countrymen, he said, "If at a very early age a system of instruction is pursued by which a certain degree of independent feeling is created in the child's mind, while all mutinous and perverse disposition is avoided,--if this system be followed up by a constant instruction in the principles of virtue, and a corresponding advancement in intellectual pursuits,--if, during the most critical years of his life, his understanding and his feelings are accustomed only to sound principles and pure and innocent impressions, it will become almost impossible that he should afterward take to vicious courses, because these will be utterly alien to the whole nature of his being. It will be as difficult for him to become criminal, because as foreign to his confirmed habits, as it would be for one of your lordships to go out and rob on the highway. Thus, to commence the education of youth at the tender age on which I have laid so much stress, will, I feel confident, be the same means of guarding society against crimes. I trust every thing to habit,--habit, upon which, in all ages, the lawgiver, as well as the schoolmaster, has mainly placed his reliance,--habit, which makes every thing easy, and casts all difficulties upon the deviation from the wonted course. Make sobriety a habit, and intemperance will be hateful and hard; make prudence a habit, and reckless profligacy will be as contrary to the nature of the child, grown an adult, as the most atrocious crimes are to any of your lordships. Give a child the habit of sacredly regarding truth, of carefully respecting the property of others, of scrupulously abstaining from all acts of improvidence which can involve him in distress, and he will just as little think of lying or cheating or stealing, or running in debt, as of rushing into an element in which he cannot breathe."