om you well know. If this is the case, consider whether
the establishment you are contemplating can be carried on, after you
shall have left it, by such men as can ordinarily be obtained. If the
plan is founded on some peculiar notions of your own, which would enable
you to succeed in it, when others, also interested in such a scheme,
would probably fail, consider whether there may not be danger that your
plan may be imitated by others, who cannot carry it into successful
operation, so that it may be the indirect means of doing injury. A man
is, in some degree, responsible for his example, and for the
consequences which may indirectly flow from his course, as well as for
the immediate results which he produces. The Fellenberg school at Hofwyl
has perhaps, by its direct results, been as successful for a given time,
as perhaps any other institution in the world; but there is a great
offset to the good which it has thus done, to be found in the history of
the thousand wretched imitations of it, which have been started only to
linger a little while and die, and in which a vast amount of time, and
talent, and money have been wasted.

Consider the influence you may have upon the other institutions of our
country, by attaching yourself to some one under the existing
organization. If you take an academy or a private school, constituted
and organized like other similar institutions, success in your own, will
give you influence over others. A successful teacher of an academy,
raises the standard of academic instruction. A college professor, if he
brings extraordinary talents to bear upon the regular duties of that
office, throws light, universally, upon the whole science of college
discipline and instruction. By going, however, to some new field,
establishing some new and fanciful institution, you take yourself from
such a sphere;--you exert no influence over others, except upon feeble
imitators, who fail in their attempts, and bring discredit upon your
plans by the awkwardness with which they attempt to adopt them. How much
more service to the cause of education, have Professors Cleaveland and
Silliman rendered by falling in with the regularly organized
institutions of the country, and elevating them, than if in early life,
they had given themselves to some magnificent project of an
establishment, to which their talents would unquestionably have given
temporary success, but which would have taken them away from the
community of