do a piece of work ourselves, than to watch a lazy negro whilst he is performing it.

The heaviest item of expenditure in every large and well ordered family, of even moderate means, has heretofore been the sums expended in the education of children. It will probably, in most families, continue to be the most costly part of living. Yet in many families the cost could be reduced to almost nothing; and in most families, very greatly reduced, without diminution of the amount or quality of education, moral, religious and intellectual, which the children would receive. The father and mother, aided by the elder children, in thousands of families, might educate the young children; and give them as good an education, intellectual, moral and religious, as they would be likely to attain at the best boarding schools. The best educated families of our acquaintance, were instructed almost entirely in this way. It will, at first be unpleasant and irksome to parents to teach their children; but the most laborious and irksome part is the beginning. So soon as children have learned to read and write a little, they may, with very little occasional assistance, go on to educate themselves, provided the parents, positively, persistently, and continuously, insist, that they shall every day prosecute their studies, and endeavor to remember and comprehend them. All education is for the most part self-education; for no instructor can observe, think, comprehend or remember for his pupil. Hence, there was a whole volume of sound philosophy in the saying of a teacher, mentioned by Dr. Samuel Johnson, who said, "it is all of my duty to whip, and that of my scholars to learn." Each parent is the best judge in what manner he shall compel his children to perform their allotted tasks. Conservatives ourselves, we would advise the occasional use of the rod in all white schools and white families, more majorum. If the parents are rigid and exact, they will readily find time at leisure hours, to afford the necessary instruction and explanations of their lessons, to their children. The improvement, growth and development of their minds, will afford a source of continual and unalloyed pleasure, and besides the parents will soon discover, that in teaching their children they are teaching and improving themselves; and this will be another source of gratification to them.

With a small well-selected library, a good newspaper, and one or more Reviews, a family educated as we propose, soon becomes a sort of literary circle. Their studies and their reading become the ordinary topics of conversation, and they are, without labor or effort, continually giving and receiving instruction from each other.

The course of instruction and reading which we should propose, would be a moderate knowledge of arithmetic, (for that is readily and best learned by practice,) and an extensive knowledge of history ancient and modern, and of geography. It is impossible to take interest in, or remember geography without a knowledge of history, and impossible to understand history without a knowledge of geography. The reading of travels and biographies is exceedingly agreeable and

instructive, and promotes greatly our knowledge and appreciation of history and geography.

Instead of giving children novels to read, if we would but throw travels and biographies and good poets in their way, they would soon acquire a taste for a love of reading.

An extensive, accurate knowledge of history, geography, travels, biography and good poetry, all of which are pleasant and easy studies, would fit one to shine in any society, and be sufficient preparation for the study and successful pursuit of either of the learned professions. Now these branches of knowledge, so ornamental and so useful, may be very generally learned at home, just as well as at schools, if parents will only be at the expense of laying out annually a small sum in books, and then compel their children to read. We throw grammar, logic, rhetoric and lexicography wholly out of our curriculum of studies. They are but nomenclatures, teach mere word knowledge, consume in their study a great deal of time that might be better employed, and make men stiff, formal and pedantic, instead of improving their reasoning powers, their language or their style.

We have studied or read more than twenty treatises on grammar and rhetoric, and learned a little formal logic, only to become convinced of the entire truth of the lines of Butler in his Hudibras:

Elsewhere

The term rhetoric there included grammar and logic. he complains that the colleges of his day, but taught "the nominal." Polite usage determines the meaning and usage of words, and polite reading and association make grammar, rhetoric, lexicography and logic a part of insensible education. We never owned an English dictionary, but three months in our life, and scarce ever looked into one, but to meet with an obsolete, defective or erroneous definition. In truth the meaning of words in any particular context is easily appreciated and understood; but torn from a context, and no words, except terms in the exact sciences, are definable. The Lord ever preserve us from the female pedant or the blue-stocking, who talks by the grammar or the dictionary!

We are not singular in our opinion as to the uselessness of these studies, both Macaulay and Carlyle, the greatest of modern English writers, hold the same doctrines that we do, and that Horace, in part, held near two thousand years ago.

Fashion for the last twenty years has had more to do with the education of girls than with the cut of their bonnets, the fitting of their dresses, or the color of their ribbons. Before the war, it was absolutely disgusting, to read the advertisements of a fashionable costly boarding school, where nothing was really taught, and every thing proposed to be taught. Kept long enough at such boarding schools, and little other could be expected, but that the pupils should return home coarse, conceited hoydens, or insufferable blue-stockings. Yet woman's nature is naturally so delicate and sensitive, and her judg

ment so good, that not even a boarding school training can permanently spoil her. In a year or two after returning to her mother's roof, she wears off the ill effects of the public schools, and becomes so delicate, sensitive and refined, as she was when she left home for the pretentious Female College.

The stuffing system, is too much the fashion and order of the day, as well in the education of boys as of girls. The fashion is borrowed from the North, whence young men and women, used to be cheaply, hastily and most imperfectly run through a great many studies, to prepare them as teachers for the Southern Market. The fashion will be too expensive for us to indulge in hereafter. In all neighborhoods where there are enough of children, male and female, to constitute a school of fifteen or more pupils, we should have the old Log Cabin school house for rich and poor-girls and boys alike. They were all the vogue forty years ago, and we know from experience that there are no better schools. A few hundred dollars will employ as teachers graduates of Southern colleges, who will prepare his pupils, if required, to enter college, or even to begin the study of a profession. To such schools, even those parents who were qualified to teach their own children, might find it advisable to send them as they became advanced in their studies. We think that private family tutors are the worst and most expensive of teachers. To dispense with them whenever practicable, will be an admirable measure of retrenchment and economy, and will aid the cause of cheap, of general, and of sound education.

