Page:Memoir, correspondence, and miscellanies, from the papers of Thomas Jefferson - Volume 1.djvu/362

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offer the first and third of the advantages of Rome. But why send an American youth to Europe for education ? What are the objects of an useful American education ? Classical knowledge, modern languages, chiefly Frejich, Spanish and Italian ; Ma thematics, Natural philosophy, Natural history, Civil history, and Ethics. In Natural philosophy, I mean to include Chemistry and Agriculture, and in Natural history, to include Botany, as well as the other branches of those departments. It is true that the habit of speaking the modern languages, cannot be so well acquired in America ; but every other article can be as well acquired at William and Mary college, as at any place in Europe. When college education is done with, and a young man is to prepare himself for public life, he must cast his eyes (for America) either on Law or Physic. For the former, where can he apply so ad vantageously as to Mr. Wythe ? For the latter, lie must come to Europe : the medical class of students, therefore, is the only one which need come to Europe. Let us view the disadvantages of sending a youth, to Europe. To enumerate them all, would re quire a volume. I will select a few. If he goes to England, he learns drinking, horse racing and boxing. These are the pecu liarities of English education. The following circumstances are common to education in that, and the other countries of Europe. He acquires a fondness for European luxury and dissipation, and a contempt for the simplicity of his own country ; he is fascinated with the privileges of the European aristocrats, and sees, with ab horrence, the lovely equality which the poor enjoy with the rich, in his own country ; he contracts a partiality for aristocracy or monarchy ; he forms foreign friendships which will never be useful to him, and loses the season of life for forming in his own country, those friendships, which, of all others, are the most faithful and per manent ; he is led by the strongest of all the human passions, into a spirit for female intrigue, destructive of his own and others hap piness, or a passion for whores, destructive of his health, and, in both cases, learns to consider fidelity to the marriage bed as an ungentlemanly practice, and inconsistent with happiness ; he re collects the voluptuary dress and arts of the European women, and pities and despises the chaste affections and simplicity of those of his own country ; he retains, through life, a fond recollection, and a hankering after those places, which were the scenes of his first pleasures and of his first connections ; he returns to his own country, a foreigner, unacquainted with the practices of domestic economy, necessary to preserve him from ruin, speaking and wri ting his native tongue as a foreigner, and therefore unqualified to obtain those distinctions, which eloquence of the pen and tongue