and other workmen
necessary for carrying on of collieries and salt-works. These are by
law itself, without any paction, bound, merely by their entering upon
work, in a colliery or salt-manufactory, to the perpetual service
thereof; and if the owner sell or alienate the ground on which the
works stand, the right of the service of these colliers, salters, &c.,
passes over to the purchaser.' What was this but modified
slavery?--and the consideration that it actually existed within Great
Britain until a recent period, and excited no sort of compassion,
should temper any observations we might be inclined to make on the
subject of slavery in distant countries.

We cannot but rejoice that in the present day there exists not the
slightest relict of serfdom in any part of the United Kingdom. Every
man is now his own master, and has his own responsibilities. We say,
we are glad of this, because without such liberty of personal action,
there can be no social progress. At the same time, it appears
undeniable that the legislature, in emancipating the humbler classes,
has strangely neglected to go one step further--that is, to make sure
of their being educated, and so rendered capable of improving their
condition to some purpose. It is in this great shortcoming that a blot
rests on our institutions. When is that blot to be removed?

EXTRACTS FROM THE DIARY OF A TRAVELLER IN CHILI.

So little is known of Chili, a country of considerable extent in South
America, with a frontage to the Pacific, that latterly a distinguished
man of science, Dr Ried of Ratisbon, went on an expedition to explore
its physical character. From the notes which were sent by this
enlightened traveller to the secretary of the Zoological-mineralogical
Society of the above-named city, we are enabled to draw the following
account of the wild interior of the Chilian territory:--

The land along the coast is unusually high, the mountains on the
sea-board rising about 3000 feet above the water, for the greater part
at an angle of 60 to 70 degrees. In their height, there is hardly any
perceptible difference; the summits form long tracts of table-land,
very uneven, however, and broken up in all directions by chasms, and
the dried-up beds of cataracts and rapid rivers. For 400 leagues along
the coast, all is one dreary waste. The entrance to this table-land is
by the dry bed of a mountain torrent. Such channels, in which not a
drop of moisture has been found