to get immediate means
of support, he wrote "Leonard and Gertrude," which might soon after be
seen on the tables of all benevolent and literary persons in all
countries. Its disclosure of continental peasant life was perhaps the
first charm to us; but it also changed the character of educational
effort in England as elsewhere. Perhaps this popularity gave the good
man honor in his own country.

After the Revolutionary War in Switzerland, the Canton of Unterwalden
was overrun with wretched children who seemed to belong to nobody. They
prowled about the burned hamlets, and infested town and country like
little wolves. The government asked Pestalozzi to take charge of some of
them, and offered him some little aid. It was a singular spectacle when
this uncouth man, then in the vigor of his years (it was in 1798),
entered the ruins of a ravaged convent, with his mob of one hundred and
fifty outcast children. He was all alone with them; and some of them
were sickly and stunted; many were fretful; and not a few ferocious, or
malicious, or impudent, or full of suspicion and falsehood. He lived and
labored among them, nursed them, taught them, and soon began to open
their minds and gain their hearts. In a little while their avidity for
knowledge astonished him. The facts of the case indicate that he had an
aptitude for communicating with children's minds that amounted to
genius. Our mistake, twenty years later, was in supposing that the
virtue lay in that part of the method which could be imitated.
Pestalozzi, conversing with young creatures who had never supposed that
anybody cared for them, surprised them by his interest in what they felt
and thought. His questions roused their faculties, and sent a glow
through their feelings; and their improvement transcended all precedent.
Reports of his conversation and his achievements set others to work; and
there was such an interrogation of children as was never dreamed of
before.

One question which Pestalozzi asked of this set of pupils is memorable.
They had seen Altdorf in flames. About those blackened ruins there were
again desolate children, living as they could. Pestalozzi sounded the
minds of his pupils as to doing something in the case. When they eagerly
desired to take in twenty among them, Pestalozzi asked them whether they
could bear the consequences. They must work harder even than now; they
must live yet more barely; they might have to share their dinners and
their clo