And then consider, in so close a kind of community, what near and intimate witnesses they are of all one another's faults, weaknesses, tempers, perversities; of whatever is offensive in manner, or unseemly in habit; of all the irksome, humiliating, or sometimes ludicrous circumstances and situations. And also, in this close association, the bad moods, the strifes, and resentments, are pressed into immediate, lasting, corrosive contact with whatever should be the most vital to social happiness. If there be, into the account, the wants, anxieties, and vexations of severe poverty, they will generally aggravate all that is destructive to domestic complacency and decorum. Now add gross ignorance to all this, and see what the picture will be. How many families have been seen where the parents were only the older and stronger animals than their children, whom they could teach nothing but the methods and tasks of labor. They naturally could not be the mere companions, for alternate play and quarrel, of their children, and were disqualified by mental rudeness to be their respected guardians. There were about them these young and rising forms, containing the inextinguishable principle, which was capable of entering on an endless progression of wisdom, goodness, and happiness! needing numberless suggestions, explanations, admonitions, brief reasonings, and a training to attend to the lessons of written instruction. But nothing of all this from the parent. Their case was as hopeless for receiving these necessaries of mental life, as the condition, for physical nutriment, of infants attempting to draw it, (we have heard of so affecting and mournful a fact,) from the breast of a dead parent. These unhappy heads of families possessed no resources for engaging youthful attention by mingled instruction and amusements; no descriptions of the most wonderful objects, or narratives of the most memorable events, to set, for superior attraction, against the idle stories of the neighborhood; no assemblage of admirable examples, from the sacred or other records of human character, to give a beautiful real form to virtue and religion, and promote an aversion to base companionship.