"Make the supposition that any given number of persons,--a hundred, for instance,--taken promiscuously, should be able to write memoirs of themselves so clear and perfect as to explain, to your discernment at least, the entire process by which their minds have attained their present state, recounting all the most impressive circumstances. If they should read these memoirs to you in succession, while your benevolence, and the moral principles according to which you felt and estimated, were kept at the highest pitch, you would often, during the disclosure, regret to observe how many things may be the causes of irretrievable mischief. 'Why is the path of life,' you would say, 'so haunted as if with evil spirits of every diversity of noxious agency, some of which may patiently accompany, or others of which may suddenly cross, the unfortunate wanderer?' And you would regret to observe into how many forms of intellectual and moral perversion the human mind readily yields itself to be modified. * * * * * "'I compassionate you,' would, in a very benevolent hour, be your language to the wealthy, unfeeling _tyrant of a family and a neighborhood_, who seeks, in the overawed timidity and unretaliated injuries of the unfortunate beings within his power, the gratification that should have been sought in their affections. Unless you had brought into the world some extraordinary refractoriness to the influence of evil, the process that you have undergone could not easily fail of being efficacious. If your parents idolized their own importance in their son so much that they never opposed your inclinations themselves nor permitted it to be done by any subject to their authority,--if the humble companion, sometimes summoned to the honor of amusing you, bore your caprices and insolence with the meekness without which he had lost his enviable privilege,--if you could despoil the garden of some nameless dependent neighbor of the carefully reared flowers, and torment his little dog or cat, without his daring to punish you or to appeal to your infatuated parents,--if aged men addressed you in a submissive tone, and with the appellation of 'Sir,' and their aged wives uttered their wonder at your condescension, and pushed their grandchildren away from around the fire for your sake, if you happened, though with the strut of pertness, and your hat on your head, to enter one of their cottages, perhaps to express your contempt of the homely dwelling, furniture, and fare,--if, in maturer life, you associated with vile persons, who would forego the contest of equality to be your allies in trampling on inferiors,--and if, both then and since, you have been suffered to deem your wealth the compendium or equivalent of every ability and every good quality,--it would indeed be immensely strange, if you had not become in due time the miscreant who may thank the power of the laws in civilized society that he is not assaulted with clubs