New Farm. Only the ground floor was as yet finished, circumstances being against the completion of the rest of the original plan.

The front, which had six windows and four rooms, looked south on to the garden. The house was burned down in 1842; but though the walls and roof have since been restored, the interior has remained empty, and is now used as a storehouse. On the east side of the house runs a road, on the right of which, a few steps south of the house, is the site of the farm-buildings, which have also been destroyed by fire. In front of the farm was a well, and on the other side of the road a manure-heap and a pond. These buildings formed as it were the centre of a large extent of meadows and fields, with a few vines at the foot of the hill, and a belt of trees above.

But the land was not at all fertile, a few days' rain sufficing to lay bare a thin bed of sand, and so Pestalozzi's agriculture did not prosper.

The buildings, too, had absorbed all the funds necessary for working the land, and Pestalozzi's steward, Merki, had been guilty of breaches of trust. Accordingly Schulthess, the banker, with some slight loss, now finally withdrew from the undertaking.

Pestalozzi, reduced to his own slender resources, again found in his wife's devotion the comfort and encouragement he so much needed. She induced her brothers to advance her some of the money to which she would be entitled at her father's death, and with this money she paid some of Pestalozzi's debts. Pestalozzi's mother also sent him what help she could. He, meanwhile, had discovered the existence of marl near Birr, and used it to improve his land; he supplemented his unremunerative farming-operations by the manufacture of cotton-stuffs, and spun and wove the raw material supplied him by his brothers-in-law.

But in spite of all his efforts, things grew worse every day, his debts continued to increase, and at last, in 1775, he himself was obliged to recognise that his undertaking had failed.

"The dream of my life," he says, "the hope of making my house the centre of a wide sphere of benevolent activity, was gone."

This failure is hardly to be wondered at; and yet experience has since confirmed the truth and value of the ideas on which his experiment was based: the advantage, for instance, of large market-gardens in the neighbourhood of towns, the great waste of manure in populous cities, and the possibility of enormously increasing the productive power of land by improved methods of cultivation. And what Pestalozzi could not accomplish then, others have accomplished since; for when we visited Muligen and Neuhof in 1869, we found this very same land in a state of most rich and varied cultivation, and producing several crops in the year. Pestalozzi's dream, then, of a hundred years ago has to-day been realized. It must not be forgotten, however, that this agricultural experiment at Neuhof was by no means in accordance with the plans prepared at Kirchberg, since Pestalozzi had not been able to combine all the conditions on which he had counted, of which nearness to Zurich was one of the most important. But his confidence and impatient ardour brooked no delay, and he set about putting his plan into execution long before he had made sure of all the means necessary for its success. This, unfortunately, is not the only occasion on which he had to suffer for this characteristic tendency of his nature.

For a man in his position, the owner of Neuhof now took a most unaccountable step. His agricultural operations having failed, and what little money he had started with being as good as lost, he decided to turn his house into a refuge for poor children.

It has been said that had this not been an act of such monstrous folly, it would have been an instance of the most sublime self-sacrifice. As a matter of fact, it was nothing more than the natural effect of a reaction which had taken place in his thought and conscience since he had become a father, a reaction which we must now endeavour to trace from its very beginning, since it resulted in Pestalozzi's finding his true vocation, and becoming the benefactor of humanity.

CHAPTER IV.

PESTALOZZI THE FATHER.

He reproaches himself with no longer thinking of anything but the temporal interests of his family. The birth of his son fills him with religious remorse. He tries to bring up his child according to the principles of "Emile." Obliged at every step to correct Rousseau, he discovers the essential principles of his own method; value of this experiment for humanity; sad fate of the child who was the subject of it.

In the lives of young men there is often a period, more or or less transient, of passion and illusion, that carries them into paths from which disappointments and the experience of the realities of life compel them, sooner or later, to turn aside. It was in this way that Pestalozzi first threw himself into politics as a revolutionary, and then into agriculture as an innovator.

