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.