Nor

got into complete working order, there was felt, necessarily, a great lack of attendance and of ordinary comforts; and at this time their assistance was invaluable. To cool the sufferer's parched tongue with refreshing drinks, to supply the stimulants without which exhausted nature must have given up the struggle, to bathe the wounded limbs and rearrange the bandages, was the constant occupation of many of these worthy imitators of Florence Nightingale. Nor did they forget, while ministering to the wants of the body, to smooth meanwhile the pillow of the wounded man, and to add those small words of sympathy, which only the kind heart of a woman knows how to express. In passing down the line of beds, it was touching to see the gratitude for these attentions evinced by those poor fellows who were sufficiently free from pain to be capable of expressing it. A melting look might be seen in the eyes of the rough soldier as he kissed the hand that served him, and fell back on his pillow with a smile of gratitude pervading his features.

There were curious contrasts in that

row of wounded men: some lay insensible as if already dead; others, though frightfully disfigured by some ghastly wound in the head or face, yet appeared to suffer little. One case in particular was that of a Prussian whose two eyes had been carried away by a bullet which had struck him in profile, going completely through the bone of his nose. Yet his suffering did not appear to be so great as one would have expected from his injury. But there were a few whose writhing agony told of a vital body wound. Under the Arcade, close to the ballroom door, lay a young Bavarian : his face once seen I can never forget. A bullet had passed right through his body, and for three days the look of death was upon his face, as his strong frame struggled in its agony. He was nursed by several of his countrywomen, who hung incessantly around his bed with the solicitude of sisters; and when for the last time I looked upon him his strength was fast failing, and the tender-hearted women

were kneeling around him, bathed in tears, with difficulty joining in the responses to the prayers which one of them was sobbing forth to the now unconscious sufferer.

But as most of those who sank under their wounds were far removed from home and friends, the death-bed scene was in general free from the additional gloom which the anguish of relations ordinarily adds to it. At the Hotel Fischer, however, a painful occurrence happened. Frau von on hearing

that her husband lay wounded at Kissingen, at once started from Munich to nurse him; and, being under the impression that his wound was slight, she entered the house from her carriage, full of gaiety and high spirits at the idea of again seeing her husband, and that he was now free from the perils of a further campaign. To her inquiry, where was Captain von - she was

met by the reply, "He is not here; he is dead; he was buried yesterday." The revulsion of feeling was too frightful, and the poor woman fell down in

sensible. It was not for some time that she revived sufficiently to learn the reality of her misery; and throughout the night her frightful screams attested the shock her nervous system had received.

But even among the wounded there were bright and cheerful faces. Many of them had been hit in the legs and feet; and, after the bullets had been extracted, they felt comparatively easy. The greater part would sit up, and enjoy the cigars which were plentifully supplied to all who called for them. To the ladies who had been kind to them they would also with great glee bring forth from under their pillow and display the bullet which had brought them low, as a great trophy. The possession of this relic always seemed to afford much satisfaction; and in several cases, where it was evident that the wound was mortal, the surgeons yielded to the clamours of the dying man, and extracted the ball, for the purpose of giving him some small satisfaction in his last hours by its possession.

Meanwhile fresh cases were daily brought in; men who in the agony of the hour had crawled under the shelter of the bushes from the burning sun, and for days and nights had escaped the search of the fatigue parties, and yet still lived. Others who had fallen in the later part of the day's engagement, and had at first been laid in the miserable hovels and sheds at the village of Winkels, were now, greatly to the delight of the poor dispossessed villagers, brought down to the hospitals at Kissingen. For these, unfortunately, there was no difficulty in finding room. Beds were always vacant, from which the hand of death had removed the former occupant. Morning after morning the gaps in the line of sick, and the sad row of lifeless forms at the extremity of the Arcade, each covered with a military cloak, bare witness to the mortality of the previous night; while the truck which had been employed to bear the more cumbrous musical instruments to the band platform, we now saw daily passing across the garden, laden with a score of dead. At the cemetery large pits had been dug, and the dead from the hospitals, as well as those who had been collected from the battle-field, were laid to rest, side by side. The latter were brought down by wagon loads, and the afternoon succeeding the battle, when I visited the cemetery, three of these dismal burdens were waiting for interment. I crossed the cemetery to a small chapel on the other side, which was open, and on the floor I beheld the corpses of about a score Bavarian soldiers awaiting a separate burial at the hands of their countrymen. Their faces were all uncovered, and the effect of so many mute forms lying extended in solemn silence was peculiarly striking. One of them was a Bavarian officer, a remarkably handsome man,

whose features I recognised as one of those, who only the Sunday before had jauntily swaggered up and down the Promenade in the Cure Garden, in full possession of life.