It has ever been a vexed question whether public or private schools are preferable. We think that day schools, for girls up to fourteen years of age (and that is long enough to send them to school) and boys to fifteen, are the best of schools. It is well that children should spend their nights, their sabbaths and their holidays at home, to keep them from mischief and from evil associations. Purity of morals and refinement of manners, are best taught in the family circle. Ushering boys too early into the world makes them shrewd and self-reliant, cunning, whilst it too often hardens their natures and undermines their principles. Human nature is very much the same every where, and a knowledge of human nature may be required just as well in a day school as at college.

Indeed, this knowledge seems intuitous in most men, whether they mix with the great world, or have ever lived in a confined neighborhood. Whilst there are others, reared in cities, sent to college, and habituated to travel and various intercourse with all kinds of society, who continue through life, irreclaimably green. Great knowledge of human nature seldom improves maa's morals, and is rather a suspicious and equivocal intellectual quality. Boys should be sent out in the world sufficiently to learn its ways, fashions, manners and customs, but they are apt enough in detecting men's motives and objects, and to learn human nature requires neither teaching nor travel.

We are not the enemy of classical academies, of colleges, nor of universities. We shall be pleased to see them all well patronised and encouraged. No man who can afford it should fail to give his sons learned educations, and to his daughters good sound English educations, and as much choice reading as possible. It is not school lessons, but reading, observation and reflection that improves the mind. At fourteen we would take the girls from school, in order, that by much reading, until they are eighteen, they may learn to think, to improve their minds, and acquire large stores of useful and ornamental knowledge. One never becomes wiser by getting and repeating lessons in a school room. It is enough, if at school, we acquire the key to knowledge and to wisdom.

Purity of morals, religious faith, refinement of manners and good educations are the best and most enduring heritage that a man can leave to his family. Property in this country is continually passing from the rich to the poor, but good education, purity of morals and refinement of manners are not subject to the vicissitudes of fortune. So long as they are retained, a man may preserve his position in society, get some lucrative employment, and if he be industrious and economical, do much to repair his ruined circumstances. We have always remarked that families of good information and good character always retain their social position, and never become abjectly poor. We know very many extensive family connexions, none of whom have been very wealthy, for centuries past, and who generally start in life with little or no capital or stock in trade, except good, useful, (and sometimes, learned) education, pure morals and industrious habits, who always manage to live well, to educate their children, and to associate in the best society. Intellectual attainments preserve through many generations, the standing and respectability of families, and of consequence, men should make almost any sacrifice to give good educations to their children, rather than strive to lay up riches for them, which often take wings to themselves, and fly away. Hence parents will find much of their time best spent, when spent in instructing their children. It is safer and wiser to confer on them, in way of education, the means of amassing wealth for themselves, rather than to neglect their educations, in order to transmit ready-made fortunes

to them.

ART. VII.-VIRGINIA-HER NEW SPIRIT AND DEVELOPMENT.

THE only agreeable sights to behold now in our old commonwealth are the many large and magnificent stores and other buildings that have already been erected in the burnt district in Richmond, and the hundreds of others, that will be equally spacious and magnificent, that are in the course of erection. I think that we may safely predict that ere another year arrives Richmond will be the most beautiful city in the Union. The Gallego Mills, too, once the most

spacious and perfect flour mills in the world, are about to be rebuilt, on a scale grander and more perfect than those consumed by fire when the city was captured. We believe that most of the new buildings, and those in progress of erection, belong to our own citizens, and have been built by means of home capital. No man can look into the future, in matters where money is concerned, so well and so far as rich capitalists, and their confidence in the coming prosperity of Richmond inspires us with equal confidence. They must know that she will speedily be put in trading connection with the Ohio and the great Northwest, or they would not so freely spend their money in buildings and other improvements, which, without such connections, must prove profitless. The country that sustained Richmond before the war is not half so productive now as it was then; yet her population is rapidly increasing, and buildings are going up, or have been recently erected, in every part of the city. Rents continue to be enormous, and all town property readily commands high and enhanced prices; yet Baltimore is about further to encroach on our already much-diminished trade, by means of a railroad through the valley, the richest portion of the State. Still, it would seem to us, that with a canal even as far as Covington, and a railroad to the Ohio, Richmond would command the most favorable situation, as well for trade as for manufactures, of any city in America. The larger portion of the grain and meat of the Northwest would find its natural and cheapest and most direct outlet through her; and the cotton of the South would in great part take the same direction, as railroad transportation becomes cheaper. There is no good harbor south of the mouth of the James fitted for ships of heavy tonnage, such as are now prepared for trade on our whole southern coast, whilst Richmond has tributary to her both the harbor near Norfolk, and that at West Point, on the York River, each deep enough to float in security the largest ships. She should become in time one of the greatest importing and exporting cities in the world, not only of meats, grain and cotton, but also of minerals, for minerals of all kinds abound in the mountain regions west of her. She has already inaugurated a direct trade with Europe; and the day may not be far distant when the merchants and farmers of a great part of the Northwest and of the South will come here as well to sell their agricultural products as to purchase their supplies of merchandise.

Norfolk will, no doubt, became a great commercial depot, but we do not think it will ever be a populous city. Yet we believe all the towns of Virginia are flourishing. Country life was delightful with plenty of slaves to work the farms, but decidedly disagreeable when we have to till them ourselves. This preference which begins to be shown for town life, will give rise to a variety of new undertakings and new occupations, and make Virginia a manufacturing State, which, as long as slavery continued, she would never have become. We should have preferred the continuance of the old order of things. We