In travelling through many parts of Germany we are often surprised at the paucity of men, and cannot help wondering where they are, or what they are doing! Women are the universal drudges here! 19. _Status quo._—Among all ranks and classes of Society in Germany, from the prince to the peasant, there is, or there _appears_ to be, a complete amalgamation, approximation—in fine, an _equalization_ in one thing—POLITENESS. But the approximation goes no farther than the hat, the cap, and the bow. It would be almost as easy for a Pariar in India, or a Ladrone in China to break the boundaries of his cast, and rise through the ranks above him, as for a German of low grade to mount into the circles of the nobility. Each ascending series is all but hermetically sealed against the inferior one! What is impossible to be done, is not therefore attempted—perhaps it is scarcely desired. All this is reversed in England. Here we have but very little reciprocity of external and formal civility among the different ranks; but the barriers between them are to easily—or at least so frequently overleaped, that almost every individual has an ardent wish, and is engaged in a constant struggle to rise above the grade in which Nature or accident placed him at birth. It is evident that this contrasted state of things, quite independent of politics, must produce tranquillity, if not content, in the one country—commotion and even strife in the other. At the same time it generates industry, energy, and enterprize in England. 20. _Locomotion._—It is passing strange that the mercurial brains of our French neighbours should never have infused any quicksilver into the heels of their horses! No. There they go at the old jog-trot of five miles an hour, over the “long rough road,” which seems as if it had been stretched out over hill and dale, by some invisible and gigantic apparatus, into a straight and narrow line, which is as tiresome to the eye of the traveller as it is to the limbs of the horses. In plodding Germany, however, we do not expect velocity in man or beast—or that the schnell-post should go at any other rate than the snail’s pace. In that country time and space seem to be confounded or amalgamated;—a league signifying an hour, and an hour a league, the word “STUNDE” (derived no doubt from “_stand_”) being applicable to either or both.