altogether one-sided, while I was without a proportionate degree of control over myself in regard to them, and the work was left void of any adequate effort after practical excellence, which was so necessary for my purpose. The disproportion between my ability and my views only increased the more. The effect of my book upon those by whom I was surrounded was like the effect of all that I did; scarcely any one understood me, and I did not find in my vicinity two men who did not half give me to understand that they looked upon the entire book as so much balderdash."

Pestalozzi here assumes three states of man: an original, instinctlike, innocent, animal state of nature, out of which he passes into the social state, (this reminds us of Rosseau ;) he works himself out of the social state and raises himself to the moral. The social man is in an unhappy middle condition between animal propensities and moral elevation.

The original animal state of nature can not be pointed to in any one individual man; the innocence of that state ceases with the first cry of the new-born child, and "animal depravity arises from whatever stands opposed to the normal condition of our animal existence," Against this depravity, man seeks for aid in the social state, but finds it not; it is only the moral will that can save him, "the force of which he opposes to the force of his nature. He will fear a God, in order that the animal instincts of his nature shall not degrade him in his inmost soul. He feels what he can do in this respect, and then he makes what he can do the law to himself of what he ought to do. Subjected to this law, which he imposes upon himself, he is distinguished from all other creatures with which we are acquainted."

Where and when, for example, did Pestalozzi's man of nature ever exist an innocent animal man, endowed with instinct? * This character does not apply to Adam in Paradise, who was not an animal, but a lord of the animals, and still less does it apply to any child of Adam. In how simple and sublime a manner, on the

* Voltaire wrote the following characteristic letter to Rosseau about his discourse, prepared and offered for the prize proposed by the Academy of Dixon, ou the origin of the inequality among men, and published in 1775:-"I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. You will please men, to whom you speak the truth, but not make them better. No one could paint in stronger colors the horrors of human society, from which our ignorance and weakness promise themselves so many delights. Never has any one employed so much genius to make us into beasts; when one reads your book, one is seized with a desire to go down on all fours. Nevertheless, as I have left off this habit already more than sixty years, I feel, unfortunately, that it is impossible for me to take to it again, and I leave this natural mode of walking to others who are more worthy of it than you and I. Neither can I take ship, in order to visit the savages of Canada, firstly, because the maladies to which I am condemned, render a European physician necessary to me; then again, because there is at present war in that country, and the examples of our nations has made the savages almost as bad as we are ourselves. I am content to live as a peaceful savage in the lonely district adjoining your native land, &c."

contrary, do the Holy Scriptures comprehend and characterize the whole human race.

Thus we see Pestalozzi but little or not at all engaged in educational undertakings during the eighteen years from 1780 to 1798; his writings too, during this time are mainly of a philosophical and political character, and relate only indirectly to education. But the French revolution introduced a new epoch, for Pestalozzi, as well as for Switzerland.

The revolutionary armies of France pressed into the country, old forms were destroyed, the whole of Switzerland was consolidated into an "inseparable republic," at the head of which stood five directors, after the model of the French directional government of that time. Among these was Legrand, a man of a class that is always becoming more rare. I visited the amiable octogenarian in Steinthal, where formerly, with his friend Oberlin, he had labored for the welfare of the communes. When the conversation turned on the happiness or the education of the people, or on the education of youth generally, the old man became animated with youthful enthusiasm, and tears started to his eyes.

Legrand was a friend of Pestalozzi's; no wonder, seeing that the two men very nearly resembled each other in their way of thinking, as well as in their enthusiastic activity and their unbounded hopefulness. Pestalozzi joined the new republic, while, at the same time, he did all in his power to subdue the jacobinical element in it. He wrote a paper "On the Present Condition and Disposition of Mankind." In this paper, as also in the "Swiss People's Journal," which he edited at the instigation of the government, he pressed upon the attention of the people the necessity of a return to the integrity and piety of their ancestors; the instruction and education of youth, he represented, were the means for attaining this object.

Although, in pointing to an ennobling education of youth, and especially the youth of the people and the poor, as the securest guarantee of a lawfully ordered political condition, he only did that which he could not leave undone; still most people believed that he was speaking and writing thus industriously, merely with the view of procuring for himself an office under the new government, when an opportunity should arise. The government on whom he urged with far too much vehemence the importance of order, justice, and law, actu ally offered him an appointment, in the hope that he would then be quiet. But what was their astonishment, when, in reply to their inquiry as to what office he would be willing to accept, he said, "I WILL BE A SCHOOLMASTER." But few understood him, only those who,

like himself, were earnestly desirous for the foundation of a truly equitable political condition.

Legrand entered into the idea; and Pestalozzi was already about to open an educational institution in the canton of Argovia, when one of the misfortunes of war intervened. On the 9th of September, 1798, Stanz in Unterwalden was burnt by the French, the entire canton was laid waste, and a multitude of fatherless and motherless children were wandering about destitute and without a shelter. Legrand now called upon Pestalozzi to go to Stanz and undertake the care of the destitute children.

Pestalozzi went; what he experienced he has himself told us.

The convent of the Ursulines there was given up to him; he took up his abode in it, accompanied only by a housekeeper, before it was even put into a fit condition for the reception of children. Gradually he gathered around him as many as eighty poor children, from four to ten years old, some of them orphans, horribly neglected, infected with the itch and scurvy, and covered with vermin. Among ten of them, scarcely one could say the alphabet. He describes the educational experiments which he made with such children, and speaks of these experiments as "a sort of feeler of the pulse of the science which he sought to improve, a venturesome effort." "A person with the use of his eyes," he adds, "would certainly not have ventured it; fortunately, I was blind."

