from the observations he made among them, and his comparisons of the manufacturing with the agricultural portion of society, brought him back to the conclusion, that the then prevailing system of edu cation, was not by any means calculated to fit mankind for the discharge of their duties in after life, and the attainment of a tranquil and happy existence; and kindled in him a zeal and energy, for which no sacrifice was too great, no difficulty too appalling.

Pestalozzi now thought it a fit opportunity to make the experiment, how far it might be possible, by education, to raise the lower orders to a condition more consistent with a Christian state of society. His establishment was converted into an asylum, in which fifty orphan or pauper children were provided with food, clothing, and instruction of that kind calculated to lead them to acquire those practical abilities, and industrious habits, by which they would be enabled to keep themselves in a situation favourable to their improvement. His object was to show, not how the State might provide for the poor, and correct them; but how it might enable the poor to correct themselves. His design was not so much confined to the establishment of a private charity, as to effect a reform in the popular education of his country. He wished to purify the affections, which he saw descend into low propensities; to substitute intelligence and true knowledge, in the place of cunning and ignorant routine; and to restore to the Word of Faith, that which had been preverted into a dead creed, its original influence upon mankind; by receiving the child not only as a child of man, but also as a child of God-destined to be restored to the image of Divine perfection.

Such was his generous intention; but, unfortunately his means were in almost every respect inadequate to the task; his knowledge of human nature, and the laws by which it is governed, was deficient, from youth and inexperience;-in the difficult art of fostering the growth of the young mind, he was quite a novice;-his establishment required organization-required positive principles; but these Pestalozzi did not possess.

When Pestalozzi ventured upon his experiment, like most other great men, ardent in pursuit of their darling object, which arouses and calls forth the highest efforts of genius, he never calculated the expense; or he made false calculations of the return to be expected from the labour of the children. The mixture of agricultural and manufacturing labor, of domestic economy, and commercial operations, T had also the effect of bringing confusion into every part of his establishment; and concealing from his view, the real state of his circumstances. His thoughts were all on the moral means he should employ, and thus his establishment every year became more certain of" failure; and as this circumstance became partially revealed to him, it had the effect to render his mind more perplexed; and the painfully distressing apprehensions, that at last arose, robbed him of much of that calmness and serenity of temper, which are indispensable in great enterprizes. VISIL ZOTJUMi isuoisa The asylum at Neuhof, commenced in 1775, and closed in 1790 during the interval; however, Pestalozzi made a series of discoveries, and

left a highly interesting record of them in various publications. The first of them, Leonard and Gertrude, a popular novel, which appeared in 1781, contained much of the information he had acquired: in 1782, this was followed by Christopher and Eliza, which had for its object to direct the attention of the lower classes to Leonard and Gertrude, and to bring home the results of his experience to the hearts and minds of the cottagers. In a Journal, published in Basel, under the direction of the celebrated philanthropist, Iselin, he inserted a series of essays, under the title of Evening Hours of a Hermit, which contained a more systematic account of instruction, and his plans for national improvement; but his "voice was as the voice of one crying in the wilderness.” He was somewhat more successful in giving currency to his ideas by a weekly journal, undertaken in the beginning of 1782, under the title of "Schweizer Blatt," i. e. Swiss journal, which was continued till 1783, and forms two octavo volumes. It touches, in a popular and interesting style, upon a variety of topics, all, however, connected with Pestalozzi's one great object-national improvement.

Between 1783 and 1790, he engaged in some degree in politics, and published" Figures to my Spelling Book ;" a series of Fables, which had a material influence in hurting his fame and character, as it raised against him many enemies; and to his identification of himself with political parties, may be attributed much of the neglect which he afterwards experienced.

