§ 1. Qui facit per alium facit per se. It is thus the law holds us accountable for the action of others which we direct. By the extension of this rule we immensely increase the personality of great writers and may credit them with vast spheres of action which never come within their consciousness. No man gains and suffers more from this consideration than Rousseau. On the one hand, we may attribute to him the crimes of Robespierre and Saint-Just; on the other Pestalozzi was instigated by him to turn to farming and—education. In treating of Rousseau as an educational reformer I passed over a life in which almost every incident tends to weaken the effect of his words. With Pestalozzi we must turn to his life for the true source of his writings and the best comment on them.
§ 2. John Henry Pestalozzi was born at Zurich in 1746. His father dying when he was five years old, he was brought up with a brother and sister by a pious and self-denying mother and by a faithful servant “Babeli,” who had comforted the father in his last hours by promising to stay with his family. Thus Pestalozzi had an advantage denied to Rousseau and denied as it would seem to Locke; there[291] was scope for his home affections, and the head was not developed before the heart. When he was sent to a day-school he became to some extent the laughing stock of his companions who dubbed him Harry Oddity of Foolborough; but he gained their good-will by his unselfishness. It was remembered that on the shock of an earthquake when teachers and taught fled from the school building Harry Oddity was induced to go back and bring away what his companions considered precious. His holidays he spent with his grandfather the pastor of a village some three miles from Zurich, where the lad learnt the condition of the rural poor and saw what a good man could do for them. He always looked back to these visits as an important element in his education. “The best way for a child to acquire the fear of God,” he wrote, “is for him to see and hear a true Christian.” The grandfather’s example so affected him that he wished to follow in his steps, and he became a student of theology.[151]
§ 3. Even as a student Pestalozzi proved that he was no ordinary man. In his time there was great intellectual and moral enthusiasm among the students of the little Swiss University. Some distinguished professors, especially Bodmer, had awakened a craving for the old Swiss virtues of plain living and high thinking; and a band of students, among whom Lavater was leader and Pestalozzi played a prominent part, became eager reformers. The citizens of the great towns like Geneva and Zurich had become in effect privileged classes; and as their spokesmen the Geneva magistrates condemned the Contrat Social and the Emile.[292] This raised the indignation of the reforming students at Zurich; and though their organ, a periodical called the Memorial, kept clear of politics, one Muller wrote a paper which contained some strong language, and this was held to be proof of a conspiracy. Muller fled and was banished. Pestalozzi and some other of his friends were imprisoned. The Memorial was suppressed.
§ 4. It is in this Memorial, a weekly paper edited by Lavater who was five years Pestalozzi’s senior that we have Pestalozzi’s earliest writing. We find him coming forward as “a man of aspirations.” No one he says can object to his expressing his wishes. And “wishes” with a man of 19 are usually hopes. Among other wishes he says: “I would that some one would draw up in a simple manner a few principles of education intelligible to everybody; that some generous people would then share the expense of printing, so that the pamphlet might be given to the public for nothing or next to nothing. I would then have clergymen distribute it to all fathers and mothers, so that they might bring up their children in a rational and Christian manner. But,” he adds, “perhaps this is asking too much at a time.”
The Memorial was suppressed because “the privileged classes” knew that it was in the hands of their opponents. Pestalozzi then and always felt keenly the oppression to which the peasants were exposed; and he spoke of “the privileged” as men on stilts who must descend among the people before they could secure a natural and firm position. He also satirises them in some of his fables, as, e.g., that of the “Fishes and the Pike.” “The fishes in a pond brought an accusation against the pike who were making great ravages among them. The judge, an old pike, said[293] that their complaint was well founded, and that the defendants, to make amends, should allow two ordinary fish every year to become pike.”
§ 5. By this time Pestalozzi had given up theology and had taken to the law. Now under the influence of Rousseau, or rather of the craving for a simple “natural” life which found its most eloquent expression in Rousseau’s writing, Pestalozzi made a bonfire of his MSS. and decided on becoming a farmer.
§ 6. There was another person concerned in this decision. In his childhood he had one day ventured into the shop of one of the leading tradesmen, Herr Schulthess, bent on procuring for his farthings some object of delight; but he found there a little shop-keeper, Anna Schulthess, seven years his senior, who discouraged his extravagance and persuaded him to keep his money. Anna and he since those days had become engaged—not at all to the satisfaction of her parents. Their intimacy had been strengthened by their concern for a common friend, a young man named Bluntschli, who died of consumption. This friend, three years older than Pestalozzi, seems to have understood him thoroughly; and in the parting advice he gave him there was a warning which happily for the general good was in after years neglected. “I am going,” said Bluntschli, “and you will be left alone. Avoid any career in which you might become the victim of your own goodness and trust, and choose some quiet life in which you will run no risk. Above all, do not take part in any important undertaking without having at your side a man who by his cool judgment, knowledge of men and things, and unshakable fidelity may be able to protect you from the dangers to which you will be exposed.”
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§ 7. When the friendship with Anna Schulthess had ripened into a betrothal Pestalozzi spent a year in the neighbourhood of Bern learning farming under a man then famous for his innovations. His new ideas Pestalozzi absorbed very readily. “I had come to him,” he says, “a political visionary, though with many profound and correct attainments, views, and anticipations in matters political. I went away from him just as great an agricultural visionary, though with many enlarged and correct ideas and intentions with regard to agriculture.”
§ 8. During his “learning year” he kept up a correspondence with his betrothed, and the letters of both, which have been preserved, differ very widely from love-letters in general. Of himself Pestalozzi gives an account which shows that in part at least he could see himself as others saw him. “Dearest,” he writes, “those of my faults which appear to me most important in relation to the situation in which I may be placed in after-life are improvidence, incautiousness, and a want of presence of mind to meet unexpected changes in my prospects.... Of my great, and indeed very reprehensible negligence in all matters of etiquette, and generally in all matters which are not in themselves of importance, I need not speak; anyone may see them at first sight of me. I also owe you the open confession, my dear, that I shall always consider my duties toward my beloved partner subordinate to my duties towards my country; and that, although I shall be the tenderest husband, nevertheless, I hold myself bound to be inexorable to the tears of my wife if she should ever attempt to restrain me by them from the direct performance of my duties as a citizen, whatever this must lead to. My wife shall be the confidante of my heart, the partner of all[295] my most secret counsels. A great and honest simplicity shall reign in my house. And one thing more. My life will not pass without important and very critical undertakings. I shall not forget ... my first resolutions to devote myself wholly to my country. I shall never, from fear of man, refrain from speaking when I see that the good of my country calls upon me to speak. My whole heart is my country’s: I will risk all to alleviate the need and misery of my fellow-countrymen. What consequences may the undertakings to which I feel myself urged on draw after them! how unequal to them am I! and how imperative is my duty to show you the possibility of the great dangers which they may bring upon me! My dear, my beloved friend, I have now spoken candidly of my character and my aspirations. Reflect upon everything. If the traits which it was my duty to mention diminish your respect for me, you will still esteem my sincerity, and you will not think less highly of me, that I did not take advantage of your want of acquaintance with my character for the attainment of my inmost wishes.”
§ 9. The young lady addressed was worthy of her lover. “Such nobleness, such elevation of character, reach my very soul,” said she. With equal nobleness she encouraged Pestalozzi in his schemes and took the consequences without a murmur during their long married life of 46 years.
§ 10. Full of new ideas about farming Pestalozzi now thought he saw his way to making a fortune. He took some poor land near Birr not far from Zurich, and persuaded a banking firm to advance money with which he proposed to cultivate vegetables and madder. In September, 1769, he was married, and six months later the[296] pair settled in a new house, “Neuhof,” which Pestalozzi had built on his land.