Of the casualties on both sides it is difficult to form an estimate. The Prussians suffered severely compared with the Bavarians, as the latter fought so much under shelter; but the large number of the Bavarians, probably some 800, who were surrounded in the town and made prisoners, must have made the loss in effective men about equal. In comparison with the fearful carnage in Bohemia, the loss of life would appear trifling; but it was only when the results of a battle between two small armies had been brought before my eyes, that I felt I could realise in their intensity the horrors of a battlefield like Sadowa.

It was not long before we had all taken our departure from Kissingen. For some little time we found considerable difficulty in so doing, as all means of transport had been seized by the Prussians, and carriages were not to be had. Some families, anxious to depart, entrusted themselves to country waggons, in which, seated on their trunks, we saw them leaving the town for a journey of some sixty miles to the rail at Cassel. But, as the army moved farther off, carriages again made their appearance, and the town was soon left to its suffering wounded and its dejected inhabitants.

May another year be a brighter one for it; but, though the bullet-marks may be removed from its walls, and the dark stains may be cleansed from its arcades, yet the recollection of Kissingen in July, 1866, will not soon be effaced from the recollection of us who then saw the horrors of war in their reality.

the charms of wit, the glow of imagi

nation, profoundness of thought, all "the gifts which Heaven imparts indiscriminately, have turned to the advan

tage of democracy; and even when they have been found in the posses"sion of its opponents, they have still "done service to its cause by bringing "into relief man's natural greatness; "its conquests have spread therefore "with those of civilization and know"ledge, and literature has become an arsenal open to all, in which the weak "and the poor have found arms every day." Whoever uses M. de Tocqueville's eyes to read the signs of the time, will accordingly see in the part taken by Lord Dufferin at once a noble, a landowner, and a man of letters and genius-in the controversy relating to land, not a vindication of its proprietors which will exempt their conduct henceforward from scrutiny, but a mark of the irresistible force of a movement which is setting up rivals in every direction to inherited distinctions and territorial power;-rendering public opinion No. 93.-VOL. XVI.

the sovereign authority, and the public. good the sole foundation upon which institutions, however ancient, can base their continuance;-above all, making landed property, once the sole source of legislation, now its recognised subject and creature, possessed of no title which is not derived from the public advantage, and amenable in all its relations to the control of the State. A great step has been made towards making the use of landed property reasonable, when its proprietors themselves begin to reason about it; not only is it a sign that they are ceasing to rely solely on power, but it exposes whatever is indefensible in their pretensions to immediate detection. A fool is said to be wiser in his own conceit than seven men that can render a reason; but sometimes he is wise beyond his conceit, for it may be ten times harder to answer folly than reason. The old vague and intractable assertions of "the rights of property," for example, however little to the intellectual credit of those who employed them, were not without an impenetrable power of resistance to argument, which enabled them to hold ground; just as the stupidest animals are the most obstinate in an encounter, because they cannot see when they are beaten, and hold on to the death.

If, however, such characteristics as the foregoing of the great movement delineated in M. de Tocqueville's pages, may awaken pleasure and hope in the minds of his disciples, others, unfortunately, are not wanting which cannot be viewed without both regret and alarm even by those whose con fidence is strongest that it is upon the whole a movement for good. Not the least portentous among these is that growing severance of the peasantry from the soil, and that increasingly selfish

Q

seen to loosen by degrees; the relations "between the poor and the rich become "fewer and less kindly; rents rise. This "is not actually the result of demo"cratic revolution, but it is its certain "indication. For an aristocracy which "has definitively let the heart of the 'people slip from its hands is like a tree which is dead at its roots, and "which the winds overturn the more "easily, the higher it is. I have often "heard great English proprietors congratulate themselves that they derive "much more money from their estates "than their fathers did. They may be "in the right to rejoice, but assuredly

66

money they are on the point of losing "in power. . . . There is yet another

66

66

sign that a great democratic movement "is being accomplished or is in preparation. In the middle age almost "all landed property was let in per"petuity, or at least for a very long term. When one studies the economy of "that period, one finds that leases for "ninety years were commoner than "leases for twelve years are now." In his celebrated Essay on M. de Tocqueville's book, Mr. Mill has with similar prescience remarked that without a large agricultural class, with an attachment. to the soil, a permanent connexion with it, and the tranquillity and simplicity of rural habits and tastes, there can be no check to the total predominance of an unsettled, uneasy, gain-seeking, commercial democracy. "Our town popu"lation," it has long been remarked, "is 66 becoming almost as mobile and uneasy as the American. It ought not to be so with our agriculturists; they ought "to be the counterbalancing element in "the national character; they should

