Then appeared
Pestalozzi and directed education also to the lower classes of
society--those which are called, not without something approaching to a
derogatory meaning, _the people_. From this time dates popular
education, the effort for the intellectual and moral elevation of the
hitherto neglected atomistic human being of the non-property-holding
multitude. There shall in future be no dirty, hungry, ignorant, awkward,
thankless, and will-less mass, devoted alone to an animal existence. We
can never rid ourselves of the lower classes by having the wealthy give
something, or even their all, to the poor, so as to have no property
themselves; but we can rid ourselves of it in the sense that the
possibility of culture and independent self-support shall be open to
every one, because he is a human being and a citizen of the
commonwealth. Ignorance and rudeness and the vice which springs from
them, and the malevolent frame of mind against the human race, which are
bound up with crime--these shall disappear. Education shall train man to
self-conscious obedience to law, as well as to kindly feeling towards
the erring, and to an effort not merely for their removal but for their
improvement. But the more Pestalozzi endeavored to realize his ideal of
human dignity, the more he comprehended that the isolated power of a
private man could not attain it, but that the nation itself must make
their own education their first business. Fichte by his lectures first
made the German nation fully accept these thoughts, and Prussia was the
first state which, by her public schools and her conscious preparation
for defence, broke the path for National Education; while among the
Romanic nations, in spite of their more elaborate political formalism,
it still depends partly upon the church and partly upon the accident of
private enterprise. Pestalozzi also laid a foundation for a national
pedagogical literature by his story of _Leonard and Gertrude_. This book
appeared at first in 1784, i.e. in the same year in which Schiller's
_Robbers_ and Kant's _Critique of Pure Reason_ announced a new phase in
the Drama and in Philosophy.--

--The incarnation of God, which was, up to the time of the Reformation,
an esoteric mystery of the Church, has since then become continually
more and more an exoteric problem of the State.--

_3. Free Education._

Sec. 260. The ideal of culture of the humanitarian and the philanthropic
education was taken up into the