member of
the Swiss Government, and a friend of the celebrated Pestalozzi,--a
friendship which descended to the son. His mother was a descendant of
the stout Van Tromp, the Dutch admiral, who was victor in more than
thirty engagements, and whose spirit and courage she is said to have
inherited. To this noble woman young Fellenberg owed ideas of liberty
and philanthropy beyond the age in which he lived and the aristocratic
class to which he belonged.

Educated at Colmar and Tuebingen, the years immediately succeeding his
college life were spent in travels, which brought him, at the age of
twenty-three, and just after the death of Robespierre, to Paris, where
he had an opportunity of studying men in the subsiding tumult of a
terrible revolution.

The result appears to have been a conviction that the true element of
human progress was to be found less in correction of the adult than in
training of the youth. His mind imbued with the two great ideas of
freedom and education, he returned to his native Bern; but taking part
there against the French, he was banished, remaining in Germany an exile
for several years, and during that period planning emigration, with
several friends, to the United States. This intention he abandoned, on
being recalled to his native country, and there offered important
diplomatic and military service. In the latter capacity he quelled an
insurrection of the peasantry in the Oberland; but, prompted by that
sympathy for the laboring classes which was a strong element in his
character, he granted these people terms so liberal that his Government
refused to ratify them, whereupon he threw up his commission, recurring
to his favorite educational projects, and serving for a time on the
Board of Education in Bern.

But it soon became apparent that the ideas of his colleagues and himself
differed too widely to permit united action. They were thinking of the
commonplace routine of school instruction,--reading, writing,
arithmetic, and the like. He looked to education as the regenerating
agent of the world,--that agent without the aid of which liberty runs
into license, and the rule of the many, as he had witnessed it in
terror-stricken France, may become one of the worst forms of despotism.
He looked beyond mere pedagogical routine or formal learning, to the
living spirit,--to the harmonious development of every human faculty and
affection, intellectual, moral, spiritual.

Resigning his situation on t