ENTERED, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1857, by HENRY BARNARD, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of Connecticut. Landor's Imaginary Conversation between Roger Ascham and Lady Jane Grey.. 39 VI. COLLEGE GOVERNMENT-or the Student's Code of Honor. By Horace Mano, LL.D. 65 VII. LETTERS TO A YOUNG TEACHER. By Gideon F. Thayer, Boston, Mass.. XVII. AN AMERICAN UNIVERSITY. By an Alabamian.. XVIII. TRANSYLVANIA UNIVERSITY AND STATE NORMAL SCHOOL, KENTUCKY. I. JOHN HENRY WICHERN. Founder of the Rough House, or Institution of Rescue at Horn, near Hamburg. JOHN HENRY WICHERN, whose name will ever be associated with one of the most interesting educational and reformatory movements of the age, as founder and superintendent of the ROUGH HOUSE, (Rauhe Haus,) near Hamburg, was born in that city on the 21st of April, 1808.* His father was a notary and sworn translator, and gave his son the advantages of the best education which Hamburg afforded. He attended the Johanneum and the academic gymnasium of his native city, and afterward, till 1830, pursued a course of theological study at Göttingen and Berlin. Soon after passing his examination in theology at Hamburg, he went practically to work, visiting the poor and the needy in the corners and the streets of the city, and undertaking the direction of a free Sunday school for poor children, in which he soon assembled four or five hundred scholars and about forty volunteer teachers. Wichern declined the propositions made him at this time to enter upon the duties of a clergyman, as his thoughts were already occupied in planning such an institution. as he opened near Hamburg, in the Rough House, at Michelmas, 1833. The Rough House, (Rauhe Haus,) was the name, by which a small property, on a lane leading out of the village of Horn, four miles from Hamburg was known, consisting of small thatched cottage, shadowed by a large chestnut tree, and two or three acres of ground partially cleared up, through which straggled a little brook. In the prosecu tion of a plan, suggested by his missionary labors among the poor of Hamburg, of establishing a House of Rescue for destitute, vagrant, and vicious children, not yet convicted by the courts of crime, Mr. Wichern, aided by a voluntary association of like minded men, and by a small donation of three hundred dollars, took possession of this rough cottage with his mother, and in a few weeks received into his family three boys of the worst description, and adopted them as his children. One by one, he added to their number from the same class until his family circle, with himself and mother, embraced fourteen persons-twelve of them, the least hopeful of the juvenile population of the city. And there under that thatched roof, with that unpromising ground, with the help of his devout mother, with a well spring of Christian charity in the hearts, and words of kindness on the lips of both, Mr. Wichern succeeded in inspiring those children with the attachments of a home-in cultivating filial affections, almost dormant * We are indebted for the principal facts of this Memoir to the Conversations-Lexicon. in forming habits of profitable industry, and laying the foundations of a good moral character on which they subsequently built up a useful life. From these small beginnings, without the aid at any time of large governmental grants, and of but one large legacy [of $13,500,] the institution has expanded, until in 1854, the grounds included thirty-two acres, portions of which are tastefully laid out in walks and shrubbery, and all of which are highly cultivated; to the original Rough House have been added fourteen buildings of plain but substantial construction, scattered in a picturesque manner about the grounds, and the principles of Family Organization, Christian Training and Industrial occupation have been preserved and improved, until it has become the working model for a new order of preventive and reformatory agencies in every country of Europe. Since 1840, as the foundation of asylums for destitute children has followed in Germany, France and England, Dr.* Wichern has aided various enterprises of a similar character. He had already united under the name of the Inner Mission almost all active efforts in Germany for the moral and religious improvement of the destitute and vicious, when chiefly through his instrumentality, the Central Committee for the Inner Mission, was appointed at the first Ecclesiastical Convention, (die Kirchen-Tag,) at Wittenberg, in Sept. 1848. Through this committee of which he was a member, Wichern gained a much wider field for his activity. At the annual meeting of the Kirchen-Tag, and on his travels in every part of Germany he aids by word and deed the establishment of societies and institutions for the promotion of education, and the care of the sick, poor and imprisoned. Upon his return from a journey to England in 1851, the Prussian government employed him to visit the houses of correction, and prisons of the kingdom, and to attempt their improvement. Prevented by these active duties from literary exertions he has published but little. His work on "the Inner Mission of the German Evangelical Church" (Hamb. 1849,) presents his principles concerning free christian charity and its relations to the ecclesiastical and social questions of the day. Since 1844 he has published the "Flying Leaves of the Rough House," (Fliegende Blätter des Rauhen Hause,) in which are contained a portion of the addresses which he has made at the different ecclesiastical conventions. The accompanying diagrams, copied from a number of the "Flying Leaves," exhibit the outward aspects of the Rough House, as they appeared to the Editor of this Journal in 1854,-and the article which follows, will present the principles on which it has been conducted. *In 1851, he received from the University of Halle, the degree of Doctor of Philology. |