ON NATIONAL EDUCATION.
The good effects reſulting from attention to private education will ever be very confined, and the parent who really puts his own hand to the plow, will always, in ſome degree, be diſappointed, till education become a grand national concern. A man cannot retire into a deſart with his child, and if he did he could not bring himſelf back to childhood, and become the proper friend and play-fellow of an infant or youth. And when children are confined to the ſociety of men and women, they very ſoon acquire that kind of premature manhood which ſtops the growth of every vigorous power of mind or body. In order to open their faculties they ſhould be excited to think for themſelves; and this can only be done by mixing a number of children together, and making them jointly purſue the ſame objects.
A child very ſoon contracts a benumbing indolence of mind, which he has ſeldom ſufficient vigour afterwards to ſhake off, when he only aſks a queſtion inſtead of ſeeking for information, and then relies implicitly on the anſwer he receives. With his equals in age this could never be the caſe, and the ſubjects of inquiry, though they might be influenced, would not be entirely under the direction of men, who frequently damp, if not deſtroy, abilities, by bringing them forward too haſtily: and too haſtily they will infallibly
