falls lower and lower on the
firmament of human life, as the child gets older and older? Look at all
dumb brutes, the lower animals of this our earth; is it not thus by
nature's law with them? The lioness will perish to preserve that very
whelp, whom she will rend a year or two hence, meeting the young lion in
the forest; the hen, so careful of her callow brood, will peck at them,
and buffet them away, directly they are fully fledged; the cow forgets
how much she once loved yonder well-grown heifer; and the terrier-bitch
fights for a bit of gristle with her own two-year-old, whom she used to
nurse so tenderly, and famished her own bowels to feed. And can you
expect that men, who make as little use as possible of Heart, that
unlucrative commodity--who only exercise Reason for shrewd purposes of
gain, not wise purposes of good, and who might as well belong to
Cunningham's "City of O," for any souls they seem to carry about with
them--can you expect that such unaffectioned, unintelligent,
unspiritualized animals, can rise far above the brute in feeling for
their offspring? No, Maria; the nursery plaything grows into the exiled
school-boy; and the poor child, weaned from all he ought to love, soon
comes to be regarded in the light of an expensive youth; he is kept at
arm's length, unblest, uncaressed, unloved, unknown; then he grows up
apace, and tops his father's inches; he is a man now, and may well be
turned adrift; if he can manage to make money, they are friends; but if
he can only contrive to spend it, enemies. Then the complacent father
moans about ingratitude, for he did his duty by the boy in sending him
to school.

O, faults and follies of the by-gone times, which lingered even to a
generation now speedily passing away!--ye are waning with it, and a
better dawn has broken on the world. Happily for man, the multiplication
of his kind, and pervading competition in all manner, of things
mercantile, are breaking down monopolies, and hindering unjust
accumulation, with its necessary love of gain. "Satisfied with little"
is young England's cry; a better motto than the "Craving after much" of
their fathers. No longer immersed, single-handed, in a worldly business,
which seven competitors now relieve him of; no longer engrossed with the
mint of gold gains, which a dozen honest rivals now are sharing with him
eagerly, the parent has leisure to instruct his children's minds, to
take an interest in their pursuits, and to cu