some of their courts were so very numerous),
could not fall very heavy upon any individual.
At Rome, on the contrary, the principal
courts of justice consisted either of a
single judge, or of a small number of judges,
whose characters, especially as they deliberated
always in public, could not fail to be
very much affected by any rash or unjust decision.
In doubtful cases such courts, from
their anxiety to avoid blame, would naturally
endeavour to shelter themselves under the example
or precedent of the judges who had sat
before them, either in the same or in some
other court. This attention to practice and
precedent, necessarily formed the Roman
law into that regular and orderly system in
which it has been delivered down to us; and
the like attention has had the like effects upon
the laws of every other country where
such attention has taken place. The superiority
of character in the Romans over that
of the Greeks, so much remarked by Polybius
and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, was
probably more owing to the better constitution
of their courts of justice, than to any of
the circumstances to which those authors
ascribe it. The Romans are said to have
been particularly distinguished for their superior
respect to an oath. But the people
who were accustomed to make oath only before
some diligent and well informed court of
justice, would naturally be much more attentive
to what they swore, than they who were
accustomed to do the same thing before mobbish
and disorderly assemblies.
The abilities, both civil and military, of
the Greeks and Romans, will readily be allowed
to have been at least equal to those of
any modern nation. Our prejudice is perhaps
rather to overrate them. But except in
what related to military exercises, the state
seems to have been at no pains to form those
great abilities; for I cannot be induced to
believe that the musical education of the
Greeks could be of much consequence in
forming them. Masters, however, had been
found, it seems, for instructing the better
sort of people among those nations, in every
art and science in which the circumstances of
their society rendered it necessary or convenient
for them to be instructed. The demand
for such instruction produced, what it
always produces, the talent for giving it; and
the emulation which an unrestrained competition
never fails to excite, appears to have
brought that talent to a very high degree of
perfection. In the attention which the ancient
philosophers excited, in the empire
which they acquired over the opinions and
principles of their auditors, in the faculty
which they possessed of giving a certain tone
and character to the conduct and conversation
of those auditors, they appear to have been
much superior to any modern teachers. In
modern times, the diligence of public teachers
is more or less corrupted by the circumstances
which render them more or less independent
of their success and reputation in
their particular professions. Their salaries,
too, put the private teacher, who would pretend
to come into competition with them, in
the same state with a merchant who attempts
to trade without a bounty, in competition
with those who trade with a considerable one.
If he sells his goods at nearly the same price,
he cannot have the same profit; and poverty
and beggary at least, if not bankruptcy and
ruin, will infallibly be his lot. If he attempts
to sell them much dearer, he is likely
to have so few customers, that his circumstances
will not be much mended. The privileges
of graduation, besides, are in many
countries necessary, or at least extremely convenient,
to most men of learned professions,
that is, to the far greater part of those who
have occasion for a learned education. But
those privileges can be obtained only by attending
the lectures of the public teachers.
The most careful attendance upon the ablest
instructions of any private teacher cannot always
give any title to demand them. It is
from these different causes that the private
teacher of any of the sciences, which are
commonly taught in universities, is, in modern
times, generally considered as in the
very lowest order of men of letters. A man
of real abilities can scarce find out a more
humiliating or a more unprofitable employment
to turn them to. The endowments of
schools and colleges have in this manner not
only corrupted the diligence of public teachers,
but have rendered it almost impossible
to have any good private ones.
Were there no public institutions for education,
no system, no science, would be
taught, for which there was not some demand,
or which the circumstances of the
times did not render it either necessary or
convenient, or at least fashionable to learn.
A private teacher could never find his account
in teaching either an exploded and antiquated
system of a science acknowledged to be useful,
or a science universally believed to be a
mere useless and pedantic heap of sophistry
and nonsense. Such systems, such sciences,
can subsist nowhere but in those incorporated
societies for education, whose prosperity and
revenue are in a great measure independent
of their industry. Were there no public institutions
for education, a gentleman, after
going through, with application and abilities,
the most complete course of education which
the circumstances of the times were supposed
to afford, could not come into the world completely
ignorant of every thing which is the
common subject of conversation among gentlemen
and men of the world.
There are no public institutions for the
education of women, and there is accordingly
nothing useless, absurd, or fantastical, in the