The commissioners dwell rather lightly on this part of the subject--on these consequences of the past and present condition of the country, and of the defective education existing in it. Many of the assistants employed by the commissioners were Dissenters, and their examinations of Church schools may be therefore suspected; at least we fancy that we can discern a certain warmth of admiration, and intensity of unction, in the reports on the Dissenting schools, which are not bestowed on the others. However this may be, we cannot but admit that these reports do actually show the existence of a very defective state of things in the principality; and we find the commissioners justly pointing out and reprobating two glaring vices in the Welsh character, the existence of which we admit, and to which we shall, of our own knowledge, add a third. The first refers to the want of chastity, or rather to the lax ideas of the common order of people on that subject previous to marriage. This, with every wish to excuse the national feelings and failings of the Welsh, we must allow to be proved by the concurrent testimony and experience of every one well acquainted with the principality. This vice, however, is more systematically established in the northern than in the southern counties; and the existence of this system is, we have no doubt, of very long standing, ranking, indeed, among the national customs which lose their origin in the night of ages. The common notion prevalent among the lower classes in Wales, and generally acted on, is, that want of chastity before marriage is no vice, though afterwards it is considered a crime, which is very rarely committed. Before we pass a sweeping condemnation on the rude population of the Welsh mountains for this laxity, let us remember that, such is the false state of "over-civilisation" in England, the same ideas and practices exist universally among the male portion, at least, of the people, and pass without any thing beyond a formal, we might almost say, a legal reprimand: that in France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and, it may be, other countries of Europe, this laxity exists not so much _before_ as _after_ marriage; and that therefore the poor Celtic mountaineers do not stand alone in their ignorance of what is better.