46

66

So, in a late debate upon Irish tenures, in Parliament, it was argued with unanswerable force by Mr. Gregory, in reference to the tenure now generally prevalent in the island: "There could be no "attachment to the institutions of a "country in which the whole of a peasantry existed merely on sufferance; certainly there was nothing conserva"tive in tenancies at will; indeed he "believed such tenancies to be the most "revolutionary in the world." The conclusion is irresistible that the true revolutionary party in Ireland are unconsciously and unwillingly, but not the less certainly, the owners of land. When therefore it is alleged that the chronic absence of tranquillity and the periodical recurrence of sedition prevent the rise of other occupations than agriculture, thereby placing almost the whole population at the mercy of the landlords, who can in consequence impose unreasonable terms, the answer is obvious,-first, that prosperous agriculture and continued political tranquillity are equally incompatible with such a tenure; secondly, that a prosperous agriculture is itself the true natural source and support of all other industries; and thirdly, that the allegation itself involves an admission that the power of the landlords is excessive. So far, moreover, is the competition for land from being the causeit could in no case be the excuse-of the insecurity of tenure in Ireland, that the immense reduction in the population and the number of the competitors for the occupation of land has been attended with increased insecurity. Before the failure of the potato, the Devon Commission urged the interference of Parliament, because the industry of the culti vators of the soil was paralysed by in1 Dissertations and Discussions, ii. 75.

that Report, famine and emigration have reduced the population by nearly three millions in twenty-one years, and statesmen of both parties have repeatedly adopted the conclusion of the Devon Commission, both as regards the effects. of the insecurity of tenure and the necessity of interference. Yet the actual condition of things is that the radical evil has increased-that leases have become fewer and evictions more frequent. So lost to the Irish proprietor's mind is indeed the very conception of a true rural population and of the best uses of land, that even so enlightened and kindly a landlord as Lord Dufferin regards the love of the soil, and of a little farm of his own on the part of the peasant, not as a healthy affection and natural blending of associations, not as the true spirit of agriculture and the germ of many social and civil virtues, not as the best ally of industrious enterprise in other pursuits, but as a morbid and mischievous propensity to be condemned and discouraged. His lordship's ideal of a happy and prosperous peasant seems to be the English agricultural labourer with ro root in the soil, no interest in it, and no love for it; and he proposes to the small farmer, as a means of improving his condition, a descent to the rank of a labourer for hire. Speaking in the House of Lords last year, the noble lord said: "From an inherent desire to possess land, and in a most unhappy fancy that he loses caste if he passes "from the condition of an embarrassed "tenant to that of an independent labourer, the tenant is ready to run

66

66

idea presents itself again and again both in his lordship's letters to the Times, and in his recent volume.1 For example :-"In proportion as the pea"sant becomes aware of a more hopeful "theatre for his industry, whether at "home or abroad, that morbid hunger "for a bit of land which has been the "bane of Ireland will subside."... "The "labourer's dream is to become a tenant, "the tenant's greatest ambition is to enjoy the dignity of a landlord. What "he cannot be brought to realize is that an independent labourer is a more "respectable person than a struggling "farmer.".. "The alternative of adequate wages is open to him; the "reckless acquisition of land to which "he cannot do justice is the result "of a passion to be discouraged rather "than stimulated."

66

66

66

If the actual use of land throughout Great Britain had not given rise to a singular set of conceptions with regard to its true use, it would be superfluous to urge that political economy has always recognized in the pleasures of rural life and occupations-in the love of a farm and the sense of independence it should be so held as to bestow-in the desire of the labourer to become a tenantfarmer and of the tenant farmer to possess land of his own-not only legitimate sources of happiness, but motives to agricultural industry, beyond its pecuniary returns, which both the laws and the customs of a country ought to foster. "The beauty of the country," says Adam Smith, "the pleasures of country life, the "tranquillity of mind which it promises,

age he seems to retain a predilection "for the primitive employment." The productive value of the affectionate interest in the land which the Continental peasant feels, after what Mr.

1 Irish Emigration and the Tenure of Land in Ireland. By Lord Dufferin.