general a salary of about £12 per annum, a house, and a few other advantages.

"I must also mention two schools at Copenhagen for the children of the nobility and gentry, who are unable to bear the expense of a proper education. One is for boys, and the other for females. That for boys is under the direction of Professor Treschow, chaplain of the garrison church at Copenhagen, a gentleman of considerable erudition, who, considering it as an act of charity, receives no recompense for his trouble. An inspector has £60 per annum. The day-scholars pay only £6 a year, and the boarders £20. They learn history, geography, and arithmetic; are instructed in the articles of their religion; and have masters for the German, French, and English languages."*

The most remarkable instance, however, which the Continent of Europe perhaps presents, of an increasing attention to the education of the lower orders, and that on the most enlightened and liberal principle, occurs in some parts of Germany, and for this improvement, the world is chiefly indebted to the exertions of Frederick the Great of Prussia. An interesting account of the seminaries which he was the means of establishing in Silesia, and which have been copied in some other countries, in consequence of the experience of their beneficial effects, may be found in a work published some years ago by Mr. Quincey Adams, then minister from the United States at the Court of Berlin. A Silesian historian, noticed by Mr. Adams, compares its effects to those produced by the reformation of Luther. It was found, accordingly, that the Roman Catholic clergy combined in opposing it. "Their indolence was averse to the new and troublesome duty imposed on them. Their zeal was alarmed at the danger arising from this dispersion of light to the stability of their Church. They considered alike the spirit of innovation, and the spirit of inquiry, as their natural enemies."†

* [Travels in Poland, Russia, Sweden, and Denmark, Book VIII. chap. iv.; Vol. II. pp. 555, 556, edit. 1784.]

+[Letters on Silesia, 1804. Letter

xli.

P.

369.]

In mentioning in my last lecture, the attention which has been paid to education in some parts of America, I neglected to take notice of a very beautiful idea suggested by the Committee of the first Virginian Assembly which met after the establishment of the New Government. The business entrusted to the Committee was, to revise the code of laws, and The work was

to reduce it into a more convenient form. actually executed by the Committee, but I do not know how far their proposed alterations were adopted. From the last accounts which I have seen, it would appear, that the plan I am now to describe has not as yet been brought to the test of experience. According to this project, every county was to be divided into small districts, of five or six miles square, to be called hundreds; and in each of them, a school was to be established for teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic; the teachers were to be supported by the hundred, and every person in it to be entitled to send his children to school for three years gratis, and as much longer afterwards as he might choose. on paying for it; these schools to be under the superintendence of a visitor who should annually choose a boy of the most promising genius, to whom it should be determined to give farther education, and to send him forward to one of those [higher ?] schools, of which twenty were to be erected in different parts, for teaching, gratis, Latin and the higher branches of arithmetic. Out of the boys thus sent forward in a year, trial was to be made for one or two years, and one boy should be continued six years longer. "By these means," says the Report, "twenty boys of the most promising talents will be raked annually from the rubbish." The ultimate result of this scheme of education, to use the words of Mr. Jefferson, "would be, to furnish to parents, in easy circumstances, convenient schools where their children. might be taught."

I know that many objections will immediately present themselves against such a proposal as this, and that some even of those who admit the reasonableness of extending among the poor, a knowledge of reading, writing, and arithmetic, will be startled at a plan which they may suppose calculated to inspire

VOL. IX.

