their owners if the intelligence be
withheld."

Sydney Smith has said, with more truth than elegance, that in the
infancy of all nations, even the most civilized, men lived the life of
pigs; and if sanitary reporters had existed in times past as they do
now, we should doubtless have received an account of the actual
existence and domestic accommodation of the old English "swains" and
"shepherds," very different from that given by Phineas Fletcher. Even
the mechanics of this day are more comfortably lodged than the great
landed gentry of the Saxon and Norman periods: and if the truth could be
got at, it would be found that, bad as is the state of our agricultural
labourers now, the condition of their forefathers was no better.

The first method of raising a man above the life of an animal is to
provide him with a healthy home. The Home is after all the best school
for the world. Children grow up into men and women there; they imbibe
their best and their worst morality there; and their morals and
intelligence are in a great measure well or ill trained there. Men can
only be really and truly humanized and civilized through the institution
of the Home. There is domestic purity and moral life in the good home;
and individual defilement and moral death in the bad one. The
schoolmaster has really very little to do with the formation of the
characters of children. These are formed in the home, by the father and
mother,--by brothers, sisters, and companions. It does not matter how
complete may be the education given in schools. It may include the whole
range of knowledge: yet if the scholar is under the necessity of daily
returning to a home which is indecent, vicious, and miserable, all this
learning will prove of comparatively little value. Character and
disposition are the result of home training; and if these are, through
bad physical and moral conditions, deteriorated and destroyed, the
intellectual culture acquired in the school may prove an instrumentality
for evil rather than for good.

The home should not be considered merely as an eating and sleeping
place; but as a place where self-respect may be preserved, and comfort
secured, and domestic pleasures enjoyed. Three-fourths of the petty
vices which degrade society, and swell into crimes which disgrace it,
would shrink before the influence of self-respect. To be a place of
happiness, exercising beneficial influences upon its members,--and
especially upon the children