I could scarcely exclude the suspicion that he intended the latter as a bitter satire upon all republican government, as Xenophon undoubtedly designed, by his essay on democracy, to ridicule that species of republic. In a letter to the learned and ingenious Mr. Taylor, of Haslewood, I suggested to him the project of writing a novel, in which the hero should be sent upon his travels through Plato's republic, and all his adventures, with his observations on the principles and opinions, the arts and sciences, the manners, customs, and habits of the citizens, should be recorded. Nothing can be conceived more destructive of human happiness; more infallibly contrived to transform men and women into brutes, Yahoos, or demons, than a community of wives and property. Yet in what are the writings of Rousseau and Helvetius, wiser than those of Plato? The man who first fenced a tobacco yard, and said this is mine, ought instantly to have been put to death, says Rousseau. The man who first pronounced the barbarous word Dieu, ought to have been immediately destroyed, says Diderot. In short, philosophers, ancient and modern, appear to me as mad as Hindoos, Mahometans, and Christians. No doubt they would all think me mad, and, for anything I know, this globe may be the bedlam, Le Bicêtre of the universe. After all, as long as property exists, it will accumulate in individuals and families. As long as marriage exists, knowledge, property, and influence will accumulate in families. Your and our equal partition of intestate estates, instead of preventing, will, in time, augment the evil, if it is one.
The French revolutionists saw this, and were so far consistent. When they burned pedigrees and genealogical trees, they annihilated, as far as they could, marriages, knowing that marriage, among a thousand other things, was an infallible source of aristocracy. I repeat it, so sure as the idea and existence of property is admitted and established in society, accumulations of it will be made; the snow-ball will grow as it rolls.
Cicero was educated in the Groves of Academus, where the name and memory of Plato were idolized to such a degree, that if he had wholly renounced the prejudices of his education, his reputation would have been lessened, if not injured and ruined. In his two volumes of Discourses on Government, we may presume that he fully examined Plato's laws and republic, as well as Aristotle's writings on government. But these have been carefully destroyed, not improbably with the general consent of philosophers, politicians and priests. The loss is as much to be regretted as that of any production of antiquity.
Nothing seizes the attention of the staring animal so surely as paradox, riddle, mystery, invention, discovery, wonder, temerity. Plato and his disciples, from the fourth-century Christians to Rousseau and Tom Paine, have been fully sensible of this weakness in mankind, and have too successfully grounded upon it their pretensions to fame.
I might, indeed, have mentioned Bolingbroke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Turgot, Helvetius, Diderot, Condorcet, Buffon, and fifty others, all a little cracked. Be to their faults a little blind, to their virtues ever kind.
Education! Oh Education! The greatest grief of my heart, and the greatest affliction of my life! To my mortification I must confess that I have never closely thought, or very deliberately reflected upon the subject which never occurs to me now without producing a deep sigh, a heavy groan, and sometimes tears.
My cruel destiny separated me from my children, almost continually from their birth to their manhood. I was compelled to leave them to the ordinary routine of reading, writing and Latin school, academy and college. John, alone, was much with me, and he but occasionally. If I venture to give you any thoughts at all, they must be very crude. I have turned over Locke, Milton, Condilac, Rousseau, and even Miss Edgeworth, as a bird flies through the air. The Preceptor I have thought a good book.
Grammar, rhetoric, logic, ethics, mathematics, cannot be neglected. Classics, in spite of our friend Rush, I must think indispensable. Natural history, mechanics and experimental philosophy, chemistry, &c., at least their rudiments, cannot be forgotten. Geography, astronomy, and even history and chronology, (although I am myself afflicted with a kind of Pyrrhonism in the two latter,) I presume cannot be omitted. Theology I would leave to Ray, Derham, Nicuentent, and Paley, rather than to Luther, Zinzindorf, Swedenborg, Wesley or Whitefield, or Thomas Aquinas or Wollebius. Metaphysics I would leave in the clouds with the materialists and spiritualists, with Leibnitz, Berkley, Priestley and Edwards, and I might add Hume and Reed, or if permitted to be read, it should be with romances and novels. What shall I say of music, drawing, fencing, dancing and gymnastic exercises? What of languages, oriental and occidental? Of French, Italian, German or Russian? of Sanscrit or Chinese?
The task you have prescribed to me of grouping these sciences or arts under professors, within the views of an enlightened economy, is far beyond my forces. Loose indeed, and indigested, must be all the hints I can note. Might grammar, rhetoric, logic, and ethics, be under one professor? Might mathematics, mechanics, natural philosophy, be under another? Geography and astronomy under a third? Laws and government, history and chronology, under a fourth? Classics might require a fifth.
Condilac's Course of Study has excellent parts. Among many systems of mathematics, English, French and American, there is none preferable to Besout's Course. La Harpe's Course of Literature is very valuable.