It is all very well to draw the moral picture of a
contented people. Contentment under some circumstances is the first
stage of rottenness. The inevitable law of change works the
deterioration of a race which does not progress. This fact admits of
practical proof here. For instance, the cloth manufactures of
Transylvania are falling into decay, and there is nothing else of an
industrial kind substituted. The result is a decrease of the general
prosperity, and a marked diminution in the population of the towns. Nor
is this the case in populous places only. The Saxon villager desires to
transmit the small estate he derived from his father intact to his
_only_ son. He does not desire a large family; it would tax his energies
too much to provide for that. It is deeply to be lamented that a
superior race like the educated Saxons of Transylvania, who held their
own so bravely against Turk and Tartar, and, what was more difficult
still, preserved their religious liberty in spite of Austrian Jesuits,
should _now_ be losing their political ascendancy, owing mainly to their
displacement by the Wallacks. According to the last census, the German
immigrants in Hungary are estimated at 1,820,922. I have no means of
making an accurate comparison, but I hear on all hands that the numbers
are diminished. There are, besides, proofs of it in the case of villages
which were exclusively Saxon having now become partly, even wholly,
Wallachian.
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