When this occurs, they well deserve all the {485} misery that so often follows a marriage contracted from such mercenary and truly despicable motives; although the parents themselves if they had their due, would undergo tenfold suffering for having been the original cause of the calamity, in first placing their daughters where such principles were to be imbibed; and afterwards co-operating with might and main to encourage their very complying teachers in accomplishing so glorious a work. My purpose in commencing this lecture, was to confine it solely to the “faults of teachers;” but I have been led insensibly to blend with them certain parental faults. Although this is a departure from the order which I had prescribed to myself, I hope it may serve to strengthen all my objections to the faults of both parties; since the influence and authority of parents superadded to the exertions of teachers in a wrong course, must be incalculably more dangerous and fatal. It has been forcibly remarked in regard to some of the practical evils of a certain government, that, “if men _suffer_, what matters it, whether it be by the act of a licensed or an unlicensed robber—a Janizary or a Jonathan Wild.” And well may it be asked in relation to the practical defects of our systems of education, what matters it whether they are legalized as in corporate schools, or submitted to as in private ones, or whether parents or teachers are most to blame for them, so long as they are quietly suffered to work all the mischief which they so constantly produce? However innocent either, or both parties may be of intentional harm to the sufferers from these defects, their influence on human happiness is not therefore the less baneful. Innocence of intention, which I doubt not may generally be pleaded in this case, is no excuse, but a great aggravation of the evil, since there can be no hope of any remedy until the perpetrators of the mischief can be convinced of its real character, its full extent, and that they alone are its authors—that they only have both the power and the right to apply the proper corrective. If _they_ would take the matter in hand; if _they_ would co-operate earnestly and perseveringly in a right course, only for a few years, the moral condition of our society would soon be as different from what it now is, as our fondest hopes could possibly anticipate. The vast improvement which such co-operation might effect, the incalculable private and public blessings it would certainly produce, cannot, I believe, be better illustrated on my part, than by giving you in conclusion, the last two paragraphs of the excellent article on popular education already quoted from the North American Review for January. In speaking of the absolute necessity of inculcating moral and religious principles as the groundwork of all really useful education, the author remarks: