besides, are worshippers of authority; the Yankee least of all, but far too much for educated Englishmen. Washington and Jefferson are statesmanlike authorities, in other matters they refer to the constitution and the Bible; and as Washington and Jefferson's data, the constitution and the Bible can be employed on behalf of slavery, the transition from the free-soil party to the camp of the opponents can be easily represented as the result of better convictions.

We now come to the professional life of the Yankees. On the seaboard naturally lives a population devoted to navigation, commerce, and fishery. The competition of European sailors has, during the last ten years, driven the New Englander out of vessels sailing between Europe and America, and he is now only to be met with on the great lakes, and on board the East and West Indian and Californian liners. The inclination to a seafaring life is so great among the Yankees, that frequently farmers' sons from the interior, and educated young men, turn sailors, either with the intention of adhering to that calling, or else to employ it as a stepping-stone to mercantile avocations. At times, even these sailors are converted into authors; for instance, the celebrated lawyer and traveller Dana, and the well-known Olmstead, served several years "before the mast." The farmers on the sea-coast nearly all lead an amphibious life: they fish at the season when the great migration of sea-fish takes place to the bays and rivers of their country, and cultivate their fields in the interval. There are in all directions clubs, which seek amusement in trips to sea, fishing-parties, and rowing-matches; and even the ladies join these excursions.

The separate branches of this profession are mainly connected with special ports. The fishermen, who catch codfish on the Newfoundland banks, generally hail from Salem, Gloucester, Lynn, and Marblehead, in Massachusetts; the whalers, from New Bedford and Newbury port; while the fishermen of Maine generally pursue their avocation on the sandbanks off their coast. The oystery breeding-grounds and fisheries are confined to the bays of Connecticut and portions of Massachusetts Bay. New England is indebted to its fisheries for a great portion of its wealth. We need only look at the palatial country-houses of the whalers at New Bedford, the numerous fine buildings in Salem, Portland, Boston, and other fishing ports, and the general prosperity of the coast districts inhabited by fishermen, to be convinced of this fact.

A hundred branches of trade are also connected with navigation. Salem makes guano of the unsold fish and offal; Rockport ships the noble granite found in the neighbourhood, which is cut into slabs and blocks of every shape by very clever machinery; other places shell and pack in air-tight tin cases oysters for export to distant markets; others, again, build vessels and boats, burn lime out of oyster-shells, &c. In short, the Yankee is most inventive in connecting industrial operations with a seafaring life; and if he lose the sale of his productions at one spot, he very rapidly compensates himself by the discovery of some other source of profit.

Nearly three-fourths of the very large coasting-trade of America are in the hands of the New Englanders, because they possess most good harbours, most good sailors, the boldest and best-trained navigators, the best building wood, and a great variety of manufactures and productions

of the soil. Down as far as the Rio La Plata their clippers and schooners keep up the interchange of the produce of every zone, and in the same way a Yankee population carries on the coasting-trade on the shores of the Pacific from the Oregon downwards. When, in 1825, the port of New York was connected with the great northern lakes by the Erie Canal, the New England sea-traffic, whose ports could not be connected with the lakes in the same way, suffered from a serious competition which threatened its ruin, and in truth a great portion of the capital invested in New England was transferred to that cosmopolitan city. But the inventive spirit of the Yankees speedily made up for this loss. While New York undertook the trade with Eastern Europe, New England provided the communication between the North and South of the Western continent, by creating masses of goods to freight vessels and satisfy the requirements of every open market in the South. Thus sprang up the spinning and weaving factories of Massachusetts, in order to work up and pay for the cotton of the South, and at the same time obtain double profit. Thus sprang up the gigantic leather and shoe trade in the same State, which fetched its hides from the La Plata States, and soon covered every foot in America, so that, in the present day, every sixth man is a shoemaker. Thus, too, sprang up the ice trade, which now supplies every hot country as far as China with the cooling luxury. Danbury applied itself to making hats wholesale; Waterbury to brass short goods; Bridgeport to carriage building and the manufacture of wooden clocks. Furthermore, we find in Yankee-land the furniture factories, which are carried on in such a way that the wood is roughly cut by cheap water and steampower in New Hampshire and Maine, and then conveyed to the workshops to be put together, varnished, and sent off. Then, again, there is the building wood trade, which cheaply supplies logs, planks, and beams at the place of growth, so that the house can be put on board vessels in port piecemeal. We have also to mention the factories for clothes, linen, schooling articles, turned goods, and pianofortes at Boston, of fire-arms at Springfield, Brottleborn, and Worcester, of half-woollen goods at Northampton, of filters and cask-staves at Burlington, of wooden toys and brooms in Maine, &c. The want of freight, the commercial spirit, and the inventive talent of the Yankees, created branches of trade long before there was that density of population which, in Europe, is considered necessary for the production of a great trade. And as the constant migration of the nation to the West and South kept wages up, the inventive spirit must find means to secure success by the most extensive use of machinery and the cleverest adaptation of the goods to the requirements of the consumers. And here is the place to speak of the protective duties, whose defenders are incorrectly sought among the Yankees. In this matter it is only true that the New England States formerly demanded protection for their trade, and did so at the time when they established it, in order to stand the competition of New York, from 1825 to 1840. Since then they no longer require this protection. Except in a few branches of trade, the movement for it is confined to Pennsylvania and New Jersey; and though, in the great electoral contest of 1860, New England advocated moderate protection, this was done from political reasons. In the first place, the Northern anti-slavery party had never yet been able to gain a victory over the Southern de

