violate an abstraction that can
do no one any good! If travelling will not take the minor points of free
tradeism out of a man, I hold him to be incorrigible. But such is
humanity! There cannot be even a general truth, that our infirmities do
not lead us to push it into falsehood, in particular practice. Men are
no more fitted to live under a system that should carry out the extreme
doctrines of this theory, than they are fitted to live without law; and
the legislator who should attempt the thing in practice, would soon find
himself in the condition of Don Quixote, after he had liberated the
galley-slaves from their fetters:--in other words, he would be cheated
the first moment circumstances compelled him to make a hard bargain with
a stranger. Were the canton of Valais to say, you _shall_ be a guide,
and such _shall_ be your pay, the imputation of tyranny might lie; by
saying, you _may_ be a guide, and such _must_ be your pay, it merely
legislates for an interest that calls for particular protection in a
particular way, to prevent abuses.

Our guide appeared with two mules harnessed to a _char a banc_, and we
proceeded. The fragment of a village which the traveller passes for
Martigny, on his way to Italy, is not the true hamlet of that name, but
a small collection of houses that has sprung up since the construction
of the Simplon road. The real place is a mile distant, and of a much
more rural and Swiss character. Driving through this hamlet, we took our
way along the winding bank of a torrent called the Drance, the
direction, at first, being south. The road was not bad, but the valley
had dwindled to a gorge, and, though broken and wild, was not
sufficiently so to be grand. After travelling a few miles, we reached a
point where our own route diverged from the course of the Drance, which
came in from the east, while we journeyed south. This Drance is the
stream that produced the terrible inundation a few years since. The
calamity was produced by an accumulation of ice higher in the gorges,
which formed a temporary lake. The canton made noble efforts to avert
the evil, and men were employed as miners, to cut a passage for the
water, through the ice, but their labour proved useless, although they
had made a channel, and the danger was greatly lessened. Before half the
water had escaped, however, the ice gave way, and let the remainder of
the lake down in a flood. The descent was terrific, sweeping before it
every thing