University of Virginia Library

The wretchedness of the lower orders is, therefore, the principal source of our physical and moral maladies. There is another, no less fertile in mischief, I mean the education of children. This branch of political economy engaged, among the ancients, the attention of the greatest legislators; with us education has no manner of reference to the constitution of the state. In early life are formed the inclinations and aversions which influence the whole of our existence. Our first affections are likewise the last; they accompany us through life, reappear in old age, and then revive the sensibilities of childhood with still greater force than those of mature age.

Wise Nature, in giving so much more force to early habits, intended that our happiness should depend on those most concerned to promote it—our parents; for on the affections they at that season inspire depends the affection we are one day called upon to return. But with us, as soon as the child is born, he is transferred to a mercenary nurse. The first bond Nature intended should attach him to his parents is burst asunder before it is formed. The day will come, perhaps, when he will behold the funeral procession of those who gave him birth leave his father's door with as much indifference as they saw his cradle turned out. He may be recalled home, it is true, at the age when the graces, when innocence, when the necessity of having an object of affection, should fix him there for ever. But he is permitted to taste those sweets only to make him feel, in a little while, the bitterness of losing them. He is sent to school, and boarded far from home. There he is doomed to shed tears which no maternal hand is ever more to wipe away; there he is to form friendships with strangers pregnant with regret and repentance; and there he must learn to extinguish the natural affections of brother, sister, father, and mother, the most powerful and the sweetest chains by which Nature attaches us to our country.

After this first horrid outrage committed on his young heart, others equally violent are offered to his understanding. His tender memory must be loaded with ablatives, conjunctions,

conjugations. The blossom of human life is sacrificed to the metaphysical jargon of a dead language. What Frenchman could submit to the torture of learning his own in that manner? And if there be those who have exercised such laborious patience, do they speak better than persons who have never endured such drudgery? Who writes best, a lady of the court, or a pedantic grammarian? To learn to speak by grammar rules, is the same thing with learning to walk by the laws of equilibrium. Practice teaches the grammar of a language, and the passions are our best instructors in the rhetoric of it. A period of life all fire and activity is thus repressed by an unnatural constraint, transforming it into a state, sad, sedentary, and speculative, which has a dismal influence on the temperament, by ingrafting upon it maladies without number.

Of love and ambition, the two moving principles of the human heart, the last is by far the most durable and dangerous. It dies last in the aged, and our education puts it prematurely in motion in the young. It would be infinitely better to assist them in directing their early tender affections toward an amiable object. Most men are destined to feel the power of this gentle passion, which Nature has made the firmest cement of society. If their age forbid a commerce of early love, their affections ought to be directed into the channel of friendship, and thus battalions of friends might be formed among them, prepared to devote themselves in the service of their country.

Ambition, give it what specious name you please, is the sworn enemy of all virtue, the source of the most dangerous and detestable vices, every one being disposed to gratify it in his own way. It is forbidden by Nature and Religion. But emulation, we are told, awakens talents. It would be easy to demonstrate that the most celebrated writers, in every walk of literature, never were brought up at college, from Homer, acquainted with no language but his own, down to J. J. Rousseau, who was a very indifferent Latin scholar. How many young men have made a brilliant figure in the run of the classes, who were by and by totally eclipsed in the vast sphere of literature! Italy is crowded with colleges

and academies; but can she boast, at this day, of so much as one man eminently distinguished? Do we not see there, on the contrary, talents distracted, by ill-assorted societies, jealousies, cabals, intrigues, and ambition, become enfeebled and melt away?

I think I perceive another reason of this decline; nothing is studies in those seminaries but methods and forms of learning, or what is called manner. This study, by fixing us in the track of a master, forces us out of the path of nature, the source of all talents. Observe the arts brought to the highest perfection in France, and you will find they are those for which there is no public school, no prize, no academy; such as milliners, jewellers, hair-dressers, cooks, &c. We have, in is true, men of high reputation in the liberal arts, and in the sciences; but these men acquired their talents before they were admitted into academies. But admitting that talents are formed in colleges, they would not for that be less prejudicial to the nation; for it is more important that a country should possess virtue than talents, and that men should be happy than renowned. A treacherous glare covers the vices of those who succeed in our colleges. But in the multitude of who never succeed, all the vices of a negative ambition are already in a state of fermentation, and prepared to burst forth, at the command of their leader, upon the world.

After having elevated a poor boy about his equals, by the title of emperor, and even above the whole human race, by that of son of the church, he is cruelly brought low by rigorous and degrading punishments. I have seen, at college, many a pretty creature, ready to swoon with pain, receive on their little hands a dozen sharp strokes; and by the infliction of this punishment, the skin separated from the tip of their fingers. What shall be said of those infamous punishments, which produce a disgraceful effect on the morals of both scholars and regents? It is impossible to enter on this subject without putting modesty to the blush. And yet they are employed by priests!

