M. de Pommeuse to the adoption of France, are divided into farms of three bonniers and a half, or nearly nine English acres, each of which farms is calculated to employ or maintain a family of six or seven individuals. What is to become of their progeny? what but to live in penury and in degraded habits, and ultimately to be voided on the general labour-market, producing there all the physical privation, degraded habits, and consequent demoralization ››we have described.

If such be in all cases the certain results of the adoption of such a system, it does appear to us that the consequences, in France, would be more rapidly and extensively mischievous, than in any other country in Europe; because the principle of her laws son the descent of landed property is already tending to the conversion of her whole territory into cottage farms. The enact-ments are as simple as they are efficacious for the purpose.ini

La loi ne considere ni la nature, ni l'origine des biens, pour en regler la succession." "Les enfans, ou leur descendans, succedent à leur pères et mères, aïeuls, aïeules, ou autre ascendans, sans distinction de sexe, ni de primogeniture, et encore qu'ils soient issus de differens mariages. Si le défunt n'a laissé ni posterité, ni frère, ni sœur, ni descendans d'eux, la succession se divise, par moitié, entre les ascendans de la ligne paternelle, et les ascendans de la ligne maternelle."-Code Civil, § 732. 745, 746.

66

Add to this, that no entails can be made beyond the second generation, and that only to the direct descendants of the testator's or donor's parent.-(Ibid. § 896. 1045. 1049). Again, a parent can only dispose (whether by will or deed of gift) of a moiety of his property, if there be one in the direct descent living; only of a third, if two; and only of a fourth, if more than two.-Ibid. § 918, 914.

How rapidly such a code must split the lands of France into wishreds was no doubt foreseen by its author, and devised as a certain mode of producing a redundant population to swell his conscription lists, and enable him to calculate and boast of his ability to expend so many more thousand lives month.

per

In addition to the operation of law, jobbers have availed themselves of the extreme subdivision of property, to sell small portions, to be paid for by instalments in five, ten, or twenty years, on which young couples, full of uncalculating, sanguine hopes, eagerly enter. Their profits are diminished by the interest, annually due, and when the year for payment of principal arrives, it has been preceded, perhaps, by a numerous family, by sickness, or by bad harvests, and they have no resource but the placing themselves on the pauper list. Accordingly, we find, in a sensible little tract," par le Comte de M***, Membre du Conseil Général du Departement de Loire et Cher,"* that "les mariages précoces, la trop grande subdivision des propriétés, et le morcellement des propriétés fait à credit," are (with the increase of manufactures) considered the principal causes of the increase of the poor in France. Yet this is the country in which M. de Pommeuse and the French ministers recommend the adoption of cottage farms.

On the whole, however, with regard to our own country, it appears to us, that, with the precautions before suggested, penal colonies, even on our home wastes, might be adopted with advantage. But in respect to the able-bodied labourer, there ought to be a farm in every parish, where employment on task-work should be supplied, but at a rate considerably below that of the general labour-market, merely sufficient to maintain the individual in healthy existence. And it has been found,† that parishes over„burdened with men preferring the utter idleness or slothful employment in which paupers are usually maintained, have, by a vigorous adoption of the plan here recommended, entirely shaken off the burden, and restored the men to the usefulness and respectability of independent labourers, and that even in cases of a manufacturing and town population.

M. de Pommense, in his zeal to recommend his favourite project, adduces examples, as he is pleased to call them, of its adoption and success in different countries of Europe, beginning with Sweden in the time of Charles XI. (p. 811). This is a case which, in fact, has nothing to do with the subject. That monarch merely reclaimed crown-lands which had been usurped by the nobles, and distributed them as military fiefs, to be held by the common soldiers and inferior officers on condition of personal service. So also concerning the colonization of Silesia; it is that,

* Des Moyens de procurer des secours à la classe indigente dans les années de Disette. Paris, 1830. + See various testimonies before Parliamentary committees, especially the Lords in 1830, and those of the Commons, on Able-bodied Labourers, in 1828, and on Wages in 1824.

