1826.] Letters from the United States of North America. 385 
-adical change is to be made, you must begin with educating the teachers. 
Having discovered so much, there is little to fear. By the ‘system ‘of 
nratual instruction; by monitorial aid, as they have it in-use now, and by 
teaching their teachers before they suffer them to teach others, ‘any+ 
thing—every thing may be done, with a people such as the Americans 
are.* They have leisure enough, and knowledge enough already, to 
understand the value of more knowledge to their posterity. i 
Nor should it stop here. Go to the ends of the earth (in Ameria) 
and you have the same spirit before you. ‘That sober, practical, and 
most’ worthy madman, Robert Owen—a creature who has done forty 
thousand times more good than ever yet was done by the same quantity 
of sense without a mixture of headlong enthusiasm—even he has built 
up~a sort of college at New Harmony, in the very heart of the great 
western wilderness. ‘ Upward of a hundred packages of books, &e. 
(says the Journal of Education) have just arrived at New Orleans; the 
most useful and the most splendid that could be procured, on natural 
history, antiquities, architecture, agriculture, &c. &c.;—and a ship- 
load of foreign teachers, I dare say, with an extensive collection of 
paintings and prints.”—The expenses, it would appear, will not now 
exceed 100 dollars (22/. 10s.) a year, for each pupil, including board, 
and the best of education, &c. &c.; and, after matters are properly 
arranged, it will be reduced one-half, says the projector. Very good.— 
Now I happen to know this cool-headed, benevolent, imperturbable 
visionary, and though I have no fear of seeing what he predicted a while 
ago, the streets of London over-grown with grass before ten years are gone 
by, or his communities multiplying themselves throughout all Europe, 
to the overthrow of “ princedoms, dominations, thrones,” yet I have so 
much faith in the probity and practical good sense of the man; with so 
fixed a belief in the superiority of his arrangements for the physical, 
moral, and intellectual education of youth, my déar P., that if I hada 
boy of my own, I would pack him off to-morrow, for education at thé 
New Harmony School. a 
To conclude—more than two hundred years ago the FATHERS AT NEw 
. PiyMmoursH (so called because they were the first English settlers’ of 
_ America) established a perpetual fund for education throughout their 
territory, by appropriating lands, in every township or district, for the’ 
support of schools. Their children have walked in their steps. All the’ 
New England ‘states, most of the middle states, and a few of the 
southern states, with eleven of the last new states, have made a similar’ 
provision’ for schools, academies, colleges and universities. In nicest of 
the original states large sums of money are appropriated by the govern- 
ment for education, and taxes are laid for the purpose-—* Reckoning’ 
all these contributions, federal and local (that is, by the confederate or 
federal government, and by the state or'local governments), it may be 
asserted,” says Mr. Ingersoll, to whose work I am indebted for this 
. knowledge, « that nearly as much as the whole national expenditure of the 
United States is (in that way) set aside for the instruction of the 
people.” ‘ 
nt ] 
_* Isay nothing of Pestalozzi the great, or of Hamilton—the quack; the former of 
whom was a philosopher, whose mode will yet be the mode of men altogether superior 
to those who have derided or mistaken Pestalozzi; and the latter of whom—quack 
though ‘he was—did pursue a mode of teaching, whereby more may be learnt in less 
time, than by any other mode with which men are familiar. 
M.M. New Serice.—Vou. II. No. 10. 
a 
a oe 