Our children, subverted by the vices of a faulty education

become false reasoners, knavish, hypocritical, envious, ugly, and wicked. In proportion as they increase in age, they increase also in malignity and the spirit of contradiction. Not a schoolboy knows any thing of the laws of his country, but some may have heard talk about those of the twelve tables. No one of them can tell how our own wars are conducted; but many can entertain you with those of the greeks and Romans. They all know single combat is prohibited; yet many go to the fencing-schools, where the only thing taught is to fight duels.

Others, destined to functions more peaceful, are put to school to learn the art of disputation. Truth, we are gravely told, is struck out of the collision of opinions. Out of disputations have arisen sophisms, paradoxes, errors of every kind. Truth never shows her face before tyrants; and every man who disputes would be a tyrant if he could. The light of truth has no resemblance to the fatal coruscations of thunder, but to the brightness of the sun when heaven is without a cloud.

I shall not follow our youth into the world, where he would be sufficiently unhappy, supposing him to have preserved only that fear of blame and desire of commendation under which his studies were conducted. Influenced by the opinion of another, himself possessing no steady principle, the silliest of women will rule over him with more unbounded empire than his professor. All I plead for is, that children should be delivered, at least, from that tedious apprenticeship of misery, by which they are depraved, at the happiest and most amiable period of their existence, and which has afterward so much influence on their characters. Man is born good, society renders him wicked, and our mode of education prepares the way for it.

Trace the history of a villain's life, and we shall find his infancy has been miserable. Where children were unhappy, I have observed them wicked and ugly; but where I saw them happy, they were beautiful and good. In Holland and Flanders, where they are brought up with the greatest gentleness, their beauty is singularly remarkable. You never hear them, as in our cities, uttering loud and bitter cries; still less are they threatened with the rod by their mothers and nurses; they are not gay, but contented. You observe on their countenance an air of tranquillity and satisfaction

perfectly enchanting, and infinitely more interesting than the boisterous mirth of our young people, when they are no longer under the eye of their fathers or preceptors.

This calmness diffused over all their actions, is the source of a happy composure during their whole life. I never saw any country where parental tenderness was so strikingly expressed; the children repay in their old age the indulgence with which they were treated in helpless infancy. By bonds so endearing are those people so powerfully attached to their country, that we find very few of them settling among strangers. With us, fathers like better to see children sprightly than good, because in an ambitious society, spirit raises man to the head of a party, but goodness makes dupes. They have epigrams composed by their children; but wit being only the perception of the relations of society, children scarcely ever have any but what is borrowed. Wit itself is frequently, in them, the proof of a miserable existence, as may be remarked in the schoolboys of our cities, who usually are sprightlier than the children of the peasantry; but in general they are all forward in point of feeling; and this reflects great blame on those who degrade them, at an age when they feel more delicately than men.

Affecting instances of sensibility are not unfrequent in the children of the common people. Walking through the Pre St. Gervais, about the setting in of winter, I observed a poor woman, lying along the ground, weeding a bed of sorrel; close by her was a little girl, of six years old at most, standing motionless and quite impurpled with the cold. I addressed myself to the woman, who was indisposed, and inquired into the nature of her malady. 'Sir,' said she, 'for three months past, I have suffered severely from the rheumatism; but my disease gives me less pain than that poor child does: she will not quit me a single moment. If I say to her, See, you are quite benumbed with cold, go and warm yourself; she replies, Alas! mother, if I leave you, your complaints will be your only companion.

Another time, being in the park at Marly, I there found three children, two little girls, employed with singular activity in picking up the scattered sticks of dry wood, which they deposited in a basket, and a little boy, all in tatters, and extremely lean, devouring a morsel of bread. I asked the tallest what she intended to do with the wood; she replied,

'Look, sir, at that poor boy; he is very miserable! He is so unfortunate as to have a step-mother, who sends him out, all day long, to pick up wood: if he carries none home, he is beaten severely; when he happens to have got a little, and is carrying it off, the Swiss at the park gate takes it from him, and applies it to his own use. He is half dead with hunger, and we have given him our breakfast.' Having thus spoken, she and her companion filled the little basket; helped him up with it on his back, and ran away before their unhappy friend to the gate of the park, to see if he could pass unmolested.

Foolish instructors! Human nature, you tell us, is corrupted: yes, but you are the persons who corrupt it by contradictions, by unprofitable studies, by dangerous ambition, by shameful chastisements: and by an equitable reaction of Divine Justice, that feeble and unfortunate generation will one day give back to that which oppresses it, all the mischief which it first received.