Great ignorance and debasement still manifest in various features of the popular character.--Entire want, in early life, of any idea of a general and comprehensive purpose to be pursued--Gratification of the senses the chief good.--Cruelty a subsidiary resource.--Disposition to cruelty displayed and confirmed by common practices.--Confirmed especially by the manner of slaughtering animals destined for food.--Displayed in the abuse of the laboring animals.--General characteristic of the people an indistinct and faint sense of right and wrong.--Various exemplifications.--Dishonor to our country that the people should have remained in such a condition.--Effects of their ignorance as appearing in several parts of the economy of life; in their ordinary occupations; in their manner of spending their leisure time, including the Sunday; in the state of domestic society; consequences of this last as seen in the old age of parents.--The lower classes placed by their want of education out of amicable communication with the higher.--Unhappy and dangerous consequences of this.--Great decline of the respect which in former times the people felt toward the higher classes and the existing order of the community.--Progress of a contrary spirit. Section IV. Objection, that a material increase of knowledge and intelligence among the people would render them unfit for their station, and discontented with it; would excite them to insubordination and arrogance toward their superiors; and make them the more liable to be seduced by the wild notions and pernicious machinations of declaimers, schemers, and innovators.--Observations in answer.--Special and striking absurdity of this objection in one important particular.--Evidence from matter of fact that the improvement of the popular understanding has not the tendency alleged.--The special regard meant to be had to _religious_ instruction in the education desired for the lower classes, a security against their increased knowledge being perverted into an excitement to insubordination and disorder.--Absurdity of the notion that an improved education of the common people ought to consist of instruction specifically and almost solely religious.--The diminutive quantity of religious as well as other knowledge to which the people would be limited by some zealous advocates of order and subordination utterly inadequate to secure those objects.--But, question what is to be understood by order and subordination.--Increased knowledge and sense in the people certainly not favorable to a credulous confidence and a passive, unconditional submission, on their part, toward the presiding classes in the community.--Advantage, to a wise and upright government, of having intelligent subjects.--Great effect which a general improvement among the people would necessarily have on the manner of