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{86} Lord Somerville has some excellent observations, relative to this, in his publication on Agriculture, published in 1800.
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sion, or whose means allowed them to prosecute it as a study. The common education of citizens was different; it consisted in teaching them to perform what was useful, and to esteem what was excellent. It was a principle with them that all men ought to know how happiness is attained, and in what virtue consists; but they neither trusted to precept nor example. They enforced by habit and practice, and in this the Romans followed the plan the Greeks had laid down, and, by that means, they surpassed all other nations.
When those great nations of antiquity abandoned their attention to the useful parts of education, they soon sunk in national character. It so happens, in this case, that the mode of education and the manners of a people are so closely connected that it is difficult, from observation, to know which is the cause, and which the effect. Youth, badly educated, make bad men, and bad men neglect the education of their children; they set them a wrong example: such is the case, when a government does not interfere. How this is to be done with advantage is the question.
Writers on political economy have, in general, considered female education as making no part of the system; but surely, if the wealth and happiness of mankind is the end in view, there can scarcely be a greater object, for none is more nearly connected with it.
Let it be granted that, in the first instance, women are not educated with any view to carry on those labours and manufactures, on which wealth is considered as depending. Let all this be admitted, and that, in an early state of life, they are of no importance in this respect; yet, surely, when they become wives and mothers, when the economy of the family, and the education of the younger children depend chiefly on them, they are then of very great importance to society. Their conduct, in that important situation, must be greatly influenced by their education.
Female education ought then to be considered as one of the things, on the conducting of which well the prosperity of a state does in a great measure depend; it ought, therefore, to be attended to in the same manner as the education of youth of the other sex.
In this case, also, so much depends on place and circumstances, [end of page #99] that we shall follow the same rule as with male education. It shall be treated of as for England, and with the different ranks of society as they are; but there are some general rules not to be forgotten, and which are applicable to all places and all countries.