* * * * * PEASANT LIFE IN GERMANY. We copy the following interesting paragraph from a work just issued in London on "The Social Condition and Education of the People of England and Europe," by Joseph Kay, of Cambridge University. "As I have already said, the _moral, intellectual and physical condition of the peasants and operatives_ of Prussia, Saxony and other parts of Germany, of Holland, and of the Protestant cantons of Switzerland, and the social condition of the peasants in the greater part of France, _is very much higher and happier, and very much more satisfactory, than that of the peasants and operatives of England_; the condition of the _poor_ in the North German, Swiss and Dutch _towns_, is as remarkable a contrast to that of the poor of the _English towns_ as can well be imagined; and that the condition of the _poorer classes_ of Germany, Switzerland, Holland and France is _rapidly improving_. The great _superiority_ of the _preparation_ for life which a _poor man_ receives in those countries I have mentioned, to that which a peasant or operative receives _in England_, and the difference of the social position of a poor man in those countries to that of a peasant or operative in England, seem sufficient to explain the difference which exists between the moral and social condition of the poor of our own country and of the other countries I have named. In Germany, Holland, and Switzerland, a child begins its life in the society of parents who have been educated and brought up for years in the company of learned and gentlemanly professors, and in the society and under the direction of a father who has been exercised in military arts, and who has acquired the bearing, the clean and orderly habits, and the taste for respectable attire, which characterize the soldier. The children of these countries spend the first six years of their lives in homes which are well regulated. They are during this time accustomed to orderly habits, to neat and clean clothes, and to ideas of the value of instruction, of the respect due to the teachers, and of the excellence of the schools, by parents who have, by their training in early life, acquired such tastes and ideas themselves. Each child at the age of six begins to attend a school, which is perfectly clean, well ventilated, directed by an able and well-educated gentleman, and superintended by the religious ministers and by the inspectors of the Government. Until the completion of its _fourteenth_ year, each child continues regular daily attendance at one of these schools, daily strengthening its habits of cleanliness and order, learning the rudiments of useful knowledge, receiving the principles of religion and morality, and gaining confirmed