For example, under the most difficult circumstances, he wanted to prove, by actual experiment, that those things in which domestic education possesses advantages must be imitated in public education.

He gave the children no set lessons on religion; being suspected by the Roman Catholic parents, as a Protestant, and at the same time as an adherent of the new government, he did not dare; but whenever the occurrence of daily life presented an opportunity, he would make them the groundwork of inculcating some religious or moral lesson. As he had formerly done at Neuhof, he sought to combine intellectual instruction with manual labor, the establishment for instruction with that for industrial occupations, and to fuse the two into each other. But it became clear to him, that the first stages of intellectual training must be separated from those of industrial training and precede the fusion of the two. It was here in Stanz also that Pestalozzi, for want of other assistants, set children to instruct children, a plan which Lancaster was similarly led to adopt in consequence of the inability of the teacher to instruct the large numbers of children who were placed under his charge.* Pestalozzi remarks,

*Lancaster's monitors, i. e. children, set to teach and superintend other children. that time, (1798,)" says Pestalozzi, “nobody had begun to speak of mutual instruction."

"At

without disapprobation, that a feeling of honor was by this means, awakened in the children; a remark which directly contradicts his opinion, that the performance of the duties of the monitor proceeded from a disposition similar to brotherly love.

Another plan, which is now imitated in countless elementary schools, was likewise tried by Pestalozzi at Stanz, namely, that of making a number of children pronounce the same sentences simultaneously, syllable for syllable. "The confusion arising from a number of children repeating after me at once," he says, "led me to see the necessity of a measured pace in speaking, and this measured pace heightened the effect of the lesson."

Pestalozzi repeats, in his account of the Stanz institution, what he had brought forward in Leonard and Gertrude. "My aim," he says, "was to carry the simplification of the means of teaching so far, that all the common people might easily be brought to teach their children, and gradually to render the schools almost superfluous for the first elements of instruction. As the mother is the first to nourish her child physically, so also, by the appointment of God, she must be the first to give it spiritual nourishment; I reckon that very great evils have been engendered by sending children too early to school, and by all the artificial means of educating them away from home. The time will come, so soon as we shall have simplified instruction, when every mother will be able to teach, without the help of others, and thereby, at the same time, to go on herself always learning."

I refer the reader to Pestalozzi's own description of his singularly active labors in Stanz, where he was not only the teacher and trainer of eighty children, but, as he says, paymaster, manservant, and almost housemaid, at the same time. In addition to this, sickness broke out among the children, and the parents showed themselves shamelessly ungrateful.

Pestalozzi would have sunk under these efforts had he not been liberated on the 8th of June, 1799, by the French, who, being hard pressed by the Austrians, came to Stanz, and converted one wing of the convent into a military hospital. This induced him to let the children return to their friends, and he went himself up the Gurnigel mountains, to a medicinal spring. Only twenty-two children remained; these, says Mr. Heussler, "were attended to, taught, and trained, if not in Pestalozzi's spirit, still with care and with more order and cleanliness, under the guidance of the reverend Mr. Businger."

* The plan of simultaneous reading and speaking had been introduced into the Austrian schools at an earlier period.

"On the Gurnigel," says Pestalozzi, "I enjoyed days of recreation. I required them; it is a wonder that I am still alive. I shall not forget those days, as long as I live: they saved me, but I could not live without my work."

Pestalozzi was much blamed for giving up the Stanz institution, although necessity had compelled him to do so. "People said to my face," he says, "that it was a piece of folly, to believe that, because a man had written something sensible in his thirtieth year, he would therefore be capable of doing something sensible in his fiftieth year. I was said to be brooding over a beautiful dream."

Pestalozzi came down from the Gurnigel; at the advice of Chief Justice Schnell, he went to Burgdorf, the second town in the canton of Bern, where through the influence of well-wishers, Pestalozzi obtained leave to give instruction in the primary schools. He had many enemies. The head master of the schools imagined that Pestalozzi wanted to supplant him in his appointment: the report spread that the Heidelberg catechism was in danger: "it was whispered," says Pestalozzi, "that I myself could not write, nor work accounts, nor even read properly. Popular reports are not always entirely destitute of truth," he adds; "it is true that I could not write, nor read, nor work accounts well.

As far as the regulations of the school would allow, Pestalozzi prosecuted here the experiments in elementary instruction which he had begun at Stanz. M. Glayre, a member of the executive council of the canton, to whom he endeavored to explain the tendency of these experiments, made the ominous remark, "You want to render education mechanical." "He hit the nail on the head," says Pestalozzi, "and supplied me with the very expression that indicated the object of my endeavors, and of the means which I employed for attaining it."

Pestalozzi had not been schoolmaster at Burgdorf, quite a year, when he had a pulmonary attack; in consequence of this he gave up the appointment, and a new epoch of his life commenced. M. Fischer, secretary to the Helvetian minister of public instruction, had entertained the idea of founding a normal school in the castle of Burgdorf, but had died before carrying it into execution. With this end in view, he had induced M. Krüsi to come to Burgdorf. Krüsi was a native of Gaiss, in the canton of Appenzell, was schoolmaster there at the early age of eighteen, and had migrated thence in the year 1799, taking with him 28 children. Pestalozzi now proposed

In a school in which children from four to eight years old received instructions in reading and writing, under the general superintendence of a female teacher.