when the bauer hated the gentleman as an oppressor survive-like the moat round the country gentleman's house.

Among the peasantry, the smaller class of proprietors here, as in Sauerland and Siegerland, are for the most part dirty and slovenly in their houses and farmyards; and an Irish gentleman living amongst them remarked to me, 'They seem of the Irish small farmer's opinion, that, "where there is muck, there is luck." Cleanliness has no nationality, it is the growth of freedom, self-respect, and prosperity; and it will rapidly grow in Westphalia with the development of its resources, the ingress of knowledge and change, and the increase of general wealth. Not long ago the same plough referred to before as of the age of Arminius was still in use in the Ruhr Basin, and all the implements of the farm were of a primitive kind. Now steam threshingmachines are common, lent or hired from one farm to another; though we are often positively assured in England by writers who seem to affect never to have been out of it, that peasant properties, small farms, and machinery are incompatible.

6

Westphalia, the Ruhr Basin in particular, may be regarded as the type of Germany, of its unhappy early history, its recent good government and rapid progress, the vast future before it, and the formidable competition before England. If you would see what Germany is doing,' said M. de Laveleye, go to the Ruhr Basin;' but the chief lesson to be learned regards what Germany is about to do. What will the Ruhr Basin be in another twenty years? All the elements

of England's earlier industrial superiority, coal, iron, mechanical power, are, as before said, rapidly becoming the common property of Germany, which brings with them to the development of its great natural resources, moral and intellectual advantages due to no national superiority on the part of the Germans, but to greater sagacity and foresight on the part of their statesmen. Of England, moreover, though not of Germany, Herr Riehl's maxim is true, that the custom of the peasant is the sole foundation of present order, the sole safeguard against future anarchy. And the peasant is driven to the town.

WESTPHALIA AND THE RUHR BASIN,
1869-1870.

THE marks of South Westphalian progress, since the previous year, which met the eye last autumn in the valley of the Lenne-the increase of houses of brick and stone, of people, carts, public conveyances and private carriages on the roads, of new faces of a different type near the stations, of villas and factories by the riverside made a scene so changed that the first impression conveyed was that the truer a description of the south of the province, as it appeared a twelvemonth before, the farther from truth was it now. Such, however, was soon seen not to be the case beyond the immediate vicinity of the great thoroughfare of the new business and life of the region, the railway. Not far from it were roads even more lonely and silent than the year before; and the very new highway of progress which had so transformed and augmented the industry of the valley through which it winds its own course, had extinguished altogether the simple industries of valleys adjacent. Rivers formerly determined in a great measure the economy of the whole district; its metal manufactures were carried on by the aid of water-power, and planted themselves in the river valleys; the men congregating there, while the dry valleys were left

during most of the year to the husbandry of women,

or to nature.

Iron and copper works of a primitive kind, together with charcoal-burning, gave formerly a considerable amount of employment in places where they are now dying out before coal and steam in the distance. In the valley of the Bigga, a river adjacent to the Lenne, there was a few years ago a good deal of metal production which the Ruhr-Sieg Railway has arrested, but which a branch line is expected soon to resuscitate on a grander scale. Even in the Lenne valley itself, although many tall chimneys have risen, though the steam-cylinder is fast driving out the water-wheel, and the steam-hammer the old tilt-hammer, the production of textiles by power has not yet begun; and a good part of the clothing business is done as it was in the middle ages. The shoemaker still goes round the farmhouses and the mines in the neighbourhood with the implements of his trade; the owner of the premises supplying the leather, and the stock of shoes being made on the spot, as the author has had ocular proof. The weaver, too, makes his periodical call at the cottage, and works up the thread which the housewife has spun from her own flax, dried in the sun-the process here substituted for steeping.

But if the manufacturing side of South Westphalian industry is far as yet in degree, if not in time, from the complete revolution that awaits it, the agricultural side is altogether unaltered. It is not here that M. Emile de Laveleye can find evidence of the superiority of the German over the Celt as a cultivateur d'élite; unless,

indeed, for his admirable irrigation and draining, which are however of no modern date. All along the Ruhr-Sieg line itself, as poor oat crops were seen last August as one could wish never again to behold in Ireland. In fact, the only tolerable crop the author saw, turned out on inquiry to be the produce of seed imported from Ireland. The snow is seldom off the ground before the end of February, when all the labour of the family is needed to put in at once the more important rye and potatoes, so the oats are sown too late. The rye itself is not a magnificent success; and most of the wheat consumed in the valley is imported from Hungary. The harvest returns for the year 1869, recently published by the Prussian Minister of Agriculture, place Westphalia lowest but one among the departments for the yield of the principal grain crops, wheat, rye, barley, and oats; Schleswig-Holstein coming first, and the other provinces ranking in order as follows-Pomerania, Prussia, Hanover, Rhine Province, Brandenburg and Saxony, Silesia, Hesse, Posen, Westphalia and Hohenzollern. In some of the provinces, the seasons doubtless in a great measure determined this order; but in the South Westphalian hills, the sterility of the soil and the system of husbandry together, must ensure feeble cereal returns. Above the left bank of the Bigga an isolated plateau of Devonian limestone appears like a geological island surrounded by rocks of Lenne-schiefer; and here

*

• Under this plateau lies in the Biggathal the smart little town of Attendorn, overlooked by the ancient schloss of a wealthy nobleman who never comes near it, and whose wife, it is said, has never seen it.