There is also a remarkable difference between the social condition of the inhabitants of the country and of the towns; and this difference must be taken into consideration in estimating the political state of Greece. The principal towns contain as many persons of education, and as high a degree of mental cultivation, as can be found in any towns of a similar size in other countries; but in the rural districts, on the contrary, there is a want of material civilisation, a degree of rudeness in every process of industry, which places the agricultural population far below the people of every other European country, even including the Greek population in Turkey. The Hellenic peasant cultivates his _zevgari_, or yoke of land, in a manner that only enables him to live, to rear a family to replace his own, and to pay his taxes. No improvements take place on his farm—nor, indeed, can any take place under the system of taxation and administration actually in force. Fruit trees are annually destroyed, and forests are burnt down, but none are ever planted. The depopulation caused by the war of the revolution may still admit of the location of some additional families on uncultivated land; but no improvement has yet been commenced in agricultural industry or transport, that will give one family the means or the time to cultivate more land than its predecessors have cultivated, or that will make the same extent of land to yield any additional produce. Here, then, we find precisely the state of things which produced the stationary condition of European society during the middle ages, and which still keeps the greater part of the East in its immutable condition. The land under the windows of King Otho’s palace, and the fields around the university of Athens, are more rudely cultivated than any other portion of the soil of Europe; yet neither king, senators, deputies, nor professors, appear to have perceived that the turning point of national civilisation is not marked by the splendour of court balls, the regularity of the payment of official salaries, or the number and quality of scholastic lectures, but by the creation of a state of things in which capital is advantageously employed in augmenting the produce of the soil. When this is not the case, generations of agriculturists succeed one another for ages, treading in the footsteps of their predecessors in the same numbers, and in the same state of barbarism.