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pick them up. Pain is the grand preserver of existence, -the sleepless sentinel that watches over our safety, and makes us both start away from the injury that is present, and guard against it carefully in the time to come.

School education is anything but what is suitable to the increasing enlightenment of the age. It is of no use to teach words alone; we must teach things also: for if words alone are taught, without any understanding of the thing signified, nothing is taught at all. If we are to have moral principle, we must have moral responsibility; and there can be no feeling of moral responsibility without self-government and self-reliance. According to Aristotle, more care should be taken of the body than the mind for the first seven years; strict attention to diet enforced; and the infant from infancy habituated to bear cold. These now trite maxims, meet with our full concurrence. The pupils of every school must feel that it is they themselves who act, and not their master through them; they must be the allies, not the servants of their governor, otherwise tuition is no better than the system of the slavish Jesuit, or the crabbed theologian of the middle ages. Our idea of a school is, that it should be a republic, in which the scholar should aid the master in the task of government, and in the code of rules: the self-renunciation virtues should be daily practised: the appetite placed under restraint, and rigidly enforced; and if there is to be any emulation, let it be that of each one striving which can overtop the other in love and good-fellowship. Nothing is profitless that cometh from the heart; no-not even a mistake.

Love covereth all sins. Culture of the affections is to me one of the highest branches of human education. There is hardly a more unnatural sight than a heartless man. A father had better extinguish a boy's eyes, than take away his heart. What a worthless thing a child would be, robbed of the hidden treasures of the heart! Cherish then your heart's best affections. Indulge in the warm and gushing emotions of filial, parental, and fraternal love. Think it not a weakness. Bind your whole family together by these strong cords-you cannot make them too strong. Religion, pure and undefiled, is love. Love to God-love to man!

It is enough for a man of a thorough philosophical spirit to know that to reduce one's wants is as much a way of being rich, as to increase one's money: there is an almost universal unwillingness to recognise the real cause of suffering, and a tacit agreement to ignore the weightier causes. The most telling charges against our present social condition is, that it embraces such violent inequalities-some bloatingly rich, some excessively poor; as if the good things of Providence underwent a kind of polarisation. And yet there is no country where so vast or so affluent a middle class fills up the space between the opposite poles. Where, indeed, are the gradations of conditions so nicely shaded? Neither is there any where such free and frequent movement from one step in the scale to another takes place. It is not uncommon to see men in the high position of legislators, whose fathers were poor men all their days. Well, blessings only come when they are sought; heaven only helps those who help

themselves; and it seems equally a law, that those only shall receive any advantage from the kindly benevolence of their fellow-creatures, who seek to come to the same results by well-directed efforts of their own.

The mass will not make themselves wanted, and are content to remain in statu quo-"hewers of wood, and drawers of water." Every man is in a great measure the architect of his own fortune-the arbiter of his own destiny; but the grand question arises-Are men—all men— placed under favourable circumstances for the full development of their various powers? GOD seems to have designed that we should go along hand-in-hand together; everywhere moral power fails: those who possess in good store are bound to use it to awaken, persuade, support, and stimulate the infirm brother. The laws of true society appear, in short, to demand great mutual buttressing and helpfulness as a supplementary force to selfreliance,—not in any way to supersede it. If so, then are all great concentrations of bloated misery, evils for which society is chargeable; and pestilence as well as crime and every other resultant evil, is only the appointed punishment. Here, too, it may be said, let the causes be removed, and the effect will cease. It is enough for us to know "the causeless curse shall not come."

As to the penal character of our calamities,-has our collective wisdom done its utmost to prevent crime, as well as apply correctives? If not, then are they not inculpated for the evils resulting from transgressions of the law? This is a nice but not very difficult query to answer. It is easy to perceive that something is wanted in our

social arrangements, with regard to the less fortunate part of communities. If man is to be made great and grand at the heavy cost-nothing less-than the prostration of his brother man, who would wish to be aggrandised by such a leverage power? The envy and hatred with which the hard-working poor contemplate their more fortunate neighbours, would be much mitigated-and perhaps altogether extinguished-if they could be brought to reflect that in a commercial country such as England, opulence and indigence, in a majority of cases, are the direct results of poverty and industry. For what does man toil, except to purchase an exemption from toil? What is the stimulus and support of a poor man? The hope of becoming rich. If the Hindoo system of caste prevailed among us —if the humble man, however gifted, could never expect to emerge from his obscurity-he might justly complain of his lot. But in no other country is the road to distinction more open and unobstructed to all classes of men than in England. The fathers and grandfathers of some of our wealthiest gentry, and of the most eminent of our living statesmen, have been mechanics and artisans.

From the nature of things these grand prizes in the lottery of life can only be gained by a few: but may we ask-If every man has a chance, is it not as much as he has a right to expect? All poor men may try to get rich; and it is no injustice to the many that only a few succeed. Drudgery and dependence are doubtless evils: but it is a great mistake to suppose that opulence is always a good. We regard man as a progressive being, capable of being elevated, by moral and intellectual culture, to a far higher

position in the scale of being, than he has yet occupied. Classes and communities may be rough and rugged, and even reckless; but they are capable of improvementthey have heads to think, and hearts to feel. They can be reached by kindness, and are soon able to distinguish between the man who courts and fawns, merely to make tools of them to serve his own personal or political purposes, and the man who seeks, from no self-interested view whatever, to counsel them, and to tell the truth in love, though the truth he tells them may be unpalateable and disagreeable for them to hear. "Poor" is often a term of reproach in England, and of pity in most other countries.

Many ways of happiness have been discovered, but all agree that there is none so pleasant as loving and being loved. Men who complain of the miseries of life, are for the most part such as are unwilling to practise self-denial, or submit to those rules of their animal and moral economy upon which salutary and uniform happiness is founded. Man's business would seem to be, not to discover relations of ideas that are useful, and have a real influence upon life, but to discover the more frivolous relations which are only amusing. Few look at things with the naked eye of common sense, always gazing at the world through the wrong end of the telescope, discovering at each revolution of the kaleidescope factitious and unnatural colours, created only by the instrument of inspection. No man can have a brilliant imagination long together, when the instrument of thought-the brain, where resides the flavour of the mind—is vitiated through some excess or other, over

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