many others who were then occupied
with the improvement of the country people. The propositions which he
makes for the elevation of the class are sensible, but unsatisfactory;
as indeed are almost all theories with respect to social evils. Yet,
when we scan the contents of this well-meaning book, we are seized with
alarm; not at what he relates concerning the oppression of the peasant,
but at the way in which he himself seems necessitated to speak of
two-thirds of the German people. They are strangers to him and his
contemporaries: it is something new and attractive to their
philanthropy to realize the condition of these peculiar men. There is
an especial charm to a conscientious and feeling mind in ascertaining
clearly, what is the exact nature and cause of the stupidity,
coarseness, and evil qualities of the country people. The author even
compares their position with that of the Jews; he discusses their
condition of mind much in the same way that our philanthropists do
those of gaol prisoners; he sincerely wishes that the light of humanity
may fall on their huts; he compares their sloth and indolence with the
energetic working power which, as was even then known, the colonists
developed in the ancient woods of the new world. He gives this
well-meaning explanation of the contrast, that in our old and as it
were already becoming antiquated state, the many work for the one, and
a multitude of the industrious go without remuneration, therefore zeal
and desire are extinguished in a great portion of them. Almost all that
he says is true and right, but this calm kindliness, with which
enlightened men of the period of Immanuel Kant and the poetic court of
Weimar regarded the people, was unaccompanied by the slightest
suspicion, that the pith of the German national strength must be sought
in this despised and ruined class; that the condition of things under
which he himself, the author, lived, was hollow, barbarous, and
insecure; that the governments of his time possessed no guarantee of
stability, and that a political state--the great source of every manly
feeling, and of the noble consciousness of independence--was
impossible, even for the educated, so long as the peasant lived as a
beast of burden; and little did he think that all these convictions
would be forced upon the very next generation, after bitter sufferings
in a hard school, by the conquest of an external enemy. His work,
therefore, deserves well to be remembere