ng of his own. But how are we to teach him the
significance of a thing being one's own? It is a prime rule to attempt
to teach nothing by a verbal lesson; all instruction ought to be left
to experience.[282] Therefore you must contrive some piece of
experience which shall bring this notion of property vividly into a
child's mind; the following for instance. Emilius is taken to a piece
of garden; his instructor digs and dresses the ground for him, and the
boy takes possession by sowing some beans. "We come every day to water
them, and see them rise out of the ground with transports of joy. I
add to this joy by saying, This belongs to you. Then explaining the
term, I let him feel that he has put into the ground this time,
labour, trouble, his person in short; that there is in this bit of
ground something of himself which he may maintain against every comer,
as he might withdraw his own arm from the hand of another man who
would fain retain it in spite of him." One day Emilius comes to his
beloved garden, watering-pot in hand, and finds to his anguish and
despair that all the beans have been plucked up, that the ground has
been turned over, and that the spot is hardly recognisable. The
gardener comes up, and explains with much warmth that he had sown the
seed of a precious Maltese melon in that particular spot long before
Emilius had come with his trumpery beans, and that therefore it was
his land; that nobody touches the garden of his neighbour, in order
that his own may remain untouched; and that if Emilius wants a piece
of garden, he must pay for it by surrendering to the owner half the
produce.[283] Thus, says Rousseau, the boy sees how the notion of
property naturally goes back to the right of the first occupant as
derived from labour. We should have thought it less troublesome, as it
is certainly more important, to teach a boy the facts of property
positively and imperatively. This rather elaborate ascent to origins
seems an exaggerated form of that very vice of over-instructing the
growing reason in abstractions, which Rousseau had condemned so short
a time before.

Again, there is the very strong objection to conveying lessons by
artificially contrived incidents, that children are nearly always
extremely acute in suspecting and discovering such contrivances. Yet
Rousseau recurs to them over and over again, evidently taking delight
in their ingenuity. Besides the illustration of the origin and
significance of prope