homes, and hasten with eager steps to the public house; nor do they
re-pass its accursed threshold, till the vice-fattening landlord has
received the greater part of the money which should support their
half-fed, half-clothed wives and children; and till they have
qualified themselves, by intoxication, to act worse than brutes on
their return home. To men of this description it matters not whether
or not their children are proving themselves skilful imitators of
their evil example,--they may curse and swear, lie and steal,--so long
as they can enjoy the society of their pot companions, it is to them a
matter of total indifference.

During my superintendence of the first school, I had a painful
facility of examining these matters. Frequently, when I have inquired
the cause of the wretched plight in which some of the children were
sent to the school,--perhaps with scarcely a shoe to their feet,
sometimes altogether without,--I have heard from their mothers the
most heart-rending recitals of the husband's misconduct. One family in
particular I remember, consisting of seven children, two of whom were
in the school; four of them were supported entirely by the exertions
of the mother, who declared to me, that she did not receive a shilling
from their father for a month together; all the money he got he kept
to spend at the public-house; and his family, for what he cared, might
go naked, or starve. He was not only a great drunkard, but a reprobate
into the bargain; beating and abusing the poor woman, who thus
endeavoured to support his children by her labour.

The evil does not always stop here. Driven to the extreme of
wretchedness by her husband's conduct, the woman sometimes takes to
drinking likewise, and the poor babes are ten thousand times more
pitiable than orphans. I have witnessed the revolting sight of a