§ 11. But in spite of his excellent ideas and great industry, his speculation failed. The bankers soon withdrew their money. Pestalozzi was not cautious enough for them. However, his wife’s friends prevented an immediate collapse.
§ 12. But before he had any reason to doubt the success of his speculation Pestalozzi had begun to reproach himself with being engrossed by it. What had become of all his thoughts for the people? Was he not spending his strength entirely to gain the prosperity of himself and his household? These thoughts came to him with all the more force when a son was born to him; and at this time they naturally connected themselves with education. He had now seen a good deal of the degraded state of the peasantry. How were they to be raised out of it?
§ 13. To Pestalozzi there seemed one answer and one only. This was by education. To many people in the present day it might seem that “education,” when quite successful, would qualify labourers to become clerks. This was not the notion of Pestalozzi. Rousseau had completely freed him from bondage to the Renascence, and education did not mean to him a training in the use of books. He looked at the children of the lowest class of the peasants and asked himself what they needed to raise them. Knowledge would not do it. “The thing was not that they should know what they did not know, but that they should behave as they did not behave” (supra, p. 169); and the road to right action lay through right feeling. If they could be made conscious that they were loved and cared for, their hearts would open and give back love and respect in return. More than this, they must be taught not only to respect their elders but also[297] themselves. They must be taught to help themselves and contribute to their own maintenance. So Pestalozzi resolved to take into his own house some of the very poorest children, to bring them up in an atmosphere of love, and to instruct them in field-work and spinning which would soon partly (as Pestalozzi hoped, wholly) pay for their keep. Thus, just at the time when the experiment for himself failed he began for others an experiment that seemed likely to add indefinitely to his difficulties.
§ 14. In the winter of 1774 the first children were taken into Neuhof. The consequences to his wife and to his little son only four years old might have vanquished the courage of a less ardent philanthropist. “Our position entailed much suffering on my wife;” he writes, “but nothing could shake us in our resolve to devote our time, strength and remaining fortune to the simplification of the instruction and domestic education of the people.”
§ 15. These children, at first not more than 20 in number, Pestalozzi treated as his own. They worked with him in the summer in the garden and fields, in winter in the house. Very little time was given to separate lessons, the children often learning while they worked with their hands. Pestalozzi held that talking should come before reading and writing; and he practised them in conversation on subjects taken from their every day life. They also repeated passages from the Bible till they knew them by heart.
§ 16. In a few months, as we are told, the appearance of these poor little creatures had entirely changed; though fed only on bread and vegetables they looked strong and hearty, and their faces gained an expression of cheerfulness, frankness and intelligence which till then had been totally wanting. They made good progress with their manual work[298] as well as with the associated lessons, and took pleasure in both. In all they said and did, they seemed to show their consciousness of their benefactor’s kind care of them.
§ 17. This experiment naturally drew much attention to it, and when it had gone on over a year Pestalozzi was induced by his friend Iselin of Basel to insert in the Ephemerides (a paper of which Iselin was editor), an “appeal ... for an institution intended to provide education and work for poor country children.” In this appeal Pestalozzi narrates his experience. “I have proved,” says he, “that it is not regular work that stops the development of so many poor children, but the turmoil and irregularity of their lives, the privations they endure, the excesses they indulge in when opportunity offers, the wild rebellious passions so seldom restrained, and the hopelessness to which they are so often a prey. I have proved that children after having lost health, strength and courage in a life of idleness and mendicity have, when once set to regular work quickly recovered their health and spirits and grown rapidly. I have found that when taken out of their abject condition they soon become kindly, trustful and sympathetic; that even the most degraded of them are touched by kindness, and that the eyes of the child who has been steeped in misery, grow bright with pleasure and surprise, when, after years of hardship, he sees a gentle friendly hand stretched out to help him; and I am convinced that when a child’s heart has been touched the consequences will be great for his development and entire moral character.”
Pestalozzi therefore would have the very poorest children brought up in private establishments where agriculture and industry were combined, and where they would learn to work steadily and carefully with their hands, the chief part of their time being devoted to this manual work, and their instruction[299] and education being associated with it. And he asks for support in greatly increasing the establishment he has already begun.
§ 18. Encouraged by the support he received and still more by his love for the children and his own too sanguine disposition Pestalozzi enlarged his undertaking. The consequence was bankruptcy. Several causes conspired to bring about this result. Whatever he might do for the children, he could not educate the parents, and these were many of them beggars with the ordinary vices of their class. With the usual discernment of such people they soon came to the conclusion that Pestalozzi was making a fortune out of their children’s labour; so they haunted Neuhof, treated Pestalozzi with the greatest insolence, and often induced their children to run away in their new clothes. This would account for much, but there was another cause of failure that accounted for a great deal more. This was Pestalozzi’s extreme incapacity as an administrator. Even his industrial experiment he carried on in such a way that it proved a source of expense rather than of profit. He says himself, that, contrary to his own principles, which should have led him to begin at the beginning and lay a good foundation in teaching, he put the children to work that was too difficult for them, wanted them to spin fine thread before their hands got steadiness and skill by exercise on the coarser kind, and to manufacture muslin before they could turn out well-made cotton goods. “Before I was aware of it,” he adds, “I was deeply involved in debt, and the greater part of my dear wife’s property and expectations had, as it were, in an instant gone up in smoke.”
§ 19. The precise arrangement made with the creditors we do not know. The bare facts remain that the children were sent away, and that the land was let for the creditors’[300] benefit; but Pestalozzi remained in the house. This was settled in 1780.
§ 20. We have now come to the most gloomy period in Pestalozzi’s history, a period of eighteen years, and those the best years in a man’s life, which Pestalozzi spent in great distress from poverty without and doubt and despondency within. When he got into difficulties, his friends, he tells us, loved him without hope: “in the whole surrounding district it was everywhere said that I was a lost man, that nothing more could be done for me.” “In his only too elegant country house,” we are told, “he often wanted money, bread, fuel, to protect himself against hunger and cold.” “Eighteen years!—what a time for a soul like his to wait! History passes lightly over such a period. Ten, twenty, thirty years—it makes but a cipher difference if nothing great happens in them. But with what agony must he have seen day after day, year after year gliding by, who in his fervent soul longed to labour for the good of mankind and yet looked in vain for the opportunity!” (Palmer.)
§ 21. But he who was always ready to sacrifice himself for others now found someone, and that a stranger, ready to make a great sacrifice for him. A servant, named Elizabeth Naef, heard of the disaster and distress at Neuhof, and her master having just died she resolved to go to the rescue. At first Pestalozzi refused her help. He did not wish her to share the poverty of his household, and he felt himself out of sympathy with her “evangelical” form of piety. But Elizabeth declared she had come to stay, and when Pestalozzi found he could not shake her determination he consented, saying, “Well, you will find after all that God is in our house also.”
§ 22. To this pious sensible but illiterate peasant woman[301] Pestalozzi was fond of tracing many of his ideas. She was the original of his Gertrude, and it was of her he wrote: “God’s sun pursues its path from morning to evening; yet your eye detects no movement, your ear no sound. Even when it goes down, you know that it will rise again and continue to ripen the fruits of the earth. Extreme as it may seem, I am not ashamed to say that this is an image of Gertrude as of every woman who makes her house a temple of the living God and wins heaven for her husband and children.” (Leonard and Gertrude). She was invaluable at Neuhof and restored comfort to the household. In after years she managed the establishment at Yverdun and married one of the Krüsis who were Pestalozzi’s assistants.
