LECTURE ON SWITZERLAND. 127 



but one criminal for every one thousand seven hundred and eijjhty 

 inhabitants; while in Massachusetts, also an agricultural community, 

 there was last year one criminal in one hundred and fifty; and counting 

 only natives of the State, one in seven hundred and fifty. These people 

 have laid broad and deep the foundations of improvement in an 

 admirable system of public instruction, combining, as all are of one mode 

 of faith, religious and intellectual culture. The law declares that the 

 happiness of a people is to be found in good morals and good instruction, 

 and that in a free country every citizen should have put within his reach 

 an education fitting him for his rights and duties. It has not stoi)ped 

 at any point in public education, saying you of a certain class shall have 

 such schools, and you such others, but has divided the schools accord- 

 ing to the age and attainments of the children, and, for those on the 

 threshold of active life, according to the probable future pursuit of the 

 individual. Thus they have elementary schools, middle or industrial 

 schools, a college, a university, and schools for male and female teachers. 

 In a canton where suffrage is universal, the legislature has had the 

 boldness to require that all children from the age of seven to sixteen 

 shall be under instruction, unless capable of passing a certain examina- 

 tion. Parents who neglect or refuse to send their children to school 

 are cited before the authorities and fined ; in case of a repetition of the 

 offense may be imprisoned, and thus deprived for a time of the rights 

 of citizenshij). Whether this provision can be fully executed or not yet 

 remains to be seen ; at present it is a salutary stimulus to the negli- 

 gent. The ground of its adojition is, that universal suffrage requires 

 universal education, and that as the law guarantees to citizens the one, 

 it has a right to demand of them the other. The middle or industrial 

 schools are colleges for business men preparing for the pursuits of com- 

 merce and the mechanic arts, and bearing the same relation to these 

 pursuits that the colleges do to the professions of medicine, law, and 

 theology. The canton has a school for the deaf and dumb, and one for 

 the blind at Yverdon. 



The prison discipline, like our own, puts in action the benevolent idea 

 of reforming the delinquents; but the horror of solitary confinement 

 which appears to exist in the mind of every one allied, even remotely, 

 to the French has marred the system both in Lausanne and at Geneva. 

 Happily the care which is taken in collecting the statistics of the prisouvS 

 must gradually lead to a change. Finding that there are as many cases of 

 recommitment now as under the old arrangement, they will see that 

 with the gregarious system, even with work, there can be no reform. 



This canton was the last scene of the labors of the great reformer in 

 education, Pestalozzi. At Yverdon, on the shores of Lake Neufchatel, 

 in a castle erected for war, but turned to purposes of peace, he termi- 

 nated his active, beneficent, but stormy life. He was the Bacon of 

 education. Adhering rigidly to the laws of induction, he changed the 

 very basis of the sciences. He combined those extraordinary qualities 