This latter step was indeed the chief folly of his youth. Carried away, in the first place, by the utopian ideas in vogue in university circles at Zurich, and by the hope of finding in agricultural reform a means of improving the condition of the people, and afterwards by his love for Anna, and his desire to reassure her parents by preparing her a comfortable home, he gradually allowed a sordid ambition to take the place of the noble philanthropic enthusiasm which had hitherto filled his heart.

But this eclipse of his great thought of self-sacrifice did not last very long. He soon found himself ill at ease in this atmosphere of material interests and reproached himself bitterly with having forsaken his former ideal. He was, in short, tormented by religious remorse.

The disappointments caused by the failure of his agricultural experiments undoubtedly helped to bring about this moral regeneration, though they were not the primary cause of it. Indeed, the extracts we are about to give from his

diary show that the crisis began at a time when Pestalozzi had as yet no reason to doubt the success of his enterprise. Already, on the 9th of January, 1770, he wrote:

แ

Why do I no longer take pleasure in speculative science? Why am I so little interested in the search for truths of the greatest importance? Can it be because the vainglory and examples that stimulated me in the town are now lacking to me? But I am resolved to attend earnestly to the development of my faculties, in spite of the distractions necessarily resulting from the work my position involves. O God, strengthen me in this resolution!"

And in another place:

"We rose late, and urgent letters absorbed the time set apart for our prayers, with which we ought to allow nothing to interfere. I have been very busy all day, and have been happier than on those days when I have less to do. I am ashamed to confess this; it shows that I am incapable of giving proper attention to my own character. After writing the foregoing, I set to work to amuse myself; but I soon stopped, ashamed of my levity. Where will it lead me? What will it bring me to in a few years?"

Shortly after this his wife writes:

"I am taking advantage of my dear husband's absence to look back over my life, which has been but ill employed for some time past. I am hoping to become a mother. If it should please God to let my child and me live, what an awful duty is before me! But if I am to die Oh, merciful Father! shed Thy grace and blessing upon us, strengthen and purify our hearts by Thy presence. At last my husband came home. He asked me if I had prayed, and I was glad to see how happy it made him to hear how I had spent the day."

These few quotations will suffice to show that only a few months after their marriage, Pestalozzi and his wife were already blaming themselves for allowing material interests to shape their lives, and praying for help in their efforts after moral improvement.

When Pestalozzi became a father, this moral crisis took

the form of deep religious remorse. Paternity, with its cares, duties, and responsibilities, places men in a new position, a position particularly calculated to make them examine their lives, and to bring about a complete moral and religious regeneration. Though a man may have been careless about himself, he will be anxious to keep his child from sin, knowing well enough the misery it produces; and he will feel the need of making himself holy, that he may be able to teach holiness to the one he holds so dear.

Pestalozzi's entry in his wife's diary soon after the birth of his son, is as follows:

แ Ah, God! I saw the time of gravest anxiety approaching, yet I could neither pray nor weep; I did not lift up my heart to God, nor did I fall on my knees to bewail my faults, to ask pity, to pray the Lord not to take my beloved from me because of my sins, nor my son because of my transgressions. My heart is hardened, alas! I have no desire to be better, my soul is full of wickedness!"

He goes on for a long time like this, then concludes with St. Paul's cry: "Who shall deliver me from the body of

this death?"

Farther on he says again:

"I was always busied with the things of no importance, and took no trouble to make my soul worthy of the happiest day of my life. Alas! I forgot my Lord and my God, and in my soul's anxiety addressed no prayer to Him who forms us all in our mothers' wombs, and who gives us breath and life. Forgive me, my Father, I am not worthy to be called Thy son.

Thou hast surrounded me with blessings beyond measure; Thou hast preserved my wife's life and strength; Thou hast made me the father of an immortal soul. Ah! if I could only show my gratitude for Thy goodness by my repentance, repentance for a long life of sin from which I have never once turned aside! Send me Thy Spirit from on high! Give me now new strength, create in me a new heart, fresh zeal! Oh, my son, my son! Horrible thought! If I were to fail in my duty to thee, if I were to lead thee astray from thy proper path, thou mightest some day before the Judge be the accuser of thy father, of him whose duty