C

not of a naturally barren waste, but of a devastated country. The landwehr of Prussia,the military colonies of Austria, Russia and Spain, are merely nurseries of soldiers, not establishments of provision for the poor. Nor, if they were, have we any means of determining their success as economical measures, however they may conduce to the increase of military and political power. In some of these countries, particularly in Prussia, the system of small farms cultivated by the occupier and his family will not have the pernicious tendency which we have ascribed to them in the comparatively fully peopled countries of France, the Netherlands and England; because, as in Canada and the western parts of the North American states, there is choice of good land, and abundance of spots ready for the swarms to settle on, which are cast off from the small farm hives. cast on

progress

There are, however, a number of experiments now in in Hamburgh and many of the small German states, which will soon, probably, give sufficient proof of the evil principle on which they are founded. As yet we have no documents, and they, perhaps, not experience enough to furnish them.

It is gratifying to find that, instead of these speculative projects, t the system of bureaux de bienfaisance and domiciliary relief is established in some parts of Switzerland; having been introduced during the French domination, it still maintains a languishing existence in the Roman states; whilst in the Neapo litan dominions, in Spain and in Portugal, the inveterate evils of numerous hospitals for the indiscriminate reception of the poor, and the indiscriminate alms-giving by individuals and monastic establishments, continue to produce their necessary effects of squalid indigence, and reprobate, riotous, swarming mendicityaid

To the vital importance of the subject of the poor, and of the means to be adopted for their management, every civilized country appears at present to be wide awake. It is probable that such universal attention has been excited by the crying evils of the English system of administration. It is to be hoped that foreign nations may be deterred from adopting this system, and that England may benefit by their experience in attempting a better.

ART. VIL~~August Lafontaine's Leben und Wirkensɛ vón J. G. Gruber. (Life and Labours of Augustus Lafontaine, byJ.G. Gruber.) Halle, 1833. 12mo.

THE life of an author should be written by himself, since its chief interest lies in tracing the course of thought and feeling, modified by external circumstances, that have formed his peculiar literary character, and in its relation to his personal character. Nor, psychologically speaking, is this less desirable, or perhaps less important, with respect to a pleasing and very popular writer of moderate calibre, than to the more splendid, starry meteors that dazzle our intellectual vision. As far as August Lafontaine is concerned, the want of such autobiography is, in some measure, supplied in the amusing work now before us, by the deceased author's friend, Gruber, who learned from himself the incidents of his early years, and has painted him such as he saw him, during a period of intimate association, in his mature and declining age; whence the metaphysician may deduce for himself the action of cause and effect. We shall give as briefly as may be, the account of the novelist's life, interspersed with extracts. 90q29 308 2qs

The family of Lafontaine fled from France upon the revocation of the edict of Nantes, and settled at Brunswick, where the au thor's father and grandfather were painters. They did not claim kindred with their illustrious namesake, the French poet; but on one occasion August did not see fit to disclaim a yet vet closer connexion. Gruber tells us:— niimob un..

1001 Only once did he accept this supposed compliment, when, being introduced to an old general officer, who might have been his grandfather, as the celebrated author Lafontaine, the veteran thus addressed him/3 Oh, I know you very well; you occasioned me a deal of trouble in my boyhood, when I was made to learn your Fables by heart. THe did not attempt to controvert this judicious opinion, but contented him self with regretting that he should have caused such a man so much useless trouble."

}

The only trait of family pride recorded of our Lafontaine related to Henning Brabandt, his maternal great grandfather, a man of inflexible integrity, who, by defending the rights of the poor against the aristocratic municipality of Brunswick, had incurred the ill will of the latter body. By a base artifice they rendered him an object of popular suspicion, and, deserted by those for whose sake he suffered, Brabandt was put to death with horrible tortures.

August Lafontaine was born at Brunswick in 1758, and his childhood was peculiarly happy. His parents were excellent people; his father, a distinguished artist and sensible man, oh eccentric, and, to his own loss, a dabbler in alchymy,