ildren a piece
of bread each, and locking them up in their cottages till they return.
This would be thought a hard life in England; but hard as it is, it is
better than the degradation of agricultural laborers, in a dear country
like England, with six or eight shillings a week, and no cow, no pig,
no fruit for the market, no house, garden, or field of their own; but,
on the contrary, constant anxiety, the fear of a master on whom they are
constantly dependent, and the desolate prospect of ending their days in
a union work-house.

Each German has his house, his orchard, his road-side trees, so laden
with fruit, that if he did not carefully prop up, and tie together, and
in many places hold the boughs together with wooden clamps, they would
be torn asunder by their own weight. He has his corn-plot, his plot for
mangel-wurzel or hay, for potatoes, for hemp, etc. He is his own master,
and he therefore, and every branch of his family, have the strongest
motives for constant exertion. You see the effect of this in his
industry and his economy.

In Germany, nothing is lost. The produce of the trees and the cows is
carried to market. Much fruit is dried for winter use. You see wooden
trays of plums, cherries, and sliced apples, lying in the sun to dry.
You see strings of them hanging from their chamber windows in the sun.
The cows are kept up for the greater part of the year, and every green
thing is collected for them. Every little nook where the grass prows by
roadside, and river, and brook, is carefully cut with the sickle, and
carried home, on the heads of women and children, in baskets, or tied in
large cloths. Nothing of any kind that can possibly be made of any use
is lost. Weeds, nettles, nay, the very goose-grass which covers waste
places, is cut up and taken for the cows. You see the little children
standing in the streets of the villages, in the streams which generally
run down them, busy washing these weeds before they are given to the
cattle. They carefully collect the leaves of the marsh-grass, carefully
cut their potato tops for them, and even, if other things fail, gather
green leaves from the woodlands. One can not help thinking continually
of the enormous waste of such things in England--of the vast quantities
of grass on banks, by roadsides, in the openings of plantations, in
lanes, in church-yards, where grass from year to year springs and dies,
but which, if carefully cut, would maintain many thousand cows