How often have we heard persons, who could argue rationally enough on other subjects, gravely assert, in reply to every argument which good feeling or justice could urge, "A family must have a head." In this particular instance the head, or _pride_ of the family, had proved its disgrace, yet standing laws and previously made settlements could not be altered. Fifteen thousand per annum, therefore, must be melted down, to make a golden image of poor little silly Sir James, while Henry, with the pittance which as a younger child was his portion, was obliged to purchase the privilege of being shot at; for the younger brother of an old baronet _could not disgrace his family_ by doing any thing likely to provide _comfortably for himself_. Thus do the _prejudices_ of society seem to have been invented for the express purpose of hunting down and crushing those whom its laws have robbed and oppressed. Children of the same parents must be defrauded of the birthright, by natural justice theirs, to heap all on one brother! And for what purpose? That he may keep alive, by being its living representative, that _pride_, that _curse_, which forbids to those so defrauded, the use of honest means for earning honest bread! If, instead of this, all property which had been a father's, were, at his death, equally divided among his offspring, without revolution or confiscation, extravagant disparity of station would gradually disappear, and with it _pride_, that destroys the happiness, with its whole array of _prejudices_, waging eternal warfare against rational contentment. How many are there who might still, even as the world now is, dwell within a very garden of Eden, of peaceful and natural delights, and yet who virtually turn themselves out of the same; and, at the mere mandate of some _prejudice_ of society--some _by-law_ of _pride_, become wanderers through the thistle-grown wildernesses of discontent, or weary pilgrims amid the thorny paths of petty mortification.