IV. LIFE AND EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM OF PESTALOZZI.

BY CARL VON RAUMER,

Minister of Public Institutions in Prussia.

(Continued from VOL. III., p. 416.)

FOR seventeen years after the publication of Leonard and Gertrude, Pestalozzi continued to drag on his needy and depressed existence at Neuhof, where he spent altogether thirty years. Of his outward life during those seventeen years, we learn little else, besides the general fact just stated. It is worthy of mention, that in this period he entered the order of Illuminati, an order which was characterized by infidelity, exaggerated ideas of enlightenment, and destructive but not reconstructive principles, and that he even became eventually the head of the order in Switzerland. He soon discovered his mistake, however, and withdrew from it. "That which is undertaken by associations," he says, "usually falls into the hands of intriguers."

In this period he wrote several books.

In the year 1782, he published "Christopher and Alice." He himself relates the origin of this work. People had imbibed from Leonard and Gertrude the idea, that all the depravity among the common people proceeded from the subordinate functionaries in the villages. "In Christopher and Alice," says Pestalozzi, “I wished to make apparent to the educated public the connection of those causes of popular depravity which are to be found higher in the social scale, but which on this account are also more disguised and concealed, with the naked, undisguised, and unconcealed causes of it, as they are manifested in the villages in the persons of the unworthy functionaries. For this purpose, I made a peasant family read together Leonard and Gertrude, and say things about the story of that work, and the persons introduced in it, which I thought might not occur of themselves to everybody's mind."

So says Pestalozzi in the year 1826; but he spoke otherwise in the preface to the book when it first appeared, in 1782. "Reader!" he says, "this book which thou takest into thy hand is an attempt to produce a manual of instruction for the use of the universal school of humanity, the parlor. I wish it to be read in every cottage." No. 10.-[VOL. IV., No. 1.]-5.

This wish was not accomplished, as we learn from the preface to the second edition, (1824,) which commences thus, "This book has not found its way at all into the hands of the people. In my native land, even in the canton of my native town, and in the very village in which I once lived, it has remained as strange and unknown, as if it had not been in existence."

In the same year, 1782, and the one following, Pestalozzi edited "A Swiss Journal," of which a number appeared every week. In this Journal, he communicated, among other things, memoirs of deceased friends. Thus he wrote the memoirs of Frölich, the pastor of Birr, who had died young. Pestalozzi says of him, "he dedicated himself to the work of the great divine calling, but eternal love dedicated him to the liberty of eternal life." The way in which he speaks of the excellent Iselin, who had died in 1782, is particularly affecting. "I should have perished in the depths into which I had fallen," he says, "if Iselin had not raised me up. Iselin made me feel that I had done something, even in the poor school."

"

The discourse on Legislation and Infanticide" also appeared in 1782.

About 1783, Pestalozzi contemplated the establishment of a lunatic asylum and a reformatory institution, and wrote upon the subject; the manuscript, however, was lost.

In the years between 1780 and 1790, in the days of the approaching French revolution, and in the first symptoms of the dangers which its influence on Switzerland might entail," he wrote "The Figures to my ABC-Book; they were not published, however, till 1795: a new edition, under the title of "Fables," came out in 1805. They relate principally to the condition of Switzerland at that time.

In the summer of 1792, he went to Germany, at the invitation of his sister in Leipzig, and became acquainted with Göthe, Herder, Wieland, Klopstock, and Jacobi; he also visited several normal schools.

In 1798 appeared Pestalozzi's "Researches into the Course of Nature in the Development of the Human Race." He says himself, speaking of this book, "I wrought at it for three long years with incredible toil, chiefly with the view of clearing up my own mind upon the tendency of my favorite notions, and of bringing my natural feelings into harmony with my ideas of civil rights and morality. But this work too is, to me, only another evidence of my inward helplessness, the mere play of my powers of research; my views were

'Pestalozzi's words in the preface to the "Figures."