§ 23. Writing of the gloomy years at Neuhof Pestalozzi afterwards said; “My head was grey, yet I was still a child. With a heart in which all the foundations of life were shaken, I still pursued in those stormy times my favourite object, but my way was one of prejudice, of passion and of error.” But with Pestalozzi self-depreciation had “almost grown the habit of his soul,” and in his writings at Neuhof at this period we find no traces of this prejudice, passion and error from which he supposes himself to have suffered. He certainly did not abandon his love of humanity; and in his sacrifice for it he sought a religious basis. In these Neuhof days he wrote: “Christ teaches us by His example and doctrine to sacrifice not only our possessions but ourselves for the good of others, and shews us that nothing we have received is absolutely ours but is merely entrusted to us by God to be piously employed in the service of charity.” (Quoted by Guimps. R’s trans. 72.) Whatever were his doubts and difficulties, he never swerved from pursuing the great object of his life, and nothing could cloud his[302] mind as to the true method of attaining that object. As he afterwards wrote to Gessner (Wie Gertrud u.s.w.), “Even while I was the sport of men who condemned me I never lost sight for a moment of the object I had in view, which was the removal of the causes of the misery that I saw on all sides of me. My strength too kept on increasing, and my own misfortunes taught me valuable truths. I knew the people as no one else did. What deceived no one else always deceived me, but what deceived everybody else deceived me no longer.... My own sufferings have enabled me to understand the sufferings of the people and their causes as no man without suffering can understand them. I suffered what the people suffered and saw them as no one else saw them; and strange as it may seem, I was never more profoundly convinced of the fundamental truths on which I had based my undertaking than when I saw that I had failed.” (R’s. Guimps 74.)
§ 24. Pestalozzi still had a few friends who did not despise the dreamer of dreams. Among them was the editor of the Ephemerides, Iselin. This friend encouraged him to write, and there soon appeared in the Ephemerides a series of reflexions under the title of “The Evening Hour of a Hermit.” Not many editors would have printed these aphorisms, and they attracted little or no attention at the time, but they have proved worth attending to. “The fruit of Pestalozzi’s past years, they are,” says Raumer, “at the same time the seed-corn of the years that were to come, the plan and key to his action in pedagogy.... The drawing of the architect of genius contains his work, even though the architect himself has not skill enough to carry out his own design.” (Quoted by Otto Fischer).[152]
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§ 25. What was the connexion between Pestalozzi’s belief at this season and complete belief in dogmatic Christianity? The question is one that will always be asked and can never, I think, be fully answered. In the days[304] preceding the French Revolution it was a proof of wisdom to “Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt, and cling to Faith,” even though the Faith were “beyond the forms of Faith” (see Tennyson’s Ancient Sage). But Pestalozzi did far more than this. He traced all virtue and strength in the people to belief in the Fatherhood of God; and he saw in unbelief the severance of all the bonds of society. The “Hermit” does not indeed use the phrases common among “evangelical” Christians, but that he was indeed a Christian is established not only by the general tone of his aphorisms but still more clearly by his last words: “The Man of God, who with his sufferings and death has restored to humanity the lost feeling of the child’s disposition towards God is the Redeemer of the world; he is the sacrificed Priest of the Lord; he is the Mediator between God and God-forgetting mankind. His teaching is pure justice, educating philosophy of the people; it is the revelation of God the Father to the lost race of his children.”
§ 26. The “Evening Hour” remaining almost unnoticed, Pestalozzi’s friends urged him to write something in a more popular form. So he set to work on a tale which should depict the life of the peasantry and shew the causes of their[305] degradation and the cure. With extraordinary rapidity he wrote between the lines of an old account book the first part of his “Leonard and Gertrude.” The book, which was complete in itself, and through the good offices of Iselin (of the Ephemerides), soon found a publisher, suddenly sprang into immense popularity, a popularity of which nothing but the “continuations” could ever have deprived it. In the works of a great artist we see natural objects represented with perfect fidelity and yet with a life breathed into them by genius, which is wanting or at least is not visible to common eyes in the originals. Just so do we find Swiss peasant life depicted by Pestalozzi. The delineation is evidently true to nature; and, at the same time, shows Nature as she reveals herself to genius. But for this work something more than genius was necessary, viz., sympathy and love. In the preface to the first edition, he says, “In that which I here relate, and which I have, for the most part, seen and heard myself in the course of an active life, I have taken care not once to add my own opinion to what I saw and heard the people themselves saying, feeling; believing, judging, and attempting.” In a later edition (1800) he says, “I desired nothing then, and I desire nothing else now, as the object of my life, but the welfare of the people, whom I love, and whom I feel to be miserable as few feel them to be miserable, because I have with them borne their sufferings as few have borne them.”
§ 27. Wherever German was read this book excited vast interest, and though it seemed to most people only a good tale, it met with some more discerning readers. The Bern Agricultural Society sent the author their thanks and a gold medal, and Pestalozzi was at once recognised as a man who understood the peasantry and had good ideas for raising[306] them. The book is and must remain a classic, but Pestalozzi in his zeal to spread the truth added again and again “continuations,” and these became less and less popular in the method of exposition.[153]
§ 28. Here and there we get glimpses of the trials Pestalozzi had gone through in his industrial experiment. “The love and patience,” he writes, “with which Gertrude bore with the disorderly and untrained little ones was almost past belief. Their eyes were often anywhere but on their yarn, so that this would now be too thick, and now too thin. When they had spoiled it, they would watch for a moment when Gertrude was not looking, and throw it out of the window by the handful, until they found that she discovered the trick when she weighed their work at night.” (E. C’s. trans., p. 122.) And in this connexion Pestalozzi preached his doctrine of perfect attainment. “‘What you can’t do blindfold,’” said Harry, “‘you can’t do at all.’” (ib.)
§ 29. “Gertrude,” we are told, “seemed quite unable to explain her method in words;” and here no doubt Pestalozzi was speaking of himself; but like Gertrude he “would let fall some significant remark which went to the root of the whole matter of education.” As an instance we may take[307] what Gertrude said to the schoolmaster: “You should do for the children what their parents fail to do for them. The reading, writing, and arithmetic are not after all what they most need. It is all well and good for them to learn something, but the really important thing for them is to be something.” When this truth is fully realized by teachers and school managers there will be some hope for national education.
§ 30. “Although Gertrude exerted herself to develop very early the manual dexterity of her children, she was in no haste for them to learn to read and write; but she took pains to teach them early how to speak: for, as she said, ‘Of what use is it for a person to be able to read and write if he cannot speak, since reading and writing are only an artificial sort of speech.’ ... She did not adopt the tone of an instructor towards the children ... and her verbal instruction seemed to vanish in the spirit of her real activity, in which it always had its source. The result of her system was that each child was skilful, intelligent, and active to the full extent that its age and development allowed.” (Ib. p. 130.)
§ 31. In this book we see that knowledge is treated as valueless unless it has a basis in action. “The pastor was soon convinced that all verbal instruction in so far as it aims at true human wisdom and at the highest goal of this wisdom, true religion, ought to be subordinated to a constant training in practical domestic labour.... So he strove to lead the children without many words to a quiet industrious life, and thus to lay the foundations of a silent worship of God and love of humanity. To this end he connected every word of his brief religious teachings with their actual every-day experience, so that when he spoke of[308] God and eternity, it seemed to them as if he were speaking of father and mother, house and home; in short of the things with which they were most familiar” (p. 156). Thus he built on the foundation laid by the schoolmaster, who “cared for the children’s heads as he did for their hearts, and demanded that whatever entered them should be plain and clear as the silent moon in the sky. To insure this he taught them to see and hear with accuracy, and cultivated their powers of attention” (p. 157).
§ 32. With all his love for the children, an element of severity was not wanting. Pestalozzi maintained that “love was only useful in the education of men when in conjunction with fear: for they must learn to root out thorns and thistles, which they never do of their own accord, but only under compulsion and in consequence of training” (p. 157).
