half sum, he might have become a schoolmaster, and here age would have come of its own accord. And a thousand such things! They prove, however, that matters can be at no bad pass in our Governments and Circles, where promotions are sold dearer to Folly than to Diligence, and where it costs more to institute a school than to serve in one.
The remarks I made on this subject to a Prince, as well as the remarks a Town-syndic made on it to myself, are too remarkable to be omitted for mere dread of digressiveness.
The Syndic—a man of enlarged views, and of fiery patriotism, the warmth of which was the more beneficent that he collected all the beams of it into one focus, and directed them to himself and his family—gave me (I had perhaps been comparing the School-bench and the School-stair to the bench and the ladder on which people are laid when about to be tortured) the best reply: "If a schoolmaster consume nothing but 30 reichsthalers;[1] if he annually purchase manufactured goods, according as Political Economists have calculated for each individual, namely, to the amount of 5 reichsthalers; and no more hundred-weights of victual than these assume, namely, 10; in short, if he live like a substantial wood-cutter, then the Devil must be in it if he cannot yearly lay by so much net profit as shall, in the long run, pay the interest of his entry debts."
The Syndic must have failed to convince me at that time, since I afterwards told the Flachsenfingen Prince:[2]
