my property, and you have no more right to give him his freedom than to rob me of my horse or my dog; we acknowledge we should be very much puzzled to know how to deal with him, otherwise than by ascending to the original source of all human possessions, and denying that man has or can have any such property in his fellow man. If the slave-owner refuse to follow us into that argument, which is properly preliminary to his own assumption, there is an end to the discussion. We must fight the battle on some other ground.

It is a common alternative amongst the slave-owners in America to fling upon Great Britain the original odium of planting slavery in the colonies. They say-" You, not we, originated this slavery. We have inherited it from the mother country." But if they quote the example of Great Britain in establishing slavery, why do they not imitate her example in abolishing it? If Great Britain be responsible, as no doubt she is, for planting slavery in America, she was also the first to show the world the magnanimous example of atonement for a great offence. Why does America imitate her only in the crime? To find slavery in a country is one thing-to perpetuate it another. But it is still worse to keep up a system of strict and unrelenting oppression under a lying declaration of republicanism and the rights of man.

But it is said that slavery is a different institution in America from that which it is found to be elsewhere. We have never been able to discover the difference. We are rather disposed to regard it, under all circumstances, the affectation of freedom, the pretence of gentility, the wholesale hypocrisy and falsehood of its advocates, as being considerably worse in America than in any other place on the face of the habitable globe.

In other places slavery is what it professes to be; and the eyes of mankind are upon it. In America it is not, and the world is deceived. In other places slavery subsists under slave laws, by which it is fenced round and in some way guarded and organised; in America it flourishes rankly in the midst of free institutions. This is appalling. The slave looks on at freedom, which he may not enjoy; he sees the stream ripple past him, but dare not quench his burning thirst!

Publicly repudiating the traffic in slaves, it is yet very well known that the slave trade is carried on with impunity in the heart of the southern states. No slaves are imported from Africa, we believe; but they are bought and sold within the slave states like cattle-under the rose. The great demand for slaves in the teeming lowlands of Louisiana has increased their value, and they have risen in price from 500 to 1000 dollars. How is this demand supplied? By buying up refractory slaves from other states-by purchasing them out of gaol-by making bargains privately with

Which Race shall Predominate; the Black or the White? 129

the insolvent planters of Virginia, and so stocking the rich cotton and sugar grounds out of the surplus labour of the old exhausted soils. Yet all this is done in the face of a public protest against the slave trade; and the very men under whose secret auspices, and for whose benefit it is done, are ready to swear that there is no such thing from one end of America to the other as a trade in slaves. To be sure, men who are capable of trading in slaves may easily be supposed capable of denying it on oath. Every body remembers how indignant Mr. Stevenson, the ambassador, was with Mr. O'Connell for calling him a slave-breeder.

But this question, which we are not allowed to discuss on its abstract merits, is rapidly bringing itself to bear in a shape which will admit of no further argument or delay. If the slave-owner will listen neither to threats nor remonstrances, and can neither be bought up nor persuaded, there is no doubt he must listen at last to the roar of the tempest that is fast accumulating in masses over his head. In other words, if he will not listen to white reason, he must listen to black force. The negro population at this moment amounts to upwards of two millions—the question speedily to be solved in the Southern States is-Which race shall predominate? It is a fearful question to contemplate in this form, but to this form and to this end the planters are forcing it by their selfishness and obstinacy.

In running through these clever and entertaining volumes, we have, as we promised in opening, confined ourselves to the social traits developed here and there by our intelligent traveller; but it is proper to inform the reader that he will find much more matter of the same kind in the work, besides a variety of curious and interesting sketches concerning the people and the resources of the soil. The publication is honourable alike to the judgment and the feelings of the writer; and may be truly ranked amongst the most impartial works that have ever appeared upon the subject of America and her institutions.

The few points upon which we have touched will justify our general impression of American character. We have no desire to exaggerate these peculiarities, and should be heartily glad of a fair excuse to refuse all credit to them. But what other opinions can any reasonable and unprejudiced looker-on entertain, while such proofs of coarseness and rudeness, ferocity and fraud, hypocrisy and meanness, exist in America as are to be found at the White Sulphur Springs, in the steamers on the Ohio and the Mississipi, in the hotels, north, east, south, and west, in the brigandage of Arkansas, and the Lynch law of Missouri-all, too, infusing their various characteristics through the rest of the Union?

VOL. XXXIV. NO. LXVII.

K

ART. VI.-Erziehungs und Unterrichts-lehre. Von Dr. FRIEDRICH EDWARD BENEKE. (Theory of Education.) 2 Bände. 8vo. 2te Auflage. Berlin. 1842.

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'Tis now within a few months of a full century, since on the margin of fair Zurich's waters' was born the great apostle of regenerated pædagogy in modern times-Henry Pestalozzi; and Pestalozzi, if German Switzerland is a part of Germany, was a German. This man, indeed, was not the first German, whose healthy instinct had brought him as an educator directly in contact with living nature, making a breach in the hard wall of separation between the school and the world, which the 'humanists' with their stone and lime classics so long doggedly upheld: the pious Francke in Halle, Salzmann, Rochow, and Bazedow, had preceded him; but Pestalozzi was the first who caused the word 'education,' like a new gospel, to thrill through Europe, and made the little town of Yverdon, with its old castle, as famous in the moral world, as Paris, with its bastiles and butcheries, was in the political. Since his day much has been done for the good cause in many places; but amidst all the echoing of famous educational names at home and abroad, it requires no very nice-discerning judgment of the ear to know that Germany has been, and is, the key-note of the Das paedagogische Deutschland' is the name of one of Diesterweg's books; one might apply this appellation to the whole countrypædagogic Germany,—and, adopting an idea of Wolfgang Menzel, suggest, that instead of an eagle, the arms of the nation (when the nation appears), should be a goose, with a professor standing beside as a supporter, and plucking a quill out of its wing; for truly, as a shrewd observer once said, when we trace matters to the fountain head, Deutschland is governed by its universities much more than by its princes.' We do not here intend to stir the discussion which Herr Huber's recent work* provokes, whether the German gymnasia or the great English schools are the best: but as a country, no man we suppose of common information will be disposed to deny that not Prussia only, but the whole of Germany, is much better supplied with education, both as regards quantity and quality, than Great Britain. This being

song.

