that pass, we don’t want to look back, we want to look forward.  We have still to build up the structure that with you is finished; we are deficient in everything that a state wants in these days, and in our haste to make railways, roads, and bridges, to erect public buildings, and to promote industrial enterprises, we make certain financial blunders.  You must not forget that we in Hungary are much in the same state that you were in England in the thirteenth century, before tenant-holdings had become general.  We shall gradually learn to see the advantages to be derived from letting land on your farm system.  There is nothing we desire so much as the creation of the tenant-farmer class, which hardly exists yet.  Large estates would be far better divided and let as farms on your system.  We are in a transition state as regards many things in agricultural matters.  English or Scotch farmers would be welcomed over here by the great landowners.  Your countryman, Professor Wrightson, convinced himself of this when he was here in 1873.  If they could command some capital, the produce of the land in many instances could be doubled.”

I asked my friend about labourers’ wages, but he said it was difficult to give any fixed rate.  A mere agricultural day-labourer would get from 1s. 3d. to 1s. 6d.; sometimes the evil practice of paying wages in kind obtained—­viz., a man receives so much Indian corn (kukoricz).  And not unfrequently a peasant undertakes to plough the fields twice, to hoe them three times, and to see the crop housed, for which he receives the half of the yield provided he has furnished the seed.  The peasants’ own lands, as a rule, are very badly managed; their ploughing is shallow, and they do nothing or next to nothing in the way of drainage.

CHAPTER XIX.

Want of progress amongst the Saxons—­The Burzenland—­Kronstadt—­Mixed character of its inhabitants—­Szeklers—­General Bem’s campaign.

It was a glorious morning when I left the comfortable village of Zeiden.  Before me were the rich pastures of the Burzenland, a tract which tradition says was once filled up by the waters of a great lake, till some Saxon hero hewed a passage through the mountains in the Geisterwald for the river Aluta, thus draining this fertile region.

The mountainous wall to the rear of Zeiden is clothed by magnificent hanging woods, which at the time I describe were just tinged with the first rich touches of autumn.  It was a lovely ride through this fertile vale.  On every side I saw myself surrounded by the lofty Carpathians, or the lesser spurs of that grand range of mountains; the higher peaks to the south and south-east were already capped with snow.  The village in which I had so agreeably sojourned for a couple of days almost rises to the dignity of a little town, for it has nearly 4000 inhabitants.  Considering its situation, on the verge of this rich