§ 33. Just at the end of the book “the Duke” appoints a commission to report on the success of the Bonal experiment, and Pestalozzi makes him give the following order: “To insure thoroughness there must be among the examiners men skilled in law and finance, merchants, clergymen, government officials, schoolmasters, and physicians, besides women of different ranks and conditions of life who shall view the matter with their woman’s eyes and be sure there is nothing visionary in the background” (p. 180). In this respect Pestalozzi is in advance of us still. No woman has yet sat on an educational commission.
§ 34. Thus we find Pestalozzi at the age of thirty-five turning author, and for the next six or seven years he worked indefatigably with his pen. Most men of genius have some leading purpose which unites their varied activities, and this was specially true of Pestalozzi. He never lost sight[309] of his one object, which was the elevation of the people; and this he held to be attainable only by means of education properly so called. The success of the first part of Leonard and Gertrude he now endeavoured to turn to account in spreading true ideas of education. With this intent he published Christopher and Eliza: My Second Book for the People (1782), which was a kind of commentary on Leonard and Gertrude. But the public wished to be amused, not taught; and the book was a failure. He was thus driven into the attempt already mentioned to catch the public ear by continuing Leonard and Gertrude, thus endangering his first and, as it proved, his only great success in literature.
§ 35. To gain circulation for his ideas he also started a weekly paper called the Swiss Journal, and issued it regularly throughout the year 1782; but the subscribers were so few that he was then obliged to give it up. I have not the smallest doubt that it was, as Guimps says, full of wisdom, but not the kind of wisdom that readers of periodicals are likely to care for.[154]
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§ 36. In the Swiss Journal we get a hint of the analogy between the development of the plant and of the man. This analogy, often as it had been observed before, was never before so fruitful as it became in the hands of Pestalozzi and Froebel. The passage quoted by Guimps is this: “Teach me, summer day, that man formed from the dust of the earth, grows and ripens like the plant rooted in the soil.”
§ 37. Between the close of the year 1787 and 1797 Pestalozzi did not publish anything. Though he had become famous, had made the acquaintance of the greatest men in Germany, such as Goethe, Wieland, Herder, and Fichte, and had been declared a “Citizen of the French Republic,” together with Bentham, Tom Payne, Wilberforce, Clarkson, Washington, Madison, Klopstock, Kozciusko, &c., he was nearly starving, and, naturally enough in that state of affairs both private and public, he was in great despondency. As we have seen, his whole life and work were founded on religion and on the only religion possible for us, the Christian religion; but carried away by his political radicalism he seems at this time to have doubted whether Christianity was more than the highest human wisdom. In October, 1793, he wrote to a friend in Berlin: “I doubt, not because I look on doubt as the truth, but because the sum of the impressions of my life has driven faith with its blessings from my soul. Thus impelled by my fate I see[311] nothing more in Christianity but the purest and noblest teaching of the victory of the spirit over the flesh, the one possible means of raising our nature to its true nobility, or in other words of establishing the empire of the reason over the senses by the development of the purest feelings of the heart.” If this was the lowest point to which Pestalozzi’s faith sank in the days of the Revolution, it remained for practical purposes higher than the faith of most professing Christians then and since.
§ 38. At this time we find him complaining: “My agriculture swallows up all my time. I am longing for winter with its leisure. My time passes like a shadow.” He was then forty-six years of age and seemed to himself to have done nothing.
§ 39. Another five years he had to wait before he found an opportunity for action. During this time, impelled by Fichte, he endeavoured to give his ideas philosophic completeness, and after labouring for three years with almost incredible toil he published in 1797 his “Inquiry into the Course of Nature in the Development of the Human Race.” This book is pronounced even by his biographer Guimps to be “prolix and obscure,” and, says Pestalozzi, “nobody understood me.” But even in this book there was much wisdom, had the world cared to learn; but the world had then no place for Pestalozzi, and as he says at the end of this book, “without even asking whether the fault was his or another’s, it crushed him with its iron hammer as the mason crushes a useless stone.” He was, however, not actually crushed, and a place was in time found for him.
§ 40. The world might be pardoned for neglecting an Inquiry which even a biographer finds “prolix and obscure.” But why could it see nothing in another book[312] which Pestalozzi published in the same year, “Figures to my ABC Book,” or according to its later title, “Fables,” a series of apologues as witty and wise as those of Lessing.[155]
§ 41. As I have said already (supra p. 239) there seems a marked distinction between thinkers and doers, at least in education, and we seldom find a man great in both. But with all his weakness as a practical man Pestalozzi proved great both as a thinker and a doer. He not only thought out what should be done, but he also made splendid efforts to do it. His first attempt at Neuhof was, as we have seen, all his own; so was the next at Stanz; but afterwards he had to work with others, and the work would have come to a standstill if he had not gained the co-operation of the magistrates, the parents of the children, and his own[313] assistants. So he never again had the free hand, or at least the free thought which bore such good fruit in his enforced cessation from practice in the years between 1780 and 1798. It is well then to ask, as his biographer Guimps has asked, what was the main outcome of Pestalozzi’s thought before he plunged into action a second time in 1798.
§ 42. Pestalozzi set himself to find a means of rescuing the people from their poverty and degradation. This he held would last as long as their moral and intellectual poverty lasted; so there was no hope except in an education that should make them better and more intelligent. In studying the children even of the most degraded parents he found the seeds, as it were, of a wealth of faculties, sentiments, tastes, and capabilities, which, if developed, might make them reasonable and upright human beings. But what was called education did nothing of the kind. Instead of developing the noblest part of the child’s nature it neglected this entirely, and bringing to the child the knowledge, ideas, and feelings of others, it tried to make him “learn” them. So “education” did little beyond stifling the child’s individuality under a mass of borrowed ideas. The schoolmaster worked, as it were, from without to within. This Pestalozzi would change, and make education begin in the child and work from within outwards. Acting on this principle he sought for some means of developing the child’s inborn faculties, and he found as he says: “Nature develops all the powers of humanity by exercising them; they increase with use.” (Evening Hour, Aph. 22.) No means can be found of exercising the higher faculties which can be compared with the actual relations of daily life; so Pestalozzi declares: “The pure sentiment of truth and wisdom is formed in the narrow circle of the relationships[314] which affect us, the circumstances which suggest our actions, and the common knowledge which we cannot do without.” And taking as his starting-point the needs, desires, and connexions of actual life he was naturally led to associate the work of the body with that of the mind, to develop industry and study side by side, to combine the workshop and the school. With regard to instruction he was never tired of insisting on the importance of thorough mastery in the first elements, and there was to be no advance till this mastery was attained. (See what “Harry” says, supra p. 306.) “The schools,” he says (E. H., No. 28), “hastily substitute an artificial method of words for the truer method of Nature which knows no hurry but waits.”
§ 43. In this account of Pestalozzi’s doctrine before 1798 I have as usual followed M. Guimps. According to him Pestalozzi had discovered “a principle which settles the law of man’s development, and is the fundamental principle of education.” This principle M. Guimps briefly states as follows: “All the real knowledge, useful powers, and noble sentiments that a man can acquire are but the extension of his individuality by the development of the powers and faculties that God has put in him, and by their assimilation of the elements supplied by the outer world. There exists for this development and the work of assimilation a natural and necessary order, an order which the school mostly sets at nought.”
