he Bernese Board of Education, Fellenberg
expended a large fortune in the purchase of the estate of HOFWYL, about
two leagues from Bern, and the erection there of the building necessary
to carry into effect his own peculiar views.

It was a favorite idea of his, that society can be most effectually
influenced for good by training its extremes in social position: those,
on the one hand, who are born to wealth and station, whence are usually
chosen lawgivers, statesmen, leaders of public opinion; and those, on
the other hand, born to a heritage of ignorance and neglect, and too
often trained even from tender age to vice and violence. He sought to
bring these extremes of European society into harmonious relation with
each other,--to raise the one from hereditary dependence and
degradation, to imbue the other with healthy ideas of true nobility in
place of the morbid prejudices of artificial rank. In both these efforts
he was eminently successful,--in the latter, more so, in my judgment,
than any educator of his age.

The establishments of Hofwyl proper[A] were, accordingly, two in number,
quite distinct from each other: the _Vehrli-Knaben_, (Vehrli's boys,) as
they were called, from the name of their admirable young teacher,
Vehrli, essentially an agricultural school, on the manual-labor
principle; and the college, of which it is my chief object to sketch the
plan and its results. To this latter institution, in consequence of the
numerous and expensive branches taught and the great number of
professors employed, (about one to each four students,) those only, with
few exceptions, could obtain admission whose parents possessed ample
means,--the exceptions being the sons of a few of Fellenberg's Swiss
friends, in moderate circumstances, whom, when they showed great
promise, he admitted with little or no charge. It was by associating
these with his own children in their studies that the nucleus of this
college was originally formed.

From their very inception, these projects met with discouragement and
opposition, especially from the patrician class, to which Fellenberg
belonged. Even in republican Switzerland, these men held that their rank
exonerated them from any occupation that savored much of utility; and it
was with a feeling almost of dishonor to their order that they saw one
of their number stoop (it was thus they phrased it) to the ignoble task
of preceptor. It need hardly be said that Fellenberg held on his way,
u