But all these deficiencies are of small import when compared with Pestalozzi’s influence upon society and education. In the eighteenth century caste ruled through wealth and education, while the masses, who supported the owners of the land in idleness and luxury, were sunk in ignorance, poverty, and vice. The schools for the common people were exceedingly few, the content of education was largely limited by ecclesiastical authority, and the methods were traditional and verbal. The teachers generally had received little training, and were selected at random. Ordinarily the pay was wretched, no lodgings were provided for the teacher, and he had often to add domestic service to his duties, in order to secure food and clothing. In the midst of such conditions appeared this most famous of modern educators, who never ceased to work for the reformation of society. As Voltaire, Rousseau, and others had held that the panacea for the corrupt times was rationalism, atheism, deism, socialism, anarchy, or individualism, Pestalozzi found his remedy in education. Like Rousseau, he keenly felt the injustice, unnaturalness, and degradation of the existing society, but he was not content to stop with mere destruction and negations. He saw what education might do to purify social conditions and to elevate the people by intellectual, moral, and industrial training, and he longed to apply it universally and to develop methods in keeping with nature. [Sidenote: and was the progenitor of all modern pedagogy.] Pestalozzi’s achievements contained the germ of modern pedagogy, as well as of educational reform. It was he that stimulated educational theorists, instead of accepting formal principles and traditional processes, to work out carefully and patiently the development of the child mind and to embody the results in practice. From him have come the prevailing reforms in the present teaching of language lessons, arithmetic, drawing, writing, reading, geography, elementary science, and music. In harmony with his improved methods, Pestalozzi also started a different type of discipline. His work made clear the new spirit in the school by which it has approached the atmosphere of the home. He found the proper relation of pupil and teacher to exist in sympathy and friendship, or, as he states it, in ‘love.’ This attitude, which appears so fully in his kindly treatment of the poor children at Neuhof and Stanz (Fig. 33), constituted the greatest contrast to that of the brutal schools of the times, and introduced a new conception into education. [Sidenote: Switzerland,]