§ 44. Now we come to the period of Pestalozzi’s practical activity. In 1798 Switzerland was overrun by the French. Everything was remodelled after the French pattern; and in conformity with the existing phase in the model country the government of Switzerland was declared to be in the hands of five “Directors.” Pestalozzi was a Radical, and[315] he at once set to work to serve the new government with his pen. The Directors gladly welcomed such an ally as the author of Leonard and Gertrude, and they made him editor of a newspaper intended to diffuse the revolutionary principles among the people. Naturally enough they supposed that he, like other people, “wanted” something; but when asked what he wanted he replied simply that he wished to be a schoolmaster. The Directors, especially Le Grand, took a genuine interest in education, and were quite willing that Pestalozzi should be allowed a free hand in his “new departure.” They therefore agreed to find the funds with which Pestalozzi might open a new Institution in Aargau.
§ 45. But the editorship and the plans for the new Institution came to an abrupt ending. The Catholic cantons did not acquiesce in giving up their local liberties and being subjected to a new government in the hands of men whom they regarded as heretics and even atheists. Consequently those missionaries of enlightenment, the French troops, at once fell upon them and slaughtered many without distinction of age or sex. The French, we are told, did not expect to meet with resistance; so their light became lightning and struck dead the stupid people who could not or would not see. “Our soldiers” (it is Michelet who speaks) “were ferocious at Stanz.” (Nos Fils, 217). This ferocity at Stanz in September, 1798, was in secret disapproved of by the Directors, who were nominally responsible for it. But all they could do was to provide in a measure for the “111 infirm old people, the 169 orphans, and 237 other children,” who were left totally destitute. Le Grand proposed to Pestalozzi that he should, for the present, give up his other plans and go to Stanz (which is on[316] the Lake of Lucerne) to take charge of the orphan and destitute children. Pestalozzi was not the man to refuse such a task as this. He at once set out. Some buildings connected with an Ursuline convent were, without the consent of the nuns, made over to him. Workmen were employed upon them, and as soon as a single room could be inhabited Pestalozzi received forty children into it. This was in January, 1799, in the middle of a remarkably cold winter.
§ 46. Thus under circumstances perhaps less unfavourable than they seemed began the five months’ trial of pure Pestalozzianism. The physical difficulties were immense. At first Pestalozzi and all the children were shut up day and night in a single room. He had throughout no helper of any kind but one female servant, and he had to do everything for the children, even what was most menial and disgusting. As soon as possible the number was increased, and before long was nearly eighty, some of the children having to go out to sleep. But great as were the material difficulties, those arising from the opposition and hatred of the people he came to succour were still worse. To them he seemed no philanthropist, but only a servant of the devil, an agent of the wicked government which had sent its ferocious soldiers and slaughtered the parents of these poor children, a Protestant who came to complete the work by destroying their souls. Pestalozzi, who was making heroic efforts in their behalf, seems to have wondered at the animosity shown him by the people of Stanz; but on looking back we must admit that in the circumstances it was only natural.
§ 47. And yet in spite of enormous difficulties of every kind Pestalozzi triumphed. Within the five months he[317] spent with them he attached to him the hearts of the children, and produced in them a marvellous physical, intellectual, and moral change. “If ever there was a miracle,” says Michelet, “it was here. It was the reward of a strong faith, of a wonderful expansion of heart. He believed, he willed, he succeeded.” (Nos Fils 223.)
What was the great act of faith by which Pestalozzi triumphed? According to M. Michelet he stood before these vicious and degraded children and said, “Man is good.” Pestalozzi does not tell us this himself; and as a benighted believer in Christianity, I venture to differ from the enlightened Michelet. As far as I can judge from Pestalozzi’s own teaching the source of his strength was his belief in the goodness not of Man but of God.
§ 48. But encouraged and rewarded as he was by the result, Pestalozzi could not long have maintained this fearful exertion. He was over fifty years of age, and he must soon have succumbed; indeed he was already spitting blood when in June, 1799, the French soldiers, whose action had brought him to Stanz, drove him away again. Falling back before the Austrians they had need of a hospital in Stanz, and demanded the buildings occupied by Pestalozzi and the children. So almost all the children had to be sent away, and then at last Pestalozzi took thought for his own health and retired to some baths in the mountains. But most of his peculiarities in teaching may be said to date from the experience at Stanz; and I will therefore give this experience in his own words.
§ 49. The following is the account given in his letter to his friend Gessner. (I have in part availed myself of Mr. Russell’s translation of Guimps, pp. 149 ff.)
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“My friend, once more I awake from a dream; once more I see my work destroyed, and my failing strength wasted.
“But, however weak and unfortunate my attempt, a friend of humanity will not grudge a few moments to consider the reasons which convince me that some day a more fortunate posterity will certainly take up the thread of my hopes at the place where it is now broken....
“I once more made known, as well as I could, my old wishes for the education of the people. In particular, I laid my whole scheme before Legrand (then one of the Directors), who not only took a warm interest in it, but agreed with me that the Republic stood in urgent need of a reform of public education. He also agreed with me that much might be done for the regeneration of the people by giving a certain number of the poorest children an education which should be complete, but which, far from lifting them out of their proper sphere, would but attach them the more strongly to it.
“I limited my desires to this one point, Legrand helping me in every possible way. He even thought my views so important that he once said to me: ‘I shall not willingly give up my present post till you have begun your work.’ ...
“It was my intention to try to find near Zurich or in Aargau a place where I should be able to join industry and agriculture to the other means of instruction, and so give my establishment all the development necessary to its complete success. But the Unterwalden disaster (September, 1798) left me no further choice in the matter. The Government felt the urgent need of sending help to this unfortunate district, and begged me for this once to make an attempt to put my plans into execution in a place where almost everything that could have made it a success was wanting.
“I went there gladly. I felt that the innocence of the people would make up for what was wanting, and that their distress would, at any rate, make them grateful.
“My eagerness to realise at last the great dream of my life would have led me to work on the very highest peaks of the Alps, and, so to speak, without fire or water.
“For a house, the Government made over to me the new part of the Ursuline convent at Stanz, but when I arrived it was still uncompleted, and not in any way fitted to receive a large number of children. Before anything else could be done, then, the house itself had to be got ready.[319] The Government gave the necessary orders, and Rengger pushed on the work with much zeal and useful activity. I was never indeed allowed to want for money.
“In spite, however, of the admirable support I received, all this preparation took time, and time was precisely what we could least afford, since it was of the highest importance that a number of children, whom the war had left homeless and destitute, should be received at once.
“I was still without everything but money when the children crowded in; neither kitchen, rooms, nor beds were ready to receive them. At first this was a source of inconceivable confusion. For the first few weeks I was shut up in a very small room; the weather was bad, and the alterations, which made a great dust and filled the corridors with rubbish, rendered the air very unhealthy.
“The want of beds compelled me at first to send some of the poor children home at night; these children generally came back the next day covered with vermin. Most of them on their arrival were very degenerated specimens of humanity. Many of them had a sort of chronic skin-disease, which almost prevented their walking, or sores on their heads, or rags full of vermin; many were almost skeletons, with haggard, careworn faces, and shrinking looks; some brazen, accustomed to begging, hypocrisy, and all sorts of deceit; others broken by misfortune, patient, suspicious, timid, and entirely devoid of affection. There were also some spoilt children amongst them who had known the sweets of comfort, and were therefore full of pretensions. These kept to themselves, affected to despise the little beggars their comrades, and to suffer from this equality, and seemed to find it impossible to adapt themselves to the ways of the house, which differed too much from their old habits. But what was common to them all was a persistent idleness, resulting from their want of physical and mental activity. Out of every ten children there was hardly one who knew his A B C; as for any other knowledge, it was, of course, out of the question.