The asylum at Neuhof was finally broken up in 1790; and upon that event we find Pestalozzi in a condition truly deplorable. Dunned by his creditors-reviled by his enemies-insulted by men of powersneered at by the vulgar-treated with ingratitude by most of those whom he had served, and separated from the few that might have been grateful;—destitute of assistance-cast down by a succession of misfortunes-and tormented by the consciousness of having contributed to them by his own failings, he consumed his days in pain and sorrow on that spot which he had made the abode of love and mercy; while the cause that lay nearest his heart seemed irrevocably overthrown. In this state he lingered; when the French revolution proved the danger of giving to an uneducated and brutal populace political power, and revealed to Pestalozzi the danger of giving an undue impetus to that fickle feeling of the lower classes which prompts them continually to change their institutions. He now learned that man, uncurbed by authority, is less likely to attain moral and intellectual improvement, than when he is under the wholesome regulation of social institutions; and his mind gradually arrived at the important conclusion, that the amelioration of outward circumstances will be the effect, but never can be the cause of mental and moral improvement; or, as our Divine Lord has expressed it, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you."

The hope that the political reform of Switzerland would produce national improvement, was futile: but some, nevertheless, wished to improve their country, which was at this time under the government of an assembly, constituted after the pattern of the Directoire Executif,

in France. Pestalozzi was known to one of the directors (Legrand), and was on the eve of forming a plan of education, when the French invasion of Switzerland took place, supported by a revolutionary party in the country itself; and the fury of this war burst, in the month of September, 1798, upon the canton of Unterwalden, whose capital (Stantz) was laid in ashes by the victorious French troops; and after a horrible massacre, in which neither age nor sex was spared, the whole of the lower valley presented one scene of devastation.

After this dreadful event, the Helvetic government hastened to mitigate the severities of war, and the most active measures were taken to rebuild the destroyed villages: the scattered remnants of the population were invited back, under the most solemn assurances of security, and supplied with provisions. This was the scene which the government proposed to Pestalozzi, for the first experiment of his plan of National Education.

Leaving his family behind him, Pestalozzi proceeded to Stantz, where the new convent of the Ursulines, then building, was assigned to him, for the formation of an asylum for orphans and other destitute children, and ample funds were provided for making the necessary arrangements. The children presented themselves in numbers; many of them were utterly destitute, and some without even a place of shelter. The house, however, would scarcely afford this: the walls were damp; it was full of dust; and scarcely any convenience existed for this development of his plans. Most of the children were in a distressing and diseased state, and all exhibited the physical, intellectual, and moral neglect to which they had been exposed.

Nor were these the only difficulties with which Pestalozzi had to contend the parents distrusted him, from his being a Protestant ; many of the children were taken away through their whims and caprices; and Pestolozzi, unsupported by the ordinary props of authority, was treated with contempt as a mere hireling; and was compelled to adopt, as his grand instrument of instruction, the extraordinary power of love, as the basis of the relation between teacher and child.

While Pestalozzi was thus, in matters of discipline, reduced to the primary motive of all virtue, he learned in the attempt of instructing his children, the art of returning to the simplest of all knowledge; he was entirely unprovided with books, or any other means of instruction; and in the absence of both material and machinery, he could not even have recourse to the pursuits of industry for filling up part of his time. The whole of the school apparatus consisted of himself and his pupils, and he was therefore compelled to investigate what means these would afford him for the accomplishment of his end; the result was, that he abstracted himself entirely from those artificial elements of instruction which are contained in books, and directed his whole attention towards the natural elements which are deposited in the child's mind. He taught numbers instead of cyphers-lively sounds instead of dead characters-deeds of faith and love instead of abstruse creeds-substances instead of shadows-realities instead of signs; he led the intellect of his children to the discovery of truths which in the nature

of things they could never forget, instead of loading their memory with the recollection of words, which, likewise, in the nature of things, they could never understand: instead of building up a dead mind and a dead heart on the ground of the dead letter, he drew forth life to the mind, and life to the heart, from the fountain of life within; and thus established a new art of education, which, to follow him, requires on the part of the teacher, not a change of system but a change of state.

Thus in the midst of his children he forgot that there was any world besides his asylum; and as their circle was a universe to him, so was he to them all in all: from morning till night he was the centre of their existence; to him they owed every comfort and every enjoyment, and whatever hardship they had to endure, he was their fellowsufferer: he partook of their meals, and slept among them in the evening he prayed with them before they went to bed, and from his conversation they dropped into the arms of slumber at the first dawn of light, it was his voice that called them to the light of the rising sun, and to the praise of their heavenly Father: all day he stood among them; his hand was daily with them joined in theirs, his eye beaming with benevolence rested on theirs, he wept when they wept, and rejoiced when they rejoiced; he was to them a father, and they were to him as children. Such love could not fail to win their hearts: discontent and peevishness ceased, and between seventy and eighty children, whose disposition had been far from kind, and their habits anything but domestic, were thus converted in a short time into a peaceful family circle, in which it was delightful to exist.

