in a vast majority the promise will be made vain,
and the hopes that might have been entertained will prove frustrate.
What can be expected from the buds of the most auspicious infancy, if
encountered in their earliest stage with the rigorous blasts of a polar
climate?

And not only will the germs of excellence be likely to be extinguished
in the members of the lower class of the community, but the temptations
to irregular acts and incroachments upon the laws for the security of
property will often be so great, as to be in a manner irresistible. The
man who perceives that, with all his industry, he cannot provide for
the bare subsistence of himself and those dependent upon him, while
his neighbour revels in boundless profusion, cannot but sometimes feel
himself goaded to an attempt to correct this crying evil. What must
be expected to become of that general good-will which is the natural
inheritance of a well-constituted mind, when urged by so bitter
oppression and such unendurable sufferings? The whole temper of the
human heart must be spoiled, and the wine of life acquire a quality
acrimonious and malignant.

But it is not only in the extreme classes of society that the glaring
inequality with which property is shared produces its injurious effects.
All those who are born in the intermediate ranks are urged with a
distempered ambition, unfavourable to independence of temper, and
to true philanthropy. Each man aspires to the improvement of his
circumstances, and the mounting, by one step and another, higher in
the scale of the community. The contemplations of the mind are turned
towards selfishness. In opulent communities we are presented with the
genuine theatre for courts and kings. And, wherever there are courts,
duplicity, lying, hypocrisy and cringing dwell as in their proper field.
Next come trades and professions, with all the ignoble contemplations,
the resolved smoothness, servility and falshood, by which they are
enabled to gain a prosperous and triumphant career.

It is by such means, that man, whom "God made upright," is led away
into a thousand devious paths, and, long before the closing scene of his
life, is rendered something the very reverse of what in the dawning of
existence he promised to be. He is like Hazael in the Jewish history,
who, when the prophet set before him the crying enormities he should
hereafter perpetrate, exclaimed, "Is thy servant a dog," that he should
degrade himself so vilely?