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.Our young people, it is said, generally return home muchimproved by their travels.A young man who goes abroad atAdam Smith ElecBook Classics The Wealth of Nations: Book 5 1031seventeen or eighteen, and returns home at one and twenty,returns three or four years older than he was when he wentabroad; and at that age it is very difficult not to improve a gooddeal in three or four years.In the course of his travels he generallyacquires some knowledge of one or two foreign languages; aknowledge, however, which is seldom sufficient to enable himeither to speak or write them with propriety.In other respects hecommonly returns home more conceited, more unprincipled, moredissipated, and more incapable of any serious application either tostudy or to business than he could well have become in so short atime had he lived at home.By travelling so very young, byspending in the most frivolous dissipation the most precious yearsof his life, at a distance from the inspection and control of hisparents and relations, every useful habit which the earlier parts ofhis education might have had some tendency to form in him,instead of being riveted and confirmed, is almost necessarilyeither weakened or effaced.Nothing but the discredit into whichthe universities are allowing themselves to fall could ever havebrought into repute so very absurd a practice as that of travellingat this early period of life.By sending his son abroad, a fatherdelivers himself at least for some time, from so disagreeable anobject as that of a son unemployed, neglected, and going to ruinbefore his eyes.Such have been the effects of some of the modern institutionsfor education.Different plans and different institutions for education seem tohave taken place in other ages and nations.In the republics of ancient Greece, every free citizen wasinstructed, under the direction of the public magistrate, inAdam Smith ElecBook Classics The Wealth of Nations: Book 5 1032gymnastic exercises and in music.By gymnastic exercises it wasintended to harden his body, to sharpen his courage, and toprepare him for the fatigues and dangers of war; and as the Greekmilitia was, by all accounts, one of the best that ever was in theworld, this part of their public education must have answeredcompletely the purpose for which it was intended.By the otherpart, music, it was proposed, at least by the philosophers andhistorians who have given us an account of those institutions, tohumanize the mind, to soften the temper, and to dispose it forperforming all the social and moral duties both of public andprivate life.In ancient Rome the exercises of the Campus Martius answeredthe purpose as those of the Gymnasium in ancient Greece, andthey seem to have answered it equally well.But among theRomans there was nothing which corresponded to the musicaleducation of the Greeks.The morals of the Romans, however, bothin private and public life, seem to have been not only equal, but,upon the whole, a good deal superior to those of the Greeks.Thatthey were superior in private life, we have the express testimonyof Polybius and of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, two authors wellacquainted with both nations; and the whole tenor if the Greekand Roman history bears witness to the superiority of the publicmorals of the Romans.The good temper and moderation ofcontending factions seems to be the most essential circumstancesin the public morals of a free people.But the factions of the Greekswere almost always violent and sanguinary; whereas, till the timeof the Gracchi, no blood had ever been shed in any Roman faction;and from the time of the Gracchi the Roman republic may beconsidered as in reality dissolved.Notwithstanding, therefore, theAdam Smith ElecBook Classics The Wealth of Nations: Book 5 1033very respectable authority of Plato, Aristotle, and Polybius, andnotwithstanding the very ingenious reasons by which Mr.Montesquieu endeavours to support that authority, it seemsprobable that the musical education of the Greeks had no greateffect in mending their morals, since, without any such education,those of the Romans were upon the whole superior.The respect ofthose ancient sages for the institutions of their ancestors hadprobably disposed them to find much political wisdom in whatwas, perhaps, merely an ancient custom, continued withoutinterruption from the earliest period of those societies to the timesin which they had arrived at a considerable degree of refinement.Music and dancing are the great amusements of almost allbarbarous nations, and the great accomplishments which aresupposed to fit any man for entertaining his society.It is so at thisday among the negroes on the coast of Africa.It was so among theancient Celts, among the ancient Scandinavians, and, as we maylearn from Homer, among the ancient Greeks in the timespreceding the Trojan war.When the Greek tribes had formedthemselves into little republics, it was natural that the study ofthose accomplishments should, for a long time, make a part of thepublic and common education of the people.The masters who instructed the young people, either in musicor in military exercises, do not seem to have been paid, or evenappointed by the state, either in Rome or even in Athens, theGreek republic of whose laws and customs we are the bestinformed
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