“The entire absence of school learning was what troubled me least, for I trusted in the natural powers that God bestows on even the poorest and most neglected children. I had observed for a long time that behind their coarseness, shyness, and apparent incapacity, are hidden the finest faculties, the most precious powers; and now, even amongst[320] these poor creatures by whom I was surrounded at Stanz, marked natural abilities soon began to show themselves. I knew how useful the common needs of life are in teaching men the relations of things, in bringing out their natural intelligence, in forming their judgment, and in arousing faculties which, buried, as it were, beneath the coarser elements of their nature, cannot become active and useful till they are set free. It was my object then to set free these faculties, and bring them to bear on the pure and simple circumstances of domestic life, for I was convinced this was all that was wanting, and these natural faculties would shew themselves capable of raising the hearts and minds of my pupils to all that I could desire.
“I saw then how my wishes might be carried out; and I was persuaded that my affection would change the state of my children just as quickly as the spring sun would awake to new life the earth that winter had benumbed. I was not deceiving myself: before the spring sun melted the snow of our mountains my children were hardly to be recognised.
“But I must not anticipate. Just as in the evening I often mark the quick growth of the gourd by the side of the house, so I want you to mark the growth of my plant; and, my friend, I will not hide from you the worm which sometimes fastens on the leaves, sometimes even on the heart.
“I opened the establishment with no other helper but a woman-servant. I had not only to teach the children, but to look after their physical needs. I preferred being alone, and, unfortunately, it was the only way to reach my end. No one in the world would have cared to enter into my views for the education of children, and at that time I knew scarcely any one even capable of it.
“In proportion as the men whom I might have called to my aid were highly educated just so far they failed to understand me, and were incapable of confining themselves even in theory to the simple starting-points which I sought to come back to. All their views about the organisation and requirements of the enterprise differed entirely from mine. What they specially objected to was the notion that the enterprise might be carried out without the aid of any artificial means, and simply by the influence of nature in the environment of the children, and by the activity aroused in them by the needs of their daily life.
“And yet it was precisely upon this idea that I based all my hope of success; it was, as it were, a basis for innumerable other points of view.
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“Experienced teachers, then, could not help me; still less boorish, ignorant men. I had nothing to put into the hands of assistants to guide them, nor any results or apparatus by which I could make my ideas clearer to them. Thus, whether I would or no, I had first to make my experiment alone, and collect facts to illustrate the essential features of my system before I could venture to look for outside help. Indeed, in my then position, nobody could help me. I knew that I must help myself and shaped my plans accordingly.
“I wanted to prove by my experiment that if public education is to have any real value for humanity, it must imitate the means which make the merit of domestic education; for it is my opinion that if school teaching does not take into consideration the circumstances of family life, and everything else that bears on a man’s general education, it can only lead to an artificial and methodical dwarfing of humanity.
“In any good education, the mother must be able to judge daily, nay hourly, from the child’s eyes, lips, and face, of the slightest change in his soul. The power of the educator, too, must be that of a father, quickened by the general circumstances of domestic life.
“Such was the foundation upon which I built. I determined that there should not be a minute in the day when my children should not be aware from my face and my lips that my heart was theirs, that their happiness was my happiness, and their pleasures my pleasures.
“Man readily accepts what is good, and the child readily listens to it; but it is not for you that he wants it, master and educator, but for himself. The good to which you would lead him must not depend on your capricious humour or passion; it must be a good which is good in itself and by the nature of things, and which the child can recognize as good. He must feel the necessity of your will in things which concern his comfort before he can be expected to obey it.
“Whatever he does gladly, whatever gains him credit, whatever tends to accomplish his great hopes, whatever awakens his powers and enables him truly to say I can, all this he wills.
“But this will is not aroused by words; it is aroused only by a kind of complete culture which gives feelings and powers. Words do not give the thing itself, but only an expression, a clear picture, of the thing which we already have in our minds.
“Before all things I was bound to gain the confidence and the love of the children. I was sure that if I succeeded in this all the rest[322] would come of itself. Friend, only think how I was placed, and how great were the prejudices of the people and of the children themselves, and you will comprehend what difficulties I had to overcome.”
After narrating what we already know he goes on:
“Think, my friend, of this temper of the people, of my weakness, of my poor appearance, of the ill-will to which I was almost publicly exposed, and then judge how much I had to endure for the sake of carrying on my work.
“And yet, however painful this want of help and support was to me, it was favourable to the success of my undertaking, for it compelled me to be always everything for my children. I was alone with them from morning till night. It was from me that they received all that could do them good, soul and body. All needful help, consolation, and instruction they received direct from me. Their hands were in mine, my eyes were fixed on theirs.
“We wept and smiled together. They forgot the world and Stanz; they only knew that they were with me and I with them. We shared our food and drink. I had about me neither family, friends, nor servants; nothing but them. I was with them in sickness, and in health, and when they slept. I was the last to go to bed, and the first to get up. In the bedroom I prayed with them, and, at their own request, taught them till they fell asleep. Their clothes and bodies were intolerably filthy, but I looked after both myself, and was thus constantly exposed to the risk of contagion.
“This is how it was that these children gradually became so attached to me, some indeed so deeply that they contradicted their parents and friends when they heard evil things said about me. They felt that I was being treated unfairly, and loved me, I think, the more for it. But of what avail is it for the young nestlings to love their mother when the bird of prey that is bent on destroying them is constantly hovering near?
“However, the first results of these principles and of this line of action were not always satisfactory, nor, indeed, could they be so. The children did not always understand my love. Accustomed to idleness, unbounded liberty, and the fortuitous and lawless pleasures of an almost wild life, they had come to the convent in the expectation of being well fed, and of having nothing to do. Some of them soon discovered that they had been there long enough, and wanted to go away again; they talked of the school fever that attacks children when[323] they are kept employed all day long. This dissatisfaction, which showed itself during the first months, resulted principally from the fact that many of them were ill, the consequence either of the sudden change of diet and habits, or of the severity of the weather and the dampness of the building in which we lived. We all coughed a great deal, and several children were seized with a peculiar sort of fever. This fever, which always began with sickness, was very general in the district. Cases of sickness, however, not followed by fever, were not at all rare, and were an almost natural consequence of the change of food. Many people attributed the fever to bad food, but the facts soon showed them to be wrong, for not a single child succumbed.
“On the return of spring it was evident to everybody that the children were all doing well, growing rapidly, and gaining colour. Certain magistrates and ecclesiastics, who saw them some time afterwards, stated that they had improved almost beyond recognition....
“Months passed before I had the satisfaction of having my hand grasped by a single grateful parent. But the children were won over much sooner. They even wept sometimes when their parents met me or left me without a word of salutation. Many of them were perfectly happy, and used to say to their mothers: ‘I am better here than at home.’ At home, indeed, as they readily told me when we talked alone, they had been ill-used and beaten, and had often had neither bread to eat nor bed to lie down upon. And yet these same children would sometimes go off with their mothers the very next morning.
“A good many others, however, soon saw that by staying with me they might both learn something and become something, and these never failed in their zeal and attachment. Before very long their conduct was imitated by others who had not altogether the same feelings.
“Those who ran away were the worst in character and the least capable. But they were not incited to go till they were free of their vermin and their rags. Several were sent to me with no other purpose than that of being taken away again as soon as they were clean and well clothed.
“But after a time their better judgment overcame the defiant hostility with which they arrived. In 1799[156] I had nearly eighty children. Most of them were bright and intelligent, some even remarkably so.
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“For most of them study was something entirely new. As soon as they found that they could learn, their zeal was indefatigable, and in a few weeks children who had never before opened a book, and could hardly repeat a Pater Noster or an Ave, would study the whole day long with the keenest interest. Even after supper, when I used to say to them, ‘Children, will you go to bed, or learn something?’ they would generally answer, especially in the first month or two, ‘Learn something.’ It is true that afterwards, when they had to get up very early, it was not quite the same.
