wealth and power of a state are produced, by innumerable little efforts, that individually increase the general amount, which is, at the time, no object of conception, but which, as it rises at last from the efforts of all, attracts the admiration of those who unconsciously contributed to it, and who, in admiring it when it has risen, are scarcely aware that the efforts which raised it were their own. To hope to produce greater virtue and happiness, by the exclusion of every particular duty, is in truth a speculation as wild, as it would be to hope to augment the political resources of an empire, by urging individuals to regard not their own profit in any case, but the profit of their thousand competitors, in the equal market of industry. It is not evil, then, for man upon the whole, that, in wishing the happiness of all mankind, he should wish, in an especial manner, the happiness of those who are connected with him by peculiar ties, - by those ties of additional duty which I have already enumerated. To the first of these I now proceed. Of the ties of relationship, and the duties of which that relationship is the source, we may consider, in the first place, those under which man enters into life, the ties which bind together with reciprocal duties the parent and the child. If we consider merely the powers of the individual, in relation to the evils to which he is exposed, man is born the most helpless of all created things. But if we consider the affection that exists in the bosoms to which he is for the first time pressed; the moral principle which, in those bosoms, would render the neglect of his wants one of the most atrocious of crimes; and the eager tendency to anticipate, with the necessary relief, the slightest expression of these wants, a tendency which is instant of itself, and which requires no moral principle to call it into action, man, we may truly say, is born as powerful as he is to be in years, when his own wisdom and the vigour of his own arm are to be to him what he may count a surer protection. He may afterwards speak with a voice of command to those whose services he has purchased, and who obey him, because, in the barter which they have made of their services, it is their trade to obey; but he cannot, even then, by the most imperious orders which he addresses to the most obsequious slaves, exercise an authority more commanding than that which, in the first hours of his life, when a few indistinct cries and tears were his only language, he exercised irresistibly over hearts, of the very existence of which he was ignorant. This feeling of regard is so strong in every breast, and so simple in its relation to the mere sustenance and protection of the little object of so many cares, that it would be a waste of time to treat of the primary obligation under which the parents lie, to save from perishing that human creature to which they have given existence, and which could not fail to perish, but for the aid which it is in their power to give to it. It is only with respect to the more complicated duties of the relation, in maturer years, that any difficulty can be felt. These duties relate to the education of the child, to the provision which is made for his mere worldly accommodation, and to the expression of that internal love which should accompany all these cares, and without which it would be impossible to feel them as acts of kindness. That such an education is to be given in every case, as is suitable to the pecuniary circumstances of the parents, and to the rank which the child may bo expected afterwards to fill, there is probably no one who would deny, however much individuals may differ as to the meaning of the term education. In the lowest ranks of life, at least in far the greater part even of civilized Europe, it means nothing more than the training of the hands to a certain species of motion, which forms one of the subdivisions of mechanical industry. In the higher ranks, it implies, in like manner, a certain training of the limbs to series of motions, which are however not motions of mere utility, like those of the artisan, but of grace; and, in addition to those bodily movements, a training of the mind to a due command of certain graceful forms of expression, to which, in a few happier cases, is added the knowledge, more or less extensive and accurate, of the most striking truths of science. When all this is performed, education is thought to be complete. To express this completion by the strongest possible word, the individual is said to be accomplished; and if graceful motions of the limbs, and motions of the tongue, in well-turned phrases of courteous elegance, and a knowledge of some of the brilliant expressions of poets, and wits, and orators, of different countries, and of a certain number of the qualities of the masses or atoms which surround him, were sufficient to render man what God intended him to be, the parent who had taken every necessary care for adorning his child with these bodily and mental graces, might truly exult in the consciousness that he had done his part to the generation which was to succeed, by accomplishing at least one individual for the noble duties which he had to perform in it. But, if the duties which man has to perform, whatever ornament they may receive from the corporeal and intellectual graces that may flow around them, imply the operation of principles of action of a very different kind; if it is in the heart that we are to seek the source of the feelings which are our noblest distinction, with which we are what even God may almost approve, and without which we are worthy of the condemnation even of beings frail and guilty as ourselves; and if the heart require to be protected from vice, with far more care than the understanding itself, fallible as it is, to be protected from error, can he indeed lay claim to the praise of having discharged the parental office of education, who has left the heart to its own passions, while he has contented himself with furnishing to those passions the means of being more extensively baneful to the world than, with less accomplished selfishness, they could have been? How many parents do we see, who, after teaching their sons by example every thing which is licentious in manners, and lavishing on them the means of similar licentiousness, are rigid only in one pointin the strictness of that intellectual discipline which may prepare them for the worldly stations to which the parental ambition has been unceasingly looking for them, before the filial ambition was rendered sufficiently intent of itself!-how many, who allow to the vices of the day full liberty, if the lesson of the day be duly meditated, and who are content that those whose education they direct should be knaves and sensualists, if only they be fitted by intellectual culture to be the leaders of other knaves, and the acquirers of wealth that may render their sensuality more delicately luxurious! To such persons, the mind of the little creature whom they are training to worldly stations for worldly purposes, is an object of interest only as that without which it would be impossible to arrive at the dignities expected. It is a necessary instrument for becoming rich and powerful; and if he could become powerful, and rich, and envied, without a soul,-exhibit the same spectacle of magnificent luxury, and be capable of adding to the means of present pomp, what might furnish out a luxury still more magnificent, they would scarcely feel that he was a being less noble than now. In what they term education, they have never once thought that the virtues were to be included as objects; and they would truly feel something very like astonishment if they were told that the first and most essential part of the process of educating the moral being whom Heaven had consigned to their charge, was yet to be begun, in the abandonment of their own vices, and the purification of their own heart by better feelings than those which had corrupted it; without which primary self-amendment, the very authority that is implied in the noble office which they were to exercise, might be a source not of good but of evil to him who was unfortunately born to be its subject. Corrumpunt vitiorum exempla domestica, magnis Sed reliquos fugienda patrum vestigia ducunt, 1 Juvenal, Sat. xiv. v. 32-49. |