parents, arising from a view of the numerous conflicting systems of education, by teaching that the process, by which a 'human being is formed to be what he is,' has more simplicity in it than is generally imagined; that it is going on every day; that it may be aided by artificial provisions, but that time, nature, and situation, with the numerous checks and excitements they offer, are principally concerned in carrying it forward. But the train of her thoughts will be best understood from her own language. You engage for your child masters and tutors at large salaries; and you do well, for they are competent to instruct him: they will give him the means, at least, of acquiring science and ccomplishments; but in the business of education, properly so called, they can do little for you. Do you ask, then, what will educate your son? Your example will educate him; your conversation with your friends; the business he sees you transact; the likings and dislikings you express; these will educate him; -the society you live in will educate him; your domestics will educate him; above all, your rank and situation in life, your house, your table, your pleasure grounds, your hounds and your stable will educate him. It is not in your power to withdraw him from the continual influence of these things, except you were to withdraw yourself from them also. You speak of beginning the education of your son. The moment he was able to form an idea, his education was already begun; the education of circumstancesinsensible education-which, like insensible perspiration, is of more constant and powerful effect, and of infinitely more consequence to the habit, than that which is direct and apparent. This education goes on at every instant of time; it goes on like time; you can neither stop it nor turn its course. What these have a tendency to make your child, that he will be. Maxims and documents are good precisely till they are tried, and no longer; they will teach him to talk, and nothing more. The circumstances in which your son is placed will be even more prevalent than your example; and you have no right to expect him to become what you yourself are, but by the same means. You, that have toiled during youth, to set your son upon higher ground, and to enable him to begin where you left off, do not expect that son to be what you were, diligent, modest, active, simple in his tastes, fertile in resources. You have put him under quite a different master. Poverty educated you; wealth will educate him. You cannot suppose the result will be the same. You must not even expect that he will be what you now are; for though relaxed perhaps from the severity of your frugal habits, you still derive advantage from having formed them; and, in your heart, you like plain dinners, and early hours, and old friends, whenever your fortune will permit you to enjoy them. But it will not be so with your son: his tastes will be formed by your present situation, and in no degree by your former one.' 'Do we see a father who is diligent in his profession, domestic in his habits, whose house is the resort of well informed intelligent people-a mother whose time is usefully filled, whose attention to her duties secures esteem, and whose amiable manners attract affection? Do not be solicitous, respectable couple, about the moral education of your offspring! do not be uneasy because you cannot surround them with the apparatus of books and systems; or fancy you must retire from the world to devote yourselves to their improvement. In your world they are brought up much better than they could be under any plan of factitious education which you could provide for them: they will imbibe affection from your caresses; taste from your conversation; urbanity from the commerce of your society; and mutual love from your example. Do not regret that you are not rich enough to provide tutors and governors, to watch his steps with sedulous and servile anxiety, and to furnish him with maxims it is morally impossible he should act upon when grown up. Do not you see how seldom this over culture produces its effect, and how many shining and excellent characters start up every day, from the bosom of obscurity, with scarcely any care at all?' The second essay alluded to, is devoted to an examination of the use of prejudices in education, and triumphantly exposes the fallacy of the maxim sometimes avowed, 'Give your child no prejudices; let reason be the only foundation of his opinions; where he cannot reason, let him suspend his belief.' 'But it is in truth,' observes the author, 'the most absurd of all suppositions, that a human being can be educated, or even nourished and brought up, without imbibing numberless prejudices from every thing which passes around him. A child cannot learn the signification of words without receiving ideas along with them; he cannot be impressed with affection to his parents and those about him, without conceiving a predilection for their tastes, opinions, and practices. He forms numberless associations of pain or pleasure, and every association begets a prejudice; he sees objects from a particular spot, and his views of things are contracted or extended according to his position in society: as no two individuals can have the same horizon, so neither can any two have the same associations; and different associations will produce different opinjons, as necessarily as, by the laws of perspective, different dis tances will produce different appearances of visible objects. Let us confess a truth, humiliating perhaps to human pride; a very small part only of the opinions of the coolest philosopher are the result of fair reasoning; the rest are formed by his education, his temperament, by the age in which he lives, by trains of thought directed to a particular track through some accidental association-in short, by prejudice. But why, after all, should we wish to bring up children without prejudices? A child has occasion to act, long before he can reason. Shall we leave him destitute of all the principles that should regulate his conduct, till he can discover them by the strength of his own genius? If it were possible that one whole generation could be brought up without prejudices, the world must return to the infancy of knowledge, and all the