“But this first eagerness did much towards starting the establishment on the right lines, and making the studies the success they ultimately were, a success indeed, which far surpassed my expectations. And yet great beyond expression were my difficulties. I did not as yet find it possible to organise the studies properly.
“Neither my trust nor my zeal had been able to overcome either the intractability of individuals or the want of coherence in the whole experiment. The general order of the establishment, I felt, must be based upon order of a higher character. As this higher order did not yet exist, I had to attempt to create it; for without this foundation I could not hope to organise properly either the teaching or the general management of the place, nor should I have wished to do so. I wanted everything to result not from a preconceived plan, but from my relations with the children. The high principles and educating forces I was seeking, I looked for from the harmonious common life of my children, from their common attention, activity, and needs. It was not, then, from any external organisation that I looked for the regeneration of which they stood so much in need. If I had employed constraint, regulations, and lectures, I should, instead of winning and ennobling my children’s hearts, have repelled them and made them bitter, and thus been farther than ever from my aim. First of all, I had to arouse in them pure, moral, and noble feelings, so that afterwards, in external things, I might be sure of their ready attention, activity, and obedience. I had, in short, to follow the high precept of Jesus Christ, ‘Cleanse first that which is within, that the outside may be clean also; and if ever the truth of this precept was made manifest, it was made manifest then.
“My one aim was to make their new life in common, and their new powers, awaken a feeling of brotherhood amongst the children, and make them affectionate, just, and considerate.
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“I was successful in gaining my aims. Amongst these seventy wild beggar-children there soon existed such peace, friendship, and cordial relations as are rare even between actual brothers and sisters.
“The principle to which I endeavoured to conform all my conduct was as follows: Endeavour, first, to broaden your children’s sympathies, and, by satisfying their daily needs, to bring love and kindness into such unceasing contact with their impressions and their activity, that these sentiments may be engrafted in their hearts; then try to give them such judgment and tact as will enable them to make a wise, sure, and abundant use of these virtues in the circle which surrounds them. In the last place, do not hesitate to touch on the difficult questions of good and evil, and the words connected with them. And you must do this especially in connection with the ordinary events of every day, upon which your whole teaching in these matters must be founded, so that the children may be reminded of their own feelings, and supplied, as it were, with solid facts upon which to base their conception of the beauty and justice of the moral life. Even though you should have to spend whole nights in trying to express in two words what others say in twenty, never regret the loss of sleep.
“I gave my children very few explanations; I taught them neither morality nor religion. But sometimes, when they were perfectly quiet, I used to say to them, ‘Do you not think that you are better and more reasonable when you are like this than when you are making a noise?’ When they clung round my neck and called me their father, I used to say, ‘My children, would it be right to deceive your father? After kissing me like this, would you like to do anything behind my back to vex me?’ When our talk turned on the misery of the country, and they were feeling glad at the thought of their own happier lot, I would say, ‘How good God is to have given man a compassionate heart!’ ... They perfectly understood that all they did was but a preparation for their future activity, and they looked forward to happiness as the certain result of their perseverance. That is why steady application soon became easy to them, its object being in perfect accordance with their wishes and their hopes. Virtue, my friend, is developed by this agreement, just as the young plant thrives when the soil suits its nature, and supplies the needs of its tender shoots.
“I witnessed the growth of an inward strength in my children, which, in its general development, far surpassed my expectations, and[326] in its particular manifestations not only often surprised me, but touched me deeply.
“When the neighbouring town of Altdorf was burnt down, I gathered the children round me, and said, ‘Altdorf has been burnt down; perhaps, at this very moment, there are a hundred children there without home, food, or clothes; will you not ask our good Government to let twenty of them come and live with us?’ I still seem to see the emotion with which they answered, ‘Oh, yes, yes!’ ‘But, my children,’ I said, ‘think well of what you are asking! Even now we have scarcely money enough, and it is not at all certain that if these poor children came to us, the Government would give us any more than they do at present, so that you might have to work harder, and share your clothes with these children, and sometimes perhaps go without food. Do not say, then, that you would like them to come unless you are quite prepared for all these consequences.’ After having spoken to them in this way as seriously as I could, I made them repeat all I had said, to be quite sure that they had thoroughly understood what the consequences of their request would be. But they were not in the least shaken in their decision, and all repeated, ‘Yes, yes, we are quite ready to work harder, eat less, and share our clothes, for we want them to come.’
“Some refugees from the Grisons having given me a few crowns for my poor children, I at once called them and said, ‘These men are obliged to leave their country; they hardly know where they will find a home to-morrow, yet, in spite of their trouble, they have given me this for you. Come and thank them.’ And the emotion of the children brought tears to the eyes of the refugees.
“It was in this way that I strove to awaken the feeling of each virtue before talking about it, for I thought it unwise to talk to children on subjects which would compel them to speak without thoroughly understanding what they were saying.
“I followed up this awakening of the sentiments by exercises intended to teach the children self-control, so that all that was good in them might be applied to the practical questions of every-day life.
“It will easily be understood that, in this respect, it was not possible to organise any system of discipline for the establishment; that could only come slowly, as the general work developed.
“Silence, as an aid to application, is perhaps the great secret of such[327] an institution. I found it very useful to insist on silence when I was teaching, and also to pay particular attention to the attitude of my children. I succeeded so well that the moment I asked for silence, I could teach in quite a low voice. The children repeated my words all together; and as there was no other sound, I was able to detect the slightest mistakes of pronunciation. It is true that this was not always so. Sometimes, whilst they repeated sentences after me, I would ask them as if in fun to keep their eyes fixed on their middle fingers. It is hardly credible how useful simple things of this sort sometimes are as means to the very highest ends.
“One young girl, for instance, who had been little better than a savage, by keeping her head and body upright, and not looking about, made more progress in her moral education than any one would have believed possible.
“These experiences have shown me that the mere habit of carrying oneself well does much more for the education of the moral sentiments than any amount of teaching and lectures in which this simple fact is ignored.
“Thanks to the application of these principles, my children soon became more open, more contented and more susceptible to every good and noble influence than any one could possibly have foreseen when they first came to me, so utterly devoid were they of ideas, good feelings, and moral principles. As a matter of fact, this lack of previous instruction was not a serious obstacle to me; indeed, it hardly troubled me at all. I am inclined even to say that, in the simple method I was following, it was often an advantage, for I had incomparably less trouble to develop those children whose minds were still blank, than those who had already acquired inaccurate ideas. The former, too, were much more open than the latter to the influence of all pure and simple sentiments.
“But when the children were obdurate and churlish, then I was severe, and made use of corporal punishment.
“My dear friend, the pedagogical principle which says that we must win the hearts and minds of our children by words alone without having recourse to corporal punishment, is certainly good, and applicable under favourable conditions and circumstances; but with children of such widely different ages as mine, children for the most part beggars, and all full of deeply-rooted faults, a certain amount of corporal punishment[328] was inevitable, especially as I was anxious to arrive surely, speedily, and by the simplest means, at gaining an influence over them all, for the sake of putting them all in the right road. I was compelled to punish them, but it would be a mistake to suppose that I thereby, in any way, lost the confidence of my pupils.
“It is not the rare and isolated actions that form the opinions and feelings of children, but the impressions of every day and every hour. From such impressions they judge whether we are kindly disposed towards them or not, and this settles their general attitude towards us. Their judgment of isolated actions depends upon this general attitude.
“This is how it is that punishments inflicted by parents rarely make a bad impression. But it is quite different with schoolmasters and teachers who are not with their children night and day, and have none of those relations with them which result from life in common.
