even England, that I was of opinion Europe would have been glad enough to take things quietly.  At all events, a war would only have made the matter worse for the allied monarchs.  The other stared at me in amazement, muttered an audible dissent, and, I make no doubt, set me down as a most disloyal subject; for, while extending her empire, and spreading her commercial system, (her Free Trade a l’Anglaise!) over every nook and corner of the earth where she can get footing, nothing sounds more treasonable to the ears of a loyal Englishman than to give the French possession of Antwerp, or the Russians possession of Constantinople.  So inveterate become his national feelings on such subjects, that I am persuaded a portion of his antipathy to the Americans arises from a disgust at hearing notions that have been, as it were, bred in and in, through his own moral system, contemned in a language that he deems his own peculiar property.  Men, in such circumstances, are rarely very philosophical or very just.

We were off in a char with the dawn.  Of course you will understand that we entered the Valais by its famous bridge, and passed St. Maurice, and the water-fall a la Teniers; for you have already travelled along this road with me.  I saw no reason to change my opinion of the Valais, which looked as chill and repulsive now as it did in 1828, though we were so early on the road as to escape the horrible sight of the basking cretins, most of whom were still housed.  Nor can I tell you how far these people have been elevated in the scale of men by an increasing desire for riches.

At Martigny we breakfasted, while the innkeeper sent for a guide.  The canton has put these men under a rigid police, the prices being regulated by law, and the certificate of the traveller becoming important to them.  This your advocate of the absurdity called Free Trade will look upon as tyranny, it being more for the interest of human intercourse than the traveller who arrives in a strange country should be cheated by a hackney-coachman, or the driver of a cart, or stand higgling an hour in the streets, than to violate an abstraction that can do no one any good!  If travelling will not take the minor points of free tradeism out of a man, I hold him to be incorrigible.  But such is humanity!  There cannot be even a general truth, that our infirmities do not lead us to push it into falsehood, in particular practice.  Men are no more fitted to live under a system that should carry out the extreme doctrines of this theory, than they are fitted to live without law; and the legislator who should attempt the thing in practice, would soon find himself in the condition of Don Quixote, after he had liberated the galley-slaves from their fetters:—­in other words, he would be cheated the first moment circumstances compelled him to make a hard bargain with a stranger.  Were the canton of Valais to say, you shall be a guide, and such shall be your pay, the imputation of tyranny might lie; by saying, you may be a guide, and such must be your pay, it merely legislates for an interest that calls for particular protection in a particular way, to prevent abuses.