neither looks forward nor back; to them, as to the savages, the actual moment is every thing: they have never been humanised by enjoyment, nor subdued by culture.
The habits of age are hopeless, but how much may be done with the children? Labour, and severe labour, is, in some shape or other, the inevitable portion of mankind; but there is no grade that has not its moments of mental relaxation, if it but know how to use them. Give the children of the poor that portion of education which will enable them to know their own resources; which will cultivate in them an onward-looking hope, and give them rational amusement in their leisure hours: this, and this only, will work out that moral revolution, which is the legislator's noblest purpose. One great evil of highly civilised society is, the immense distance between the rich and the poor; it leads, on either side, to a hardened selfishness. Where we know little, we care little; but the fact once admitted, that there can be neither politically nor morally a good which is not universal, that we cannot
