On the Education of Children Predisposed to Insanity

the study of psychology teaches us, that gross delinquents are for the most part inaccessible to pity or remorse, and that the moral sense, abandoned to its own blind caprice, rarely fails in warping the judgment, and misguiding the steps, not only in the jocund hour of youth, but, what is still worse, in the more mature season of manhood, ambition and strength. In persons of feeble organization and imbecile temperament, the perception of good and evil lies dormant or inert, suffering the wild fire of passion to flame and flicker over their slumbering energies with its alluring, seductive, and fatal fascinations. Self-indulgence covers the broad way to destruction ? and in the condign felon or the hopeless maniac we may detect the first neglected germ of all his miseries?viz., the want of self-control. The extent of depravity to which this single moral deficiency is sure to lead, would be incredible, were it not but too well attested both by history and our own common experience. The perfidious and cruel Gabrino-Fundulo, condemned to lose his head on account of his atrocious crimes, fiercely confessed, that the only thing he ever repented of, was not having precipitated Pope John XXIII. and