credulity of their pupils.

The women will be ignorant and superstitious, for want of varied
instruction; brave, from the frequent presence or promise of danger;
efficient, from the small division of labour which is practicable in the
superintendence of such a family; given to gossip and uncertainty of
temper, from the sameness of their lives; devoted to their husbands and
children, from the absence of all other important objects; and vain of
such accomplishments as they have, from an ignorance of what remains to
be achieved.

The retainers must be ignorant,--physically strong and imposing,
perhaps, but infants in mind, and slaves in morals. Their worship is
idolatry--of their chief. The virtues permitted to them are fidelity,
industry, domestic attachment, and sobriety. It is difficult to see what
others are possible. Their faults are all comprehended in the word
barbarism.

These characteristics may be extended to the divisions of the nation
corresponding to those of the household: for the sovereign is only a
higher feudal chief: his nobles are a more exalted sort of serfs; and
those who are masters at home become slaves at court. Under this system,
who would be so hardy as to treat brutality in a serf, cunning in a
priest, prejudice in a lady, and imperiousness in a lord, as any thing
but the results--inevitable as mournful--of the state of society?

Feudalism is founded upon physical force, and therefore bears a relation
to the past alone. Right begins in might, and all the social relations
of men have originated in physical superiority. The most prevalent ideas
of the feudal period arise out of the past; what has been longest
honoured is held most honourable; and the understanding of men,
unexercised by learning, and undisciplined by society and political
action, falls back upon precedent, and reposes there. The tastes, and
even the passions, of the feudal period bear a relation to antiquity.
Ambition, prospective as it is in its very nature, has, in this case, a
strong retrospective character. The glory that the descendant derives
from his fathers, he burns to transmit. The past is everything: the
future, except in as far as it may resemble the past, is nothing.

Such, with modifications, have been the prevalent ideas, tastes, and
passions of the civilized world, till lately. The opposite state of
society, which has begun to be realized, occasions prevalent ideas, and
therefore prevalent virtues and vices, of