Under more agreeable circumstances next day, I became aware that Gottenburg is a regularly-built town of about 30,000 inhabitants, containing a remarkable proportion of good private houses--much permeated by canals, which are crossed by rather hard-favoured stone-bridges--exhibiting on the inland side some beautiful environs, throughout which are scattered many handsome mansions belonging to the most eminent merchants. Gottenburg contains several British mercantile houses, and is very much an English town, unless that my own countrymen may be said more particularly to take the lead in its society. Iron-founding and machine-making, cotton-spinning, sailcloth-making, and sugar-refining, are the chief branches of industry, all of them conducted under the protection of prohibitory duties, the Swedes being willing to buy these articles at high prices from Englishmen who will consent to make them in Sweden, rather than purchase them cheaply in England. Accordingly, several of the Gottenburg firms are understood to be realising incomes in striking disproportion to those common among the natives; one, for instance, having cleared so much as L.50,000 in a year; though here, it must be remarked, the result was helped by a patent. These settlers are probably compensating in some degree for their monopolies by the impulse which they give to the indigenous population, noted in all time for the slowness of their movements, and their dislike to adopt new fashions and methods. There is a good, moreover, to be gained from commixtures of the people of two countries, in as far as it tends, by making them acquainted with each other, to extinguish mutual prejudice. As might be expected, some of the manufactures thus forced into prominence in Sweden are conducted under considerable disadvantages as compared with those of England. For example, a cotton manufacturer in Sweden cannot get a supply of his materials equably over the year, all communications being shut up during the seven months of winter. The consequent necessity of laying up a stock to serve through the winter, entailing a greater outlay of capital, is so much against him. On the other hand, he may save in the wages of his labourers. These trades are in the meanwhile prosperous; but I have a strong sense of the precariousness of any prosperity depending on protection, and believe that it would be well for the protégés to consider that the self-sacrificing whim of their Swedish customers may some day give way to an admission of the rational principle--that the cheapest market is, in all circumstances, the best.