The Press.
London, England, 1857-09-12 00:00:00

cruel position in which it is now placed—a
position in which the millions of money wasted
are but a secondary consideration to the out-
rages which our fellow-count►ywomen have
suffered, and to the blood of our noblest
soldiers that has been spilt. The incapacity
which led to our drifting into the war with
Russia, and the mismanagement which filled
the Crimea with our dead, were but trifling
matters compared with the misgovernment
which has maddened into demons the soldiers
from the Oude province that filled our ranks
in Bengal. Yet England still tolerates the
sway of the authors of these evils, as if uncon-
scious of the wrong. In the men whose
imbecility has brought about the present
crisis, and who have all along misconstrued
and underrated it, they look for that vigour
and sagacity by which alone the honour of the
nation can be retrieved. Ministers who have
proved themselves unequal to the arrange-
ment of a cap cover are supposed competent
to the war duties of the most eventful period
the nation has ever seen. Men who broke
down under six miles want of road in the
Crimea aro expected to operate with success
at the distance of nine hundred miles from
their base in Bengal. That British pluck will
do wonders we doubt not, and it will, we hope,
even overcome the obstacles to success occa-
sioned by being superintended by such Minis-
ters as these ; but vast will be the sums the
nation will have to pay for their incompe-
tence, and many are the families that will be
placed in mourning by their neglect. England
will triumph, but it will triumph at a cost at
which posterity will stand aghast ; and our
sons, in after times, when referring to the
most disastrous period of their history, will
turn to the Ministry of Lord Palmerston, and
to the massacres, and dishonour, and financial
embarrassment he brought down upon us by
his unrighteous spoliation of Oude.

North America: its Agriculture and Climate.
By Robert Russell. Edinburgh : Adam and
Charles Black.
Tills useful volume bids fair, we think, to be-
come a standard authority upon the subjects
of which it treats. The route taken by the
author was such as to afford him the best op-
portunities of judging; and the knowledge of
a practical agriculturist, as it seoms to us,
has enabled him to condense and systematise
his results-. _ _ .

Starting from Boston, Mr. Russell took his •
way north to the confines of West Canada, as
far as Toronto and Quebec. Then turning
south, he came leisurely down through New
York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, as far as Cincin-
nati. Then bending eastward through Vir-
ginia and Carolina, he again reached the coast
at Charleston. From the town of Savannah
he sailed across to Cuba, returning by way of
New Orleans, whence he travelled northward
again to Washington, and back to Boston,
after a tour of six or seven months' duration.
From the above sketch it will be seen that
our author visited all the principal districts of
all the principal crops in which agriculturists
are interested ; that he inspected the cultiva-
tion of cereals and grasses, rice, sugar, cotton,
and tobacco ; and we may add that his obser-
vations upon each will be found highly in-
teresting to. the majority of English readers,
and to those who contemplate emigration in-
valuable.
In the northern districts ho principally
notices the scarcity, and consequent high
price, of labour. This prevents the land from
being thoroughly tilled, and has in many
places caused its premature exhaustion from
the nnessity of growing the same crop over
and over again. Wheat cannot be alternated
with turnips or other vegetable crops from
want of hands, and the only alternative is to
sow red clover among the corn, or sometimes
to leave the land fallow for several seasons.
This system, however, answers better in
America than it would do in England. The
clover is usually ploughed in and makes ex-
cellent manure. We subjoin some extracts
which show the method of farming pursued
both in arable and pasture lands :

Ou one of the Riga farms which we visited, extending to
230 acres, we found R 0 acres in wheat, 111 in barley, 14
Indian corn, 20 woods, the rest pasture and clover, In