whole with roads leading on either side from the great European and American cities. Malta and the West India islands have, however, the additional disadvantage of being colonies. The moral progression of a people can scarcely begin till they are independent. Their morals are overruled by the mother-country,--by the government and legislation she imposes, by the rulers she sends out, by the nature of the advantages she grants and the tribute she requires, by the population she pours in from home, and by her own example. Accordingly, the colonies of a powerful country exhibit an exaggeration of the national faults, with only infant virtues of their own, which wait for freedom to grow to maturity, and among which an enlarged sympathy with the race is seldom found. This is a temper uncongenial with a confined, dependent, and imitative society; and the first strong symptoms of it are usually found in the persons of those whose mission it is to lead the colony out of its minority into independence. These are conditions of a people which may guide the traveller's observations by showing him what to expect. Remembering these conditions, he will mark the greater or less enlargement and generosity of the spirit of society, and learn from these the fact or promise of progression, or whether it is too soon to look for either. There is another important condition which can hardly escape his notice: whether the people are homogeneous or composed of various races. The inhabitants of New England are a remarkable specimen of the first, as the inhabitants of the middle states of America will be of the last, two or three generations hence. Almost all the nations of Europe are mongrel; and those which can trace their descent from the greatest variety of ancestors have, other circumstances remaining the same, the best chance of progression. Among a homogeneous people, ancestral virtues flourish; but these carry with them ancestral faults as their shadow; and there is a liability of a new fault being added,--resistance to the spirit of improvement. If the chances of severity of ancient virtue are lessened in the case of a mongrel people, there is a counterbalancing advantage in the greater diversity of interests, enlargement of sympathy, and vigour of enterprise introduced by the close union of the descendants of different races. The people of New England, almost to a man descended from the pilgrim fathers, have the strong religious principle and feeling, the uprightness, the domestic attachment, and the principled worldly prudence of their ancestors, with much of their asceticism (and necessarily attendant cant) and bigotry. Their neighbours in the middle states are composed of contributions from all countries of the civilized world, and have, as yet, no distinctive character; but it is probable that a very valuable one will be formed, in course of time, from such elements as the genial gaiety of the