By various methods, the suggestion of his own inventive and buoyant mind, did Pestalozzi seek to win and cultivate the affections of his children, and worked upon them a visible transformation, both physical and moral, in a few months; but while sketching out, in idea, new plans of improvement and discipline, in the summer of 1799, the Austrians took possession of Italy, and Pestalozzi was obliged to abandon his interesting experiment at the moment when it began to promise fruits of success. Disappointment at seeing the work of his hands suddenly destroyed, after the greatest difficulties and dangers had been conquered, and the reflection that the enemies of the cause had now an opportunity afforded them of reviling and ridiculing what was on the point of being established by the evidence of incontestible facts, preyed heavily on his mind, and in a fit almost of despondency, Pestalozzi fled into the solitude of the Alps, and amidst the rocks and steeps of the Gurnigal, sought rest for his weary soul, and health for his exhausted

nerves.

But it was not long that Pestalozzi remained in an inactive condition: stimulated by his friend Zehender, he again determined to resume his experiment. In consideration of his past services, and with a view to facilitate his further proceedings, he obtained from the Helvetic government a pension of about £30 per year, which was raised to £100 in 1801, but ceased entirely at the dissolution of the Helvetic government in 1803. In 1799, Pestalozzi went to Burgdorf, VOL. I.-Feb. 1835.

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and obtained access to one of the public schools, with liberty to try his experiments: the school itself however remained under the management of the former master, who, eyeing his new colleague with great suspicion and jealousy, contrived in a short time to get him removed. He was soon after admitted into a school of infants, between the age of four and eight, where he had no molestation, and was left at full liberty by the good old dame who presided over the innocents, to keep crowing the A, B, C, after his own fashion from morning to night.

While he was thus engaged in following up the discoveries he had made at Stautz, Fisher, one of the under-secretaries of state in the Helvetic government, had been directed to re-organize the schools at Burgdorf, and the castle of that place was assigned to him for a teacher's seminary, by means of which it was proposed to put the public instruction of the whole country upon a uniform plan; the plan was, however, delayed from time to time for want of funds, and Fisher dying, Pestalozzi was still left officially unemployed; but he had by the intervention of Fisher been brought in contact with Kruesi, a school-master, who was intrusted with the care of twenty-eight fatherless children, of Protestant descent, who had been driven by war from their native soil. After Fisher's death, Pestalozzi and Kruesi formed a union of their schools, in the castle, the possession of which the central government now transferred to Pestalozzi.

In this spacious place was every thing necessary for an establishment, except furniture, teachers, pupils, and the nervus rerum. Pestalozzi however set himself earnestly to work, and through the intervention of some members of the government, and before the expiration of 1799, he was enabled to announce the opening of an establishment, which contained twenty-six pupils in 1800, and thirty-seven in 1801. Of these about one-third were sons of representatives of different cantons of Switzerland, an other part belonged to the wealthier class of tradesmen and agriculturists, and the rest were the sons of respectable families reduced by misfortunes, who were placed under Pestalozzi's care by benevolent friends or relatives. The expense of its first outfit was covered by a loan, which he was afterwards enabled to pay, though not without great difficulty-the small income of the institution being absorbed by its current expenses, so that it would have been impossible to have carried it on, had not the Helvetic government voted him, in addition to the annuity above mentioned, a sufficient provision from year to year, and a stipend of £25 each to two of his assistants, Kruesi and Bass, who however did not receive it, but considering the pressure of Pestalozzi's position, generously appropriated it to the general funds of the house, from which they received nothing but their board and lodging;- -a fact which shows the high moral interest with which the first followers of Pestalozzi embraced his cause.

A letter addressed by him in February 1801, to the central government of Berne, shows the views of Pestalozzi on the subject of education. He proposed to himself the following three distinct objects: