66 DEXTER FUND EDUCATIONAL Great Educators. This department will present during the year studies of the lives and works of five great educators. Pestalozzi being the center of the educational reform endeavors in the past three hundred years, a specially full treatment is here given of him. Below is published the second and last installment of Mayo's famous Memoir of Pestalozzi, carefully revised and annotated. The November number will have an article on Comenius. The Story of Pestalozzi. II. By the REV. CHARLES MAYO, LL.D. After some years spent in an obscure retirement, and devoted to the composition of various works, 13 Pestalozzi was again called into active life. The tempest of the revolutionary war, so afflictive to Switzerland, burst with peculiar violence on the canton of Unterwalden. Stanz 13. The works of Pestalozzi were various, and all were on his darling object-the improvement of the people by means of education. However disappointed he was in the views taken of "Leonard and Gertrude," he would not let the matter end there. He published in the following year his second Book for the people, under the title of "Christopher and Alice." In this work he makes a peasant family read together "Leonard and Gertrude," and say things about the story and the persons introduced into that work, which he thought might not occur to every one. The next work of Pestalozzi was of a political character. Many parts of Switzerland were groaning under vexatious tyranny; and every attempt on the part of the oppressed to ease their yoke was resisted with the greater obstinacy and violence the more urgently relief was wanted. Every passion of the human breast was presenting itself in its most hideous aspect; and Pestalozzi, who was gifted with penetration into the hidden recesses of the heart, collected the caricatures of human nature, which the time presented to him, in a volume of Fables, published under the enigmatic title of " Figures to my Spelling Book." But this, combined with his well-known political opinions, gained him no friends, while it frustrated his hopes of obtaining assistance from the Swiss government in carrying on his establishment at Neuhof. Truly an educator, like a minister of religion, should not be a prominent and one-sided politician; for education, like Christianity, altho the friend and advocate of freedom, is rather personal than political. The breaking up of the establishment at Neuhof was a fortunate thing for Pestalozzi and for the world. He was no longer was consigned to the flames, and the wretched inhabitants, driven into the mountains suffered the extremes of distress and want. In the year 1798 Pestalozzi was invited by the government to establish a school there,14 that the children might be rescued from the brutalizing influence of neglect and abject misery. He hesitated not to accept the proposition. Such was his ardor to pursue the execution of a plan which had long been the subject of his thoughts, that neither the most discourag to fritter away his strength in efforts to which he was not equal. His severe mental and physical labor was not to be in vain; but was to bear precious fruits. As the first of these fruits, there appeared in 1780 a paper of his, brief, but full of meaning, in Iselin's Ephemerides, under the title, "The Evening Hour of a Hermit." It contains a series of concise aphorisms. They are somewhat metaphysical, and require to be read with attention. To the thoughtful reader, however, they will be welcome, and they throw light upon Pestalozzi's religious opinions, which have been much disputed. 14. The circumstances that led to this invitation are worthy of record. The hope that the political reform of Switzerland would of itself produce national improvement was now gone by, and those who had the welfare of the people at heart began to look out for some positive influence by which the awakened tendency for new things might be directed. Switzerland like France was under the government of a directory, the most influential member of which was Legrand, a pure-minded and noble patriot. He was a friend of Pestalozzi, and had arrived at a decided conviction that national regeneration, founded upon a better education of all, and especially of the lower classes, was the only means of turning the late changes in the social system to some permanently good account. With Pestalozzi he agreed that to educate men whose happiness should not depend on their fortunes, nor their virtue on their circumstances-freemen in the true sense of the word-was the way to save the cause of liberty from the shipwreck it had suffered in the revolution. Tho tired of the dictatorship, Legrand would not resign until he had afforded Pestalozzi an opportunity of realizing his views. It was on the occasion of the directory distributing favors to their friends, and asking Pestalozzi what he would have, that he uttered the noble sentiment which had been formed many years before-"I will be a schoolmaster." In order to carry out this resolution he laid his plans before the directory. These obtained a most favorable reception from the secretaries of state for the home department. The directory promised to supply him with pecuniary means, |