Another great feature in the system of our English training, is the severe separation of children from servants.  Many are the families of mere English gentry, totally removed from the nobility, who never permit their children to enter the servants’ hall nor the kitchen.  And the probable remark upon so rigorous a separation, which an inconsiderate person will make, that it is founded upon aristocratic arrogance, happens to be in the very teeth of the truth.  We shall content ourselves with saying, that the comfort as well as benefit of both parties were promoted by such an arrangement; whilst, so far from arguing hauteur, it was the high civil condition of the English servant, which, by forcing respect from his master, first widened the interval between the two ranks, and founded a wholesome repulsion between them.  In our own times, we have read descriptions of West India planters admitting the infant children of their slaves to play and sprawl about their saloons:  but now, since the slave has acquired the station of a free man, and (from the fact of not having won this station meritoriously, but passively received it as a boon) is too generally disposed to use it in a spirit of defiance, does any man expect such scenes for the future?  Through the prevalence of habit, old cases of that nature may happen to survive locally:  but in the coming generation, every vestige of these indulgent relations will have disappeared in the gloomy atmosphere of jealous independence.  That infant, who had been treated with exemplary kindness as a creature entirely at the mercy of his master, and the living monument of his forbearance, will be thrown sternly upon his legal rights when he has the power of enforcing those rights in so many instances against his patron.  This case, from its abruptness, involves unamiable features:  but the English case had developed itself too gradually and naturally to be otherwise than purely dignified for both parties.  In the age of Beaumont and Fletcher, (say 1610-1635,) gentlemen kicked and caned their servants:  the power to do so, was a privilege growing out of the awful distance attached to rank:  and in Ireland, at the opening of the present century, such a privilege was still matter of prescriptive usage, and too frequently furnished the matter for a menace.  But the stealthy growth of civilization and of civil liberty in England, moved onwards so surely, under the stimulation of manufacturing industry, (making menial service a secondary object for the poor,) that before 1750, a gentleman, forgetting himself so far as to strike a servant, would have been recalled to better thoughts by an action for assault.  On the Continent, for the very reason that no such rights had been matured for servants, it was possible to treat them with much more indulgence:  because the relations between the two parties were less honourable, allowing to the servant nothing in the way of absolute right; for that very reason, it was possible to treat him as a child who founds his