beautiful fabric which has been built up by successive generations must be begun again from the very foundation.' There is a third volume, which came out after the others, entitled 'A Legacy for Young Ladies, consisting of Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose and Verse, by the late Mrs Barbauld.' It was, as its title indicates, a posthumous publication. The pieces composing it were found among the author's papers after her death, and are designed partly to 'enforce moral truths,' and convey instruction in history and other branches of the graver studies of youth, and partly to exercise the ingenuity and form the taste by light and pleasing, though correct and highly finished sketches. It is sufficient to say of them here, that, in point of literary merit, they do not detract from the high fame of the author; they convey valuable ideas in an agreeable dress; and are adapted to preserve the purity of the female mind, while they furnish occupation for the understanding, and tend to excite and amuse the fancy. The volume contains, besides the 'Legacy,' the fourteen pieces contributed by Mrs. Barbauld to the Evenings at Home,' her 'Hymns in Prose,' and the Critical Essay originally prefixed to her Selection from the Spectator, Tatler, Guardian. Those parts of her writings, which are designed particularly for children, are too well known, and their merits too generally acknowledged, to call for any remarks. They belong to a most useful class of productions, and one with which we have been hitherto but scantily supplied, partly because their importance has not been sufficiently felt, and partly on account of the peculiar difficulty of executing them. A work designed for infant and juvenile minds, if it be such as it ought to be, must combine several excellences not very easy of attainment. Hitherto good works of this kind have been rare. The task of making books for children, has been performed, with comparatively few exceptions, by a very worthless class of writers, mere hireling scribblers, who have been entirely regardless of the great moral purpose of education; or by well meaning, but weak minds, wholly unfit for an employment requiring a rare union of delicacy and judgment. The want of something better adapted to the objects of infant education is now generally felt, and we are gratified to witness a disposition in writers of superior merit, at the present day, particularly females, to furnish them. Much remains to be done. It will be long before all, which is capable of being performed in this department, will be accomplished. We flatter ourselves, however, that the deficiency will not long remain as great as it now is; but that something will be done to meet the demands of the age. We trust that the time is not far distant, when careful parents will no longer be compelled, for want of something better, to subject the minds of their children to the sinister influence of works, the starveling offspring of ignorance and quackery; when the whole mass of ill adapted- and senseless productions, which now load the shelves of the nursery, and fill the juvenile cabinet, will be thrown aside, and works of a more unexceptionable cast and higher aim will take their places. ART. IX. Message from the President of the United States, transmitting a Report from the Secretary of State, with Copies of the Correspondence with the Government of France, touching the Claims of American Citizens for Spoliations. February, 1825. In a former number of this Journal, we presented our readers with a sketch of the history of the claims of American citizens on the governments of Naples and of Holland, and of the negotiations of the American government, to to procure procure the liquidation and settlement of those claims. A lucid and instructive account of the claims of our citizens on the government of Denmark has been published in a contemporary Journal.* We proceed therefore, in the pursuit of the plan originally formed by us, to the consideration of the claims of our citizens on the government of France. These claims, at present, form the subject of our most important controversy with foreign powers. We call it the most important, both because the amount of property involved in it is greater, than is involved in all our other controversies of a similar kind, and because, on the nature of the settlement we may be enabled to make, with France, depends the nature of the settlement we may make with Naples, Holland, and Denmark. When we shall have successfully asserted our claims on France, we shall of course meet with no powerful obstacles, in obtaining justice from the secondary powers; and till we have enforced our rights against the stronger, it would be beneath the dignity of our national character, to assume a lofty and coercive tone, towards the weaker. It may be necessary to inform some of the younger portion of our readers, precisely in what our claims on France had their origin. It is now twenty years, within a few months, since the famous Berlin decree was promulgated by Napoleon, at the city, whose name it bears. The alleged provocation of this decree was the blockade of the coasts of France and Holland, and of a part of Germany, by the British, and the refusal of the British to permit neutrals to carry on, in a time of war, a trade between the colonies of a belligerent and the mother country, not permitted by the belligerent, in time of peace. These pretensions of the British Government had been strenuously resisted by that of the United States, and formed part of the subjects of the protracted negotiations, first of Mr Monroe, and subsequently of that gentleman and Mr Pinkney. If Napoleon ever entertained the expectation that the government of the United States would be able, through the mild medium of negotiation, to induce the British cabinet to relax from these pretensions, it was not long before he chose to adopt the more violent course of retaliation, and to take the matter into his own hands. Accordingly, on the twentyfirst of November, 1806, the following decree was promulgated at Berlin, with a long preamble which we omit.t * Since published in a separate form by its author, the Hon. Caleb Cushing of Newburyport. + The preamble appears without the decree, in Wait's State Papers, VII. 163. |