“My punishments never produced obstinacy; the children I had beaten were quite satisfied if a moment afterwards I gave them my hand and kissed them, and I could read in their eyes that the final effect of my blows was really joy. The following is a striking instance of the effect this sort of punishment sometimes had. One day one of the children I liked best, taking advantage of my affection, unjustly threatened one of his companions. I was very indignant, and my hand did not spare him. He seemed at first almost broken-hearted, and cried bitterly for at least a quarter of an hour. When I had gone out, however, he got up, and going to the boy he had ill-treated, begged his pardon, and thanked him for having spoken about his bad conduct. My friend, this was no comedy; the child had never seen anything like it before.
“It was impossible that this sort of treatment should produce a bad impression on my children, because all day long I was giving them proofs of my affection and devotion. They could not misread my heart, and so they did not misjudge my actions. It was not the same with the parents, friends, strangers, and teachers who visited us; but that was natural. But I cared nothing for the opinion of the whole world, provided my children understood me.
“I always did my best, therefore, to make them clearly understand the motives of my actions in all matters likely to excite their attention and interest. This, my friend, brings me to the consideration of the moral means to be employed in a truly domestic education.
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“Elementary moral education, considered as a whole, includes three distinct parts: the children’s moral sense must first be aroused by their feelings being made active and pure; then they must be exercised in self-control, so that they may give themselves to that which is right and good; finally they must be brought to form for themselves, by reflection and comparison, a just notion of the moral rights and duties which are theirs by reason of their position and surroundings.
“So far, I have pointed out some of the means I employed to reach the first two of these ends. They were just as simple for the third; for I still made use of the impressions and experiences of their daily life to give my children a true and exact idea of right and duty. When, for instance, they made a noise, I appealed to their own judgment, and asked them if it was possible to learn under such conditions. I shall never forget how strong and true I generally found their sense of justice and reason, and how this sense increased and, as it were, established their good will.
“I appealed to them in all matters that concerned the establishment. It was generally in the quiet evening hours that I appealed to their free judgment. When, for instance, it was reported in the village that they had not enough to eat, I said to them, ‘Tell me, my children, if you are not better fed than you were at home? Think, and tell me yourselves, whether it would be well to keep you here in such a way as would make it impossible for you afterwards, in spite of all your application and hard work, to procure what you had become accustomed to. Do you lack anything that is really necessary? Do you think that I could reasonably and justly do more for you? Would you have me spend all the money that is entrusted to me on thirty or forty children instead of on eighty as at present? Would that be just?’
“In the same way, when I heard that it was reported that I punished them too severely, I said to them: ‘You know how I love you, my children; but tell me would you like me to stop punishing you? Do you think that in any other way I can free you from your deeply-rooted bad habits, or make you always mind what I say?’ You were there, my friend, and saw with your own eyes the sincere emotion with which they answered, ‘We don’t complain about your hitting us. We wish we never deserved it. But we want to be punished when we do wrong.’
“Many things that make no difference in a small household could not be tolerated where the numbers were so great. I tried to make[330] my children feel this, always leaving them to decide what could or could not be allowed. It is true that in my intercourse with them I never spoke of liberty or equality; but, at the same time, I encouraged them as far as possible to be free and unconstrained in my presence, with the result that every day I marked more and more that clear open look in their eyes which, in my experience, is the sign of a really liberal education. I could not bear the thought of betraying the trust in me which I saw shining in their eyes; I strove constantly to strengthen it and at the same time their free individuality, that nothing might happen to trouble those angel-eyes, the sight of which caused me the most intense delight. But I could not endure frowns and anxious looks; I myself smoothed away the frowns; then the children smiled, and even among themselves they took care not to shew frowning faces.
“By reason of their great number, I had occasion nearly every day to point out the difference between good and evil, justice and injustice. Good and evil are equally contagious amongst so many children, so that, according as the good or bad sentiments spread, the establishment was likely to become either much better or much worse than if it had only contained a smaller number. About this, too, I talked to them frankly. I shall never forget the impression that my words produced when, in speaking of a certain disturbance that had taken place among them, I said, ‘My children, it is the same with us as with every other household; when the children are numerous, and each gives way to his bad habits, the disorder becomes such that the weakest mother is driven to take sensible measures in bringing up her children, and make them submit to what is just and right. And that is what I must do now. If you do not willingly assist in the maintenance of order, our establishment cannot go on, you will fall back into your former condition, and your misery—now that you have been accustomed to a good home, clean clothes, and regular food—will be greater than ever. In this world, my children, necessity and conviction alone can teach a man to behave; when both fail him, he is hateful. Think for a moment what you would become if you were safe from want and cared nothing for right, justice, or goodness. At home there was always some one who looked after you, and poverty itself forced you to many a right action; but with convictions and reason to guide you, you will rise far higher than by following necessity alone.’
“I often spoke to them in this way without troubling in the least[331] whether they each understood every word, feeling quite sure that they all caught the general sense of what I said....
“Here are a few more thoughts which produced a great impression on my children: ‘Do you know anything greater or nobler than to give counsel to the poor, and comfort to the unfortunate? But if you remain ignorant and incapable, you will be obliged, in spite of your good heart, to let things take their course; whereas, if you acquire knowledge and power, you will be able to give good advice, and save many a man from misery.’
“I have generally found that great, noble, and high thoughts are indispensable for developing wisdom and firmness of character.
“Such an instruction must be complete in the sense that it must take account of all our aptitudes and all our circumstances; it must be conducted, too, in a truly psychological spirit, that is to say, simply, lovingly, energetically, and calmly. Then, by its very nature, it produces an enlightened and delicate feeling for everything true and good, and brings to light a number of accessory and dependent truths, which are forthwith accepted and assimilated by the human soul, even in the case of those who could not express these truths in words.
“I believe that the first development of thought in the child is very much disturbed by a wordy system of teaching, which is not adapted either to his faculties or the circumstances of his life. According to my experience, success depends upon whether what is taught to children commends itself to them as true through being closely connected with their own personal observation and experience....
“I knew no other order, method, or art, but that which resulted naturally from my children’s conviction of my love for them, nor did I care to know any other.
“Thus I subordinated the instruction of my children to a higher aim, which was to arouse and strengthen their best sentiments by the relations of every-day life as they existed between themselves and me....
“As a general rule I attached little importance to the study of words, even when explanations of the ideas they represented were given.
“I tried to connect study with manual labour, the school with the workshop, and make one thing of them. But I was the less able to do this as staff, material, and tools were all wanting. A short time only before the close of the establishment, a few children had begun to spin;[332] and I saw clearly that, before any fusion could be effected, the two parts must be firmly established separately—study, that is, on the one hand, and labour on the other.
“But in the work of the children I was already inclined to care less for the immediate gain than for the physical training which, by developing their strength and skill, was bound to supply them later with a means of livelihood. In the same way I considered that what is generally called the instruction of children should be merely an exercise of the faculties, and I felt it important to exercise the attention, observation, and memory first, so as to strengthen these faculties before calling into play the art of judging and reasoning; this, in my opinion, was the best way to avoid turning out that sort of superficial and presumptuous talker, whose false judgments are often more fatal to the happiness and progress of humanity than the ignorance of simple people of good sense.
“Guided by these principles, I sought less at first to teach my children to spell, read, and write than to make use of these exercises for the purpose of giving their minds as full and as varied a development as possible....
“In natural history they were very quick in corroborating what I taught them by their own personal observations on plants and animals. I am quite sure that, by continuing in this way, I should soon have been able not only to give them such a general acquaintance with the subject as would have been useful in any vocation, but also to put them in a position to carry on their education themselves by means of their daily observations and experiences; and I should have been able to do all this without going outside the very restricted sphere to which they were confined by the actual circumstances of their lives. I hold it to be extremely important that men should be encouraged to learn by themselves and allowed to develop freely. It is in this way alone that the diversity of indiv............