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But, besides that our system of education is calculated to bring boys and girls too rapidly forward, to educate them superficially, and to develop too strongly their self-esteem, it is deficient because their intellectual nature is alone cultivated; knowledge, practical and useful, is imparted, but the moral nature is neglected. Understand me; I do not mean that the teachers are wanting in morality, as it is generally defined, but they do not call into operation the moral organs. Precepts and rules are given, but nothing more: suppose, however, that a master who wished to strengthen the calculating powers of his pupils, should content himself with reading the rules of arithmetic, without requiring them to do the sums or to practise upon those rules, would he not be called an ignoramus? and if he punished a boy for making an error the first time he attempted a practical application of the rule, would he not be called cruel? But he is more of an ignoramus, if he supposes that a boy in whom the feeling of benevolence is not naturally strong, will be kind to his fellow-pupils because he has heard the precept to be so, often repeated; and because it has been read to him, night and morning, from the bible, "thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself."

You will all allow that the moral and religious natures of man are of at least as much importance as the intellectual; but if you take a general view of the School System of the United States, you must grant that they are almost entirely neglected: the perceptive and intellectual faculties are exercised six mortal hours in children who had better be frisking about in the green fields; but the organs of benevolence, conscientiousness, and veneration, are hardly called into action at all.

However, I need not enlarge upon the subject of school education, for it has been treated in a most satisfactory manner by a preceding lecturer.

Another effect of our social relations which violates the phrenological axiom, that too great cerebral excitement is injurious, is the continual and fearful agitation which is kept up about political matters. There is a large part of our community, whose interest and whose daily bread is dependent upon the success of party, and who are obliged to watch with intense anxiety every cloud, every portent, and to make any and every sacrifice, even of country's good, for party ascendancy. Our social political institutions engender an inordinate self-esteem; they tend to create an impatient and restless spirit, that incapacitates the people for self-restraint; they appeal so frequently to the sovereignty of the multitude, that the multitude thinks it may exercise its sovereignty immediately, and without being tramelled by legal forms, and tedious legislative delays.

This spirit, farther excited by the cause I have already mentioned, the undue and early development of self-esteem in our boys, and the thrusting them yet unbearded into the political arena, keeps that arena a scene of excitement, of violence, of tumult and blood: aye! blood; for it is a sad reflection, that the unhallowed and disgraceful scenes of riot, burning, and bloodshed, which have disgraced our land within the last five years, and which portend greater horrors to come, are more numerous and atrocious, than those of any civilised people on earth.

But, I am on a dangerous subject; it may be, that these are necessary evils; it may be that these are the paltry sums of suffering we are paying for the boon of liberty to thirteen millions of people; if so, then welcome! thrice welcome such, and worse! for most feelingly can I say, in view of the situation of less favored lands, in the words of one of their greatest poets, --

Still, still forever
Better, though each man's life-blood were a river,
That it should flow and overflow, than creep
In thousand lazy channels through our veins,
Damm'd like the dull canal with locks and chains,
And moving, as a sick man in his sleep
Three paces, and then faltering: -- better be
Where the extinguished Spartans still are free
In their proud charnel of Thermopylae,
Than stagnate in our marsh; -- or o'er the deep
Fly, and one current to the ocean add,
One spirit to the souls our fathers had,
One freeman more, America, to thee!

Let me turn to another theme, and point out some of our social religious institutions, which, it appears to me, engender and keep up too great cerebral excitement, and violate the great phrenological principle, which cannot be too often repeated, that the functions of all the great organs should be performed in their season and degree, and only so. And, if I would most cautiously and respectfully approach the palladium of our civil liberty, and hesitate to pronounce an opinion respecting any change in its institutions, how much more reverentially and solemnly should I approach the ark of our religion, our sheet anchor in the storms of this world, our pole-star and only guide to the world to come. Nor, indeed, need I go farther than to point out some of the abuses, which a diffused knowledge of the general principles of phrenology would speedily and effectually remedy.