SECTIO Ν Ι. TO THE DEVONSHIRE ADVENTURER. SIR, THE HE business of education has been carried on among all ranks and orders for several hundred years. It may be hard therefore to believe that in so common a thing, there can be either difficulty or danger, which the force of human genius has not long since conquered or removed. But it so happens, that with all the advantages of the longest possible experience, men have attained to no certain light on this matter. Accordingly no subject has ever been more popular. Every body agrees in the importance of education, but no one has yet succeeded in giving it a determinate form. Every body desires that reason should establish it, yet all concur in giving it up to the dominion of fancy. The world have been already alternately astonished, amused and deceived by the wondrous hypotheses, ingenious inventions, and cunning sophisms which the heads of authors have engendered and their hands indited on this uncertain yet universal topic. These circumstances deter me from taking any general view of it. One thing I deem to meet with general belief; that the most likely way to reform manners which are offensive in men, is to forbear implanting them in children; or in other words, to begin with the rising generation. This truth is demonstrable from the nature of that dominion which time and custom possess over human 4 affairs. affairs. As these have established the vices and prejudices of the present race of men so firmly as to defy attack, there is no reason why their influence should be less in confirming the virtues and good habits of the generation which succeeds. There virtues and good habits are to be supplied by education, but not that kind of education which has hitherto so surely supplied the contrary. It must be rendered less complicate and more moral, it must be retrieved from the factitious influence of fashion, it must become natural and rational, ere we can hope to see such mighty good spring from it. Then indeed will education be highly capable. Authors have told us much of the omnipotence of love, but they might have spoken with much more truth of the omnipotence of education. For education can found or destroy, bless or curse, just as it is administered. It is the guide to all that is great and good, or to all that is evil and base, to happiness or misery, to Heaven or perdition. Education should begin almost from the cradle, for to defer its commencement is to render its progress more difficult. They who do not think any instruction necessary, before the mind of the pupil is able to acquire knowledge, confine education to science, and disregard its morality: not considering how much takes place in the first twenty four months of an infants life, which may give an irrecoverable tincture to its future temper and capacities. It is proper therefore to consult on the mode of treatment best adapted to the infantile years. Nurses are the first persons, into whose hands a new born infant is committed. The most proper nurses are undoubtedly the mothers; nay, it is clear that nature never intended any others to be sought. The pain and danger attendant on parturition beget on the part of the sufferer a strong involuntary attachment to the being sh has has laboured to bring forth. She feels a tender wish for its welfare, and a desire to do it all possible good, and to avert from it every evil. The means as well as the desire are provided by the bounteous hand of nature. The same nutriment, which supported the child in the womb, presents itself in different channels and in a different state for its use, after it is born. An exuberant supply of soft and nourishing food is ready to be imbibed into the tender stomach of the infant, a food peculiarly adapted to its yet unpractised organs, and the retention of which would be injurious to the mother. Yet fashion has prevented these manifest operations of nature, and given rise to a custom, which cuts asunder all the compassionate ties which connect the mother to her offspring, and whose long establishment heightens the colouring of human depravity. The custom I allude to, is that which sanctions the mother to commit the being, she has conceived and nurtured in her own body, to the hireling hands of a nurse. The bare supposition, that a mother can be so lost to the immediate dictates of nature, as to discard her infant from her bosom and her protection, is sufficiently degrading, but to authorize such an unnatural purpose by the formal consent of society, is most extraordinary and most infamous. Such a habit could only accompany the most evil principles, and is a sure sign of the decline both of virtue and wisdom. In the primitive times of every nation, it has been unknown. Matrons then followed the pure sensations of nature, and gave themselves up gladly to the duties she inculcated, and to the maternal pleasures she bestowed as their reward. But the Mother of the present day, absorbed in the vortex of dissipation, and bound to the fulfillment of a thousand factitious duties, disburdens herself of an infant, as she would of the plague, curses the pain and confinement that nature has has entailed upon her sex, and employs the unavoidable season of deprivation in regretting the loss of pleasures which she cannot partake, and in forming new and more daring schemes of extravagance and riot. So deaf can fashion make us to the call of nature, so blind to the prospect of futurity! 3 Every violence done to a determinate ordinance of nature must bring forth evil, This custom, of all others, is perhaps most pregnant with mischief. The operation of evil is not delayed it, commences immediately, and the divided mother and child both feel its effects. The health of the mother receives a certain injury from the unnatural suppression of her juices, and is sometimes wholly ruined by the means taken to ensure this suppression. Her hapless infant, abandoned to the coldness of mercenary attention, moans and languishes under numerous evils, contracts perhaps many bodily maladies, and infallibly suffers in its mental welfare, He may die through neglect, or he may be changed by design, for such things have happened. At any rate he is alienated from his parents; he is kept like one unknown and disregarded, a stranger to his family blood, and unworthy to be admitted among his nearest relatives. In consequence, the seeds of gratitude and affection are never sown in his infant mind; and he can incur no disgrace, if the clings to his nurse, and flees from the approach of his long estranged parents. It could scarcely be considered but as a just retaliation, should he hereafter desert the parents who abandoned him, and return to their late repentance the stings of coldness and reproach. These are a few of the evils on which the moralist has often enlarged with pathetic eloquence: and such will surely pursue those parents, who sacrifice their natural duty and their most reasonable gratification to pursue fleeting and unstable enjoyments, I will say nothing |