* It is a common remark that love goes by contrast as much as by similarity. So Milton's favourites, among the ancient poets, were Euripides and Ovid, men in every respect the reverse of himself; and Professor Huber, in his work on the English Universities,' (English by Newman, 3 vols., 1843,) seems to have set himself the task of championing these institutions through thick and thin, for no other reason than that they are in all respects precisely the reverse of the corresponding institutions in his own country.

The Science of Pædagogy.

131

the case, it is only natural to expect that German literature should exhibit the greatest number of original and standard works on education: that these indefatigable workers in the prolific world of books should have reduced their manifold experience in this matter to some system of generally recognised and universally available principles: that in fact pædagogy in these latter days should constitute with them a new science, as political economy does amongst ourselves. Here, in England, indeed, where it has long been the practice to make any body a schoolmaster, and to make no very particular demands on the energy or eloquence of professors, the claims of the science of teaching a b c or alpha, beta, gamma, to a place in the learned roll, may not be very distinctly understood; but a French statesman, who knows something about the matter, speaks in very different language. The science of education,' says he, is an essential branch of moral and political philosophy, and, like all other departments of science worthy of that name, it has need of being surrounded by the light of experience; and to avoid the danger of being misled by fantastic theories, we must lose no opportunity of obtaining an accurate acquaintance with the various systems of education that are followed by all great civilised nations.** We shall therefore say that the Germans have done well to erect paedagogik' into the dignity of a separate science; and that their voluminosity in this department is at once a sign of their past, and a prophecy of their future progress in the noble art of which this science deduces the principles, and systematises the rules. Let us now see what Herr Beneke has got to say.

The Berlin professor commences, as an English one would do, with a Vorrede' (a preface); from that he goes on to an 'Einleitung' (a leading into an introduction); and this 'Einleitung,' extending over 101 pages, starts in the true German style, with a 'Grundbegriff,' or fundamental notion of what education is. In the preface to the first edition, which was published in 1834, we are informed that while in the first decennium of the present century the indefatigable diligence and the sound judgment of Niemeyer, the nice practical tact and the fine human warmth of Schwartz, the piercing perspicacity of Herbart, and Jean Paul's sparkling combinations, had, in close succession, done much for the science of pædagogy, and since that time many treatises on separate branches had appeared, still, in respect of scientific completeness, no work of any note on education had issued from the German press. This fact concerns us little, but the alleged cause of it is worth our hearing. The science of pædagogy,' says the

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* Cousin on Education in Holland,' by Leonhard Horner. London, 1838.

professor, depends altogether on the science of psychology; it is, in fact, only the application of psychology, as astronomy, projectiles, and other branches of natural philosophy, are the application of mathematics. But in Germany, for the last twenty years, psychology, or the experimental science of mind, has been almost altogether neglected. Our high soaring countrymen allowed themselves to be carried off their legs by the Bacchantic whirl of speculation; and transported now into one system and now into another, by help of which they hoped at last to gain that sublime point from which they might be able' die Welt und Gott in ihrem innersten Wesen zu erfassen und zu construiren' to comprehend and to construct the world and God in their inmost substance; from this position they considered themselves entitled to look down with contempt on experience and such experimental sciences as Psychology and Education. But now,' continues the professor, 'we have boxed the compass of abstract thought, and are content to learn wisdom, like other fools, from experience.' Our high flown Hegelian and Schellingian philosophers condescend to take a lesson from Locke, and Bacon, and the schoolmaster abroad. Now this, if it be true, (as we know from divers signs it is,) is the best news we have heard from Germany for a long time. There are to be no more Hegels in Berlin. The last one died of the cholera in 1832. The Germans are going to be practical. They are about to traverse the intellectual, as they are even now doing the physical, world, with something tangible—with railroads. They are going to write sentences that have a beginning and an end, and to billow out thoughts whose depths may be sounded. This is very good. Let the duty be taken off to-morrow, that we may all buy German books.

*

Having in his introduction based pædagogy upon the fundamental principles of psychology, our author divides the whole subject with great judgment into two parts. The doctrine of 'education' (Erziehungs-lehre), and the doctrine of 'instruction' (Unterrichts-lehre). This is the favourite distinction made by that excellent educationist, Mr. Stow, in Glasgow. To instruct, says the northern philanthropist, 'is comparatively an easy matter; a retail dealing in special commodities, a dexterous juggling with so many balls; but in order to educate, you must not merely instruct, but you must train; to have an educational system at all, it must be a training system.' This is what the inquisitive traveller will find written in large letters in the lobby of the Normal school of

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*It may be mentioned here, that Professor Beneke has published several works on mental philosophy that have attracted considerable attention in Germany. He is a philosopher of the practical and experimental school; and this is a novelty in Deutschland.