The first idea which is to be given to a child, little as we might expect such a doctrine from the author of the Second Discourse, is declared to be that of property.  And he can only acquire this idea by having something 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 property, there is the complex fancy in which a juggler is made to combine instruction as to the properties of the magnet with certain severe moral truths.[284] The tutor interests Emilius in astronomy and geography by a wonderful stratagem indeed.  The poor youth loses his way in a wood, is overpowered by hunger and weariness, and then is