contradiction! But, if the natural effect of Mr. Owen’s system be to lead to this absurdity, it requires nothing more to show that it is not, and cannot be, according to truth. But, if Mr. Owen’s principles be true, and the nature of man is inherently good, according to his own showing, his system is altogether unnecessary. For, if man would not be bad were he not taught to be so, surely the simplest and the easiest plan would be to take the human race in infancy, before they have been contaminated, or rather, “made to receive an unfavourable character,” and let the germs of goodness which they have within them develope themselves, and come to perfection. Should we, then, have a paradise without sin? Ah! Mr. Owen knows that there is not a single spot on this earth which has not been contaminated with sin; and instead of human nature being in a state the nearest approaching to perfection where there has been least contact with the truths and doctrines of the Bible, which he regards as the source of all the errors and all the evils which there are in the world, (see p. 60, Book of the New Moral World,) it is the testimony of universal history and fact, that there it is the most depraved. It is, however, not necessary to go to what may be termed the children of nature, to the untutored sons of the forest, to prove, not only the existence of sin, but also of a sinful disposition, of a natural tendency to evil even in the infant breast; it might be furnished to almost any extent from Mr. Owen’s own establishments, and from the lips of his own agents. It is possible that Mr. Owen himself, from his attachment to a favourite theory, and his desire to support it at all hazards, as well as from having his mind absorbed in the grand object which he has before him, may not see what is so plain to others; or, it may be that what appears black to them is white to him; but let his dancing masters, and the nurses of his infant children, be brought into an open court and fully examined, and they will testify to the satisfaction of every impartial jury, although composed even of Robert Owen’s followers, that some, at least, of these urchins, at an age when they could not have been taught these things, unless their mother’s milk imparted them, display passions and dispositions which indicate anything rather than an entire absence from evil. We shall require no other witnesses to prove that the nature of man is not naturally good, but is inherently depraved.