is most likely to conduce to his own private good.  But, where the moral feelings are not strong, and still more where they are almost in abeyance, I fear that the theory that virtue and happiness are invariably coincident will hardly be supported by a candid examination of facts.  To some men, I fear it must be acknowledged, present wealth and power and dignity are more than a sufficient recompense for any remorse which they may continue to feel for past greed or lack of candour or truthfulness.  These considerations will serve to shew the immense importance of moral education, alike in the family, the school, and the state.  If we are to depend on men acting rightly, and with a due regard to wider interests than their own, we must take pains to develope in them moral feelings sufficiently strong and sensitive to make the reflexion on wrong or selfish acts more painful to them than the sacrifice which is needed for dutiful and generous conduct.  So far as society, through its various instruments of law and opinion, of education and domestic influences, can effect this object, so far will it promote its own security and advancement.

Our adoption, then, of a tendency to promote social welfare or well-being, as the test of conduct, is justified, I conceive, by an examination of the internal constitution of human nature and of the conditions which are necessary to secure the harmonious working of its various parts.  It may be objected that this test is vague in its conception and difficult in its application.  Both objections, to a great extent, hold good.  If they did not, moral theory and moral practice would be very easy matters, but, as a fact, we know that they are by no means easy.  The conception of social well-being must be more or less vague, because we are constantly filling it up by experience; it is not a fixed, but a growing conception, and, though we may be certain of the character and importance of many of the elements which have already been detected in it by the experience of past generations, it seems impossible to fix any limits to its development in the future history of mankind.  Man will constantly be discovering new wants, new and more refined susceptibilities of his nature, and with them his conception of human well-being must necessarily grow.  But, though not a fixed or final conception, the idea of social well-being is sufficiently definite, in each generation, to act as a guide and incentive to conduct.  It is the star, gradually growing brighter and brighter, which lights our path, and, any way, we know that, if it were not above us in the heavens, we should be walking in the darkness.