Y

the labouring orders with views of literary ambition unsuitable to their condition. The truth, however, is, that so far as this is an evil, the plan in question has a tendency to correct it; for, while it affords the means of improvement to such as are designed by nature for intellectual eminence, it discourages that preposterous vanity which crowds the learned professions with men who were obviously intended for other occupations. Similar objections have been frequently urged against those establishments in Europe, which are calculated to lower the price of literary education; and it has even been supposed, that they have the effect of withdrawing all men too much from the laborious professions, to a life of speculation. But surely a disinterested love of science and of literature is not to be numbered among the predominant passions of the present age; and as to the honours and emoluments which attend a literary life, how few individuals are to be found who prefer these to the scramble of political intrigue, or the solid earnings of commercial industry? It is, indeed, wisely ordered by Providence, in every age and state of society, that while a small number of minds are captivated with the delights of study, the great mass of the people are urged by much more irresistible motives, to take a share in the active concerns of human life. The same wisdom which regulates the physical condition of man, watches also over all the other circumstances of his destiny; and as it preserves invariable that balance of the sexes which is most favourable to human happiness, so it mingles, in their due proportions, the elements of those moral and intellectual qualities in the character of different men, on which the order of society depends. To vary these proportions by legislative arrangements, is not surely, in any instance, the business of an enlightened statesman, and least of all in those cases where the establishments in question may have the effect to bring into activity those seeds of genius which are so sparingly sown among the human race, and which, with careful cultivation, might be ripened into a harvest to bless and improve generations yet unborn.

And here, I cannot resist the opportunity which my present

subject affords me, of remarking the effects to be expected from a general diffusion of information on the progress of science, effects which are not proportioned merely to the increased number of cultivated minds thus engaged in the investigation. of truth, but to this circumstance, combined with all the advantages which are gained by the division and distribution of intellectual labour. Mr. Smith, in his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,* has explained, with great ingenuity, and with peculiar felicity of illustration, in what manner the division of labour in the mechanical arts increases the productive powers of human industry. The advantages, however, which are gained in the pursuits of science in consequence of the operation of similar circumstances, are incomparably greater. Different individuals are led, partly by original constitution, and partly by early education, to betake themselves to different studies, and hence arise those infinitely diversified capacities of mind, which we naturally call diversities of genius. These diversities of genius, in consequence of the mutual connexion among the various branches of literary knowledge, are all subservient to one another; and when the productions to which they give birth are converted into a common stock, as they now are by means of the press, all the varieties of intellect, natural and acquired, among men, aided by all the assistance they derive from the lights which they mutually impart, may be said to be combined together into one great machine, for advancing the means of human knowledge and happiness.

The circumstance, however, which constitutes the chief distinction between the division of labour in the mechanical arts and in the intellectual employments, is this:—that in the former, the number of individuals who can be made to contribute their labours to a common stock, is comparatively limited; whereas, in the latter, a combination is formed, by means of the press, among all the powers which genius and industry can display in the most remote ages and nations. How many trains of sublime and beautiful imagery have been kindled in

* [Book I. chap. i.; Vol. I. p. 6, seq., tenth edition.]

the minds of our modern poets, by sparks struck out by Homer or by Hesiod! And not to speak of the mighty effects produced in the Christian world by the truths of Revelation, what an accession to the happiness of many individuals now existing on the globe, may be traced to the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, to the Maxims of Confucius, or to the familiar sayings which fell from the lips of Socrates on the streets of Athens.

In those scientific pursuits, however, which rest on observation and experiment, and where the reasoning powers are alone concerned, a mutual communication of lights is of still greater importance than in works of imagination, by reason that here, the force of a single mind, how great soever its superiority over that of other men, can accomplish but little in comparison with the united exertions of a number of different individuals. Nor, perhaps, have the most liberal contributors to the present stock of scientific knowledge been themselves aware, when following the impulse of a merely speculative curiosity, what a rich harvest they were sowing for a distant posterity. The truth is, that the value of every new fact and theory, however insulated it may be at present, may eventually be incalculably great, inasmuch as he who has the merit of suggesting either the one or the other, puts in motion the whole of the machine, to whose possible effects no human sagacity can fix a limit. How little was it supposed by Apollonius or Archimedes, when pursuing the objects of mathematical study, that they were preparing a torch which was destined, after an interval of two thousand years, to shed the light of day on the most obscure recesses of nature.

Nor is it only in the sublimer exertions of imagination or invention, that we may trace the effects of this division and distribution of labour on human improvement. What Mr. Smith has so well remarked* concerning the astonishing multiplicity of arts, which contribute their share in furnishing a peasant with his coarse woollen coat, will be found applicable, in a far greater degree, to the means which contribute to the improvement of his comparatively uncultivated understanding. * [Ibid. p. 17.]