The home circle is select and chaste—the promiscuous intermingling with the world meretricious and contaminating. The mother not trained to the appreciation and discharge of the domestic duties, was never the mother of a great representative mind; because she is incapable of imparting those stern principles of exalted morality and fixity of purpose essential in forming the character of such men. The mother of Cincinnatus was a farmer's wife; of Leonidas, a shepherdess; and the mothers of Washington, Webster, Clay, Calhoun, William H, Crawford, and Andrew Jackson were all the wives of farmers—rural and simple in their pursuits, distinguished for energy and purity; constant in their principles, and devoted to husband, home, and children. They never dreamed it was woman's vocation or duty to go out into the world and mingle in its strifes and contentions—but at home, to view them, reflect upon their consequences to society, and upon the future of their sons and daughters, and warn them what to emulate and what to shun. They, as did their husbands, felt the necessity of preserving that delicacy of thought and action which is woman's ornament, and which is more efficient in rebuking licentiousness and profligacy in the young and the old than all the teaching of the schools without such example. Such were the mothers of the great and the good of our land, and such the mothers of those men now prominent and distinguished in the advocacy and support of the great principles of natural rights and humanity.
It is a mooted question whether the purposes of human life demand a high, classical education among the masses; or whether the general happiness is promoted by such education. In the study of the human mind in connection with human wants, we are continually met with difficulties arising from the want of education; and quite as frequently with those resulting from education. So much so, that we hear from every wise man the declaration that as many minds are ruined by over-education as from the want of education.
Man's curse is to labor. This labor must of necessity be divided to subserve the wants of society—and common sense would teach that each should be educated as best to enable him to perform that labor which may fall to his lot in life. But who shall determine this lot? Every day's experience teaches the observant and thinking man that no one individual is uselessly born. To deny this proposition would be to call in question the wisdom and goodness of the Creator. Every one possesses proclivities for some one avocation, and should be educated for its pursuit. This is manifested in very early life; in some much more palpably than in others. This is always the case when the aptitude is decisive. In such cases this idiosyncrasy will triumph over every adverse circumstance, educational or otherwise; but in the less palpable, it will not; and the design of nature may, and indeed constantly is, disappointed, and improper education and improper pursuits given. In these pursuits or callings, the person thus improperly placed there never succeeds as he would had his bent or mental inclination been observed, and his education directed to it, and he given to its pursuit. Such persons labor through life painfully; they have no taste or inclination for the profession, business, or trade in which they are engaged; its pursuit is an irksome, thankless labor; while he who has fallen into nature's design, and is working where his inclinations lead, labors happily, because he labors naturally. These inclinations the parent or guardian should observe; and when manifested, should direct the education for the calling nature has designed. Idiosyncrasies are transmissible or inherited. In old and populous communities, where every pursuit or profession is full, the father generally teaches his own to his son or sons. Where this has extended through three or four generations, the proclivity is generally strongly marked, and in very early childhood made manifest. Thus, in the third or fourth generation, where all have been blacksmiths, the child will be born with the muscles of the right arm more developed than those of the left, and the first plaything he demands is a hammer. So, where a family have been traders, will the offspring naturally discover an aptness for bargaining and commerce. This is illustrated in the instincts of the Jews, a people of extraordinary brain and wonderful tenacity of purpose. Five thousand years since, a small fragment of the Semitic race, residing in Mesopotamia between the waters of the Euphrates and the Tigris, consisting of two families, came into the land of Canaan, in Asia Minor; from them have descended the people known as Jews. The country over which they spread, and which is known as Judea, is not more than four hundred miles long by two hundred and fifty in breadth, situated between two populous and powerful empires, the Assyrian and Egyptian, who, waging war too frequently, made the land of Judea their battle-field, and its people the objects of persecution and oppression. The earnings of their labor were deemed legitimate prey by both, and taken wherever found: they were led into captivity by the Assyrians and by the Egyptians, enslaved, and denied the legal right to possess the soil—which, to the everlasting disgrace of Christian Europe, was a restriction upon this wonderful people until within the present century. A blind bigotry would have blotted them from the face of the earth, but for that energy, talent, and enterprise possessed by them in a superior degree to any people upon the globe. Inspired by a sublime belief that they were the chosen people of God, no tyranny nor oppression could subdue their energies. They prayed and labored, went forward with untiring determination, upheld by their faith, and always, under the direst distress, found comfort from this belief and the fruits of incessant labor. The soil of their loved Canaan was barren, and yielded grudgingly to the most persistent labor. This drove them to trade, and an extended intercourse with the world. Without a national government of sufficient power to protect them when robbed by the people or the governments surrounding their own, they were compelled, for self-protection, to resort to every means of concealing the earnings of their enterprise and superior knowledge and skill from Christian and pagan alike. They gave value to the diamond, that in a small stone, easy of concealment, immense wealth might be hidden. They invented the bill of exchange, by which they could at pleasure transfer from one country to another their wealth, and avoid the danger of spoliation from the hand of power and intolerance. Without political or civil rights in any but their own country, they were compelled to the especial pursuit of commerce for centuries, and we now see that seven-tenths of all Jews born, as naturally turn to trade and commerce as the infant to the breast. It has become an instinct.
To these persecutions the world is probably indebted for the developments of commerce—the bringing into communication the nations of the earth for the exchange of commodities necessary to the use and comfort of each other, not of the growth or production of each, enlarging the knowledge of all thus communicating, and teaching that civilization which is the enlightenment and the blessing of man—ameliorating the savage natures of all, and teaching that all are of God, and equally the creatures of His love and protection; and leading also to that development of mind in the Israelite which makes him conspicuous to-day above any other race in the great attributes of mind—directing the policy of European governments—first at the Bar, first in science, first in commerce, first in wealth—preserving the great traits of nationality without a nation, and giving tone, talent, wealth, and power to all.
A few men only are born to think. Their minds expand with education, and their usefulness is commensurate with it. This few early evince a proclivity so strong for certain avocations as to enable those who have the direction of their future to educate them for this pursuit. This proclivity frequently is so overpowering as to prompt the possessor, when the early education has been neglected, to educate himself for this especial idiosyncrasy. This was the case with Newton—with Stevenson, the inventor of the locomotive-engine, who, at twenty years of age, was ignorant even of his letters. Arkwright was a barber, and almost entirely illiterate when he invented the spinning-jenny. Train, the inventor of the railroad, was, at the time of its invention, a coal-heaver, and entirely illiterate.
These cases are rare, however. The great mass of mankind are born to manual labor, and only with capacities suited for it. To attempt to cultivate such minds for eminent purposes would be folly. Even supposing they could be educated—which is scarcely supposable, for it would seem a contravention of Heaven's fiat—they could no more apply this learning, which would simply be by rote, than they could go to the moon. Such men are not unfrequently met with, and are designated, by common consent, learned fools. Nature points out the education they should receive. In like manner with those of higher and nobler attributes, educate them for their pursuits in life. It requires not the same education to hold a plough, or drive an ox, that it does to direct the course of a ship through a trackless sea, or to calculate an eclipse; and