mocrats without the support of the Protectionist States, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and hence they were bought by the concession of protecting duties, in which New England now feels as slight an interest as the North-West. Secondly, speculations in land and building sites, provisions, and shares, had attained a dangerous height before 1860, and entailed the great crisis of 1857. This was the effect of the slaveholder's policy, who looked askance at Northern trade and colonisation, at the white immigration and free labour, and at the same time of a large amount of a capital, which, through the universal desire of the people to grow rich suddenly, strove to gain enormous profits by gigantic speculations. At that time capital was too valuable even for the best paying trades; and in order to bring it afloat once more, protection duties were regarded as the most effective means. Thirdly, a free trade, such as the slaveholders desired, impoverished the land, caused a powerful aristocratic caste to spring up, rendered the labourers proletarians, and demoralised the whole nation. Hence those moderate protecting duties were necessary as portions of a political system which sought to obtain for free labour the mastery over slavery.

We will close our excerpts from Mr. Douai's work with a glance at the agriculture of the Yankees. This is regulated more than elsewhere by mercantile considerations. In Germany, agriculture has its internal moral law, the countryman strives for excellence in his labour, and finds a large portion of his reward in its inner value. In America people desire rapidly to subdue a rough and obstinate nature, and the excellence of the work is only taken into consideration as it rewards in the immediate present. The settler on rough land must at once find an ample return for his exertions, or else he is ruined, owing to the smallness of his capital. He is obliged to destroy his stock of growing wood, and exhausts his land by cultivating it without rotation of crops or manuring. He can only think of rational husbandry, stall-feeding, draining, improving the breed of cattle, and the use of machinery, when he has completely exhausted his land, for by that time his capital is generally sufficient for the purpose. To this is added the advantage of growing maize. Maize is a thing without which the rapid settlement of America would have been simply impossible. It grows on any not thoroughly exhausted soil wherever the summer heat reaches 14 deg. R. It can be left to itself after sowing in spring, and be left in the haulm till November. The leaves are splendid food for cattle; the corn supplies food for men and domestic animals, and the haulms, which are left standing, afford the cattle which run about at liberty a certain amount of food during the winter. Furthermore, maize does not exhaust the soil so quickly, but loosens it, and protects it from excessive heat and heavy showers. Lastly, it will grow on the same soil for a generation, and prepares it for nearly every other sort of crop. So long, therefore, as constant immigration ensures the farmer a paying market for his Indian corn, he would be a fool to grow other crops, which do not pay so well; and even when the market is no longer at the door of his block-house, the maize, when converted into fat stock, will be valuable.

Thus, then, in America, nature has formed an alliance with the natural indolence of man in order to keep the agriculturist at the lowest stage of his profession. In the South he has remained there; in the Central

States German industry has raised itself partially above it. Among the Yankees, these obstacles to improvement were broken at an early period by the rough climate, poorer soil, the habit of reflection brought from England, and the trading spirit of the population. The Yankee farmer became simultaneously a tradesman. As a rule, he devotes himself preeminently to one branch of agriculture. In the vicinity of populous towns, he confines his attention to producing milk. Farther away from towns, he produces as much butter and cheese as he can, fattens cattle, or else attends to wool, to growing vegetables, plantations, horse-breeding, or haymaking. Large corn-fields are nowhere visible; but, on the other hand, fine herds of cattle, for New England, owing to its abundance of water, is specially adapted for breeding, and improved breeds do not degenerate there so easily as in the West and South. Every field almost is sown with grass once every three, four, or five years, and left a meadow for one or two years, and in the same way perfectly exhausted land is converted into pasturage by the help of guano, and is sown with clover so soon as the cattle have restored its fertility. Other fields are made serviceable by draining and subsoil ploughing, and, generally among the Yankee farmers, much active progress is visible. They possess excellently edited agricultural papers, read works on their profession, have schools, agricultural exhibitions, societies which distribute all sorts of useful knowledge, good seeds, saplings, &c.

