[26] It was then thought that the aqueduct would cost but $2,000,000. [27] I refer to the Report of M. Villerme, in the _Mémoires de l'Institut, Tom._ lxxi. [28] This was printed in 1846. In 1850, and since, these men have publicly gloried in a similar act even more atrocious. [29] Keble, in one of his poems, represents a mother seeing her sportive son "enacting holy rites," and thus describes her emotions: "She sees in heart an empty throne, And falling, falling far away, Him whom the Lord hath placed thereon: She hears the dread Proclaimer say, 'Cast ye the lot, in trembling cast, The traitor to his place hath past,-- Strive ye with prayer and fast to guide The dangerous glory where it shall abide.'" [30] It is the custom in Massachusetts to tax men in the place where they reside, on the first day of May; as the taxes differ very much in different towns of the same State, it is easy for a man to escape the burden of taxation. VIII. A SERMON OF THE DANGEROUS CLASSES IN SOCIETY.--PREACHED AT THE MELODEON, ON SUNDAY, JANUARY 31, 1847. MATTHEW XVIII. 12. If a man have an hundred sheep, and one of them be gone astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and goeth into the mountains, and seeketh that which is gone astray? We are first babies, then children, then youths, then men. It is so with the nation; so with mankind. The human race started with no culture, no religion, no morals, even no manners, having only desires and faculties within, and the world without. Now we have attained much more. But it has taken many centuries for mankind to pass from primeval barbarism to the present stage of comfort, science, civilization, and refinement. It has been the work of two hundred generations; perhaps of more. But each new child is born at the foot of the ladder, as much as the first child; with only desires and faculties. He may have a better physical organization than the first child; he certainly has better teachers; but he, in like manner, is born with no culture, no religion, no morals, even with no manners; born into them, not with them; born bare of these things and naked as the first child. He must himself toil up the ladder which mankind have been so long in constructing and climbing up. To attain the present civilization he must pass over every point which the race passed through. The child of the civilized man, born with a good organization and under favorable circumstances, can do this rapidly, and in thirty or forty years attains the height of development which it took the whole human race sixty centuries or more to arrive at. He has the aid of past experience and the examples of noble men; he travels a road already smooth and beaten. The world's cultivation, so slowly and painfully achieved, helps civilize him. He may then go further on, and cultivate himself; may transcend the development of mankind, adding new rounds to the ladder.