driven. If a man, threatened with law proceedings, is compelled to
sell his whole crop of potatoes at a ruinous loss, our keen and
knowing youngster glories in the opportunity of making a bargain by
which he shall profit to the amount of a hundred per cent., though
the seller return to his agitated family writhing with despair. The
malleable intellect of our youth is annealed by the Demon of Gain
upon the anvil of Self-interest.

National education is one of the first objects of a paternal
government. The course of study ought ever to be adapted to the
circumstances and position of the scholars. In the first years of a
colony, the human mind peculiarly exhibits a downward tendency. Few
men prove themselves in their new condition of life superior or equal
to the character which they had formerly borne, as pious, learned, or
humane. The circumstances which formerly so eminently conduced to
the maintenance of piety, the cultivation of intellect, and the
exercise of benevolence, no longer exist. Solitary and selfish from
position, men of naturally generous temper and good disposition, feel
their hearts contract and shrivel within them. Surrounded by a
sordid and selfish crew, they find no objects for sympathy, no
inducements for the increase or the preservation of knowledge, no
animating impulse to lead them forward in a good cause. Struggling
for a time in the net which is around them, they at length fall from
the edge, down into the seething cauldron, and become fused among the
mass.

'The tendency of colonization is to deteriorate.' The first object
of Government should therefore be to arrest this impulse, and remedy
the evil so far as may be accomplished. If the original settlers
degenerate in their moral condition, their children sink still lower.