Altogether, however, the Yankee is not very attached to farming, and only too gladly seizes any opportunity to turn to another vocation, especially to trade, in which a fortune can be more rapidly gained. Ten thousand persons in this way annually remove to the towns, while other ten thousand emigrate to the Far West, to Kansas, Oregon, and Nebraska, where they hope to grow rapidly rich through the rising value of the ground. Thus there are thousands of farms in New England which may be purchased far below their real value, while the rough land in the West generally fetches more than its present real value. Hundreds of thousands of German agriculturists could purchase farms in proper working order in Yankee-land very reasonably. The journey thither is cheaper, the wages of those who wish to work their way from farm-servants are higher, and intercourse with the neighbours is pleasanter than among the rough Backwoodsmen of the West. To this must be added that the proximity of the large cities offers many comforts, that the climate is excellent, and that there is everywhere an opportunity to give children a fair education.

If we may believe the other Americans, the Yankees, and specially the Bostonians, the best educated people in the New World, form a mutual admiration society, and it is true that they are not wont to hide their candle under a bushel. Still, they have a greater right to do so than the rest; and, to quote only one instance, when the New Yorkers and Southerners say of Yankees that they carry on a thriving trade in wooden nutmegs and wooden hams, it is only envy that makes them speak thus. On the contrary, they are far more honest, their banks and insurance offices incomparably more substantial, and bankruptcies are far rarer among them than all the other members of Uncle Sam's family.

NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE.

AFRICA LAID OPEN.*

THE discovery of the sources of the Nile is one of those events which will redound to the credit of the age we live in, and will ever be an honour to the men by whom it was effected, as well as to the nation to which they belonged. But in a humane point of view, the discovery of a belt of fertile country-elevated and temperate in climate, well watered and fertile, probably well populated, adapted for any and all the purposes of civilisation, and occupying no small proportion of that great zone of Equatorial Africa which remains to the present day a blank on our maps--is far more replete with significant interest and bright with promises to the future. Such a possible opening to enterprise and civilisation arouses in us an ardent desire for a more full and thorough comprehension and appreciation of the true position of Central Africa to Europe, and of the real relation of the negro to the European-not only of the "negro's place in nature" simply as so viewed, but of his position with regard to civilised nations, and upon which question, after all, must really hinge the future of Africa. We shall be best able to enter into this latter part of the question after a brief summary of what has recently been done by Speke and Grant, and upon an infinitesimally smaller scale-and yet in its way a very suggestive one-by Mr. Winwood Reade.

The earlier portions of Captains Speke and Grant's remarkable journey lay through Uzaramo, Usagara, Ugogo, and across the wilderness to Kazé, in Unyamuezi, or the Moon country-regions all previously described in Captain Burton's work, giving the results of his and Captain Speke's previous explorations of Eastern Africa as far as Lake Tanganyika, and the latter's branch expedition to Victoria Nyanza. The necessities of such a country demanded a large number of attendants, and the expedition actually started in the following strength: 1 corporal and 9 privates, Hottentots; 1 Jemadar and 25 privates, Belūchs; i Arab Kafila Bashi and 75 Wanguana, or freed slaves; 1 Kirangozi, or overlooker, and 100

Journal of the Discovery of the Sources of the Nile. By John Hanning Speke, Captain H.M. Indian Army, Fellow and Gold-Medallist of the Royal Geographical Society, Hon. Corr. Member and Gold-Medallist of the French Geographical Society, &c. With Map and Portraits, and numerous Illustrations chiefly from Drawings by Captain Grant. Blackwood and Sons.

Savage Africa: being the Narrative of a Tour in Equatorial, South-Western, and North-Western Africa. By W. Winwood Reade, Fellow of the Geographical and Anthropological Societies of London, and Corresponding Member of the Geographical Society of Paris. Smith, Elder, and Co.

On the Negro's Place in Nature. By James Hunt, Ph. D., F.S.A., &c. Trübner and Co.

Feb.-VOL. CXXX. NO. DXVIII.

K