“Lately, in the neighbourhood of Odessa, the cultivation of beetroot, and extraction of sugar from it, was carried on to a considerable extent by the large landed proprietors of the adjoining provinces. Notwithstanding most praiseworthy exertions, these aristocratic beetroot growers were totally unable to make their speculation remunerative, and many of them must have been ruined had not the legislature stepped in and prohibited the sale of any other sugar. The consequence is, that the inhabitants are obliged to buy sugar at a hundred per cent higher than the price at which our colonial sugar could be imported into the country. It is some satisfaction to know that, notwithstanding this iniquitous regulation, combined with the system of forced labour, the beetroot growers are unable to cultivate with profit.”[31] But the train is in motion, the trumpet has sounded, and we are off through the darkness, and along the slightly undulating flats, on our way to Berlin. We found ourselves in company with a pleasant Frenchman _en route_ from the embassy in London to the embassy in Berlin; and before our most unanimous deliberations on the affairs of the East had come to a close, we found ourselves at the end of our journey, and by 10 P.M. had reached our quarters in the Hôtel de Russie. Berlin, how many beauties and attractions dost thou present to the stranger who steps out for the first time from this hotel, and, walking a few yards, places himself in the centre of the Unter den Linden, with his back to the river and bridge. Leisurely he feasts his eyes as he turns, now to the right and now to the left, now gazing down the long vista which terminates at the Brandenburg gate, now turning towards the arsenal and the museum, and now farther round towards the cathedral and the royal palace. Architecture, sculpture, and the arts of decoration and design, all contribute their attractions; massing, grouping, and colouring, add their effects upon the intelligent eye, while the heart is touched by the mementoes of the past which here and there arrest his glance, the grateful homage to the departed which the monumental statuary exhibits, the love of country breathing from brief but frequent inscriptions, and over all the love and veneration of both king and people for the Great Frederick, the founder of the Prussian fortunes. Deeper than all the other sights which thus first arrest the stranger’s eye, the monument to Frederick and his times will touch and impress the sensitive stranger. On his war steed there he rides, the iron man, the observed of all eyes, surrounded, it is true, by the generals who rose to fame beneath his banner, but not less conspicuously by the statesmen who led his civil armies, by the poets and great writers whom he esteemed and imitated, by the advancers of science in his time, and by those who ornamented his reign through the decorations of the fine