Let us conjure up the long row of theoretical children of a bygone age, painfully pathetic in their staidness, closely imprisoned. They began with Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), the iconoclast, who attacked civil society, the family, the state, the church, and from whose pen the school did not escape chastisement. His universal cry of “back to nature” frightened the conservative; even Voltaire could not refrain, on reading the essay dealing with the origin of inequality among men, to write him: “Never has any one employed so much genius to make us into beasts. When one reads your book he is seized at once with a desire to go down on all-fours.” Rousseau’s “Émile, or Treatise on Education” (1762) was wholly revolutionary; it tore down ancient theories, such as those practised by Dr. Isaac Watts upon his “ideal” boy and girl; all existent educational strictures were ignored. Rousseau applied to childhood his belief in the free unfolding of man’s nature; however impracticable his methods, he loosed the chains that held fast the claims of childhood, and recognised their existence. He set the pendulum swinging in the human direction; he turned men’s minds upon the study of the child as a child, and, because of this, takes his place at the head of modern education. He opened the way for a self-conscious striving on the part of authors to meet the demands of a child’s nature, by furnishing the best literary diet--according to educational theories--for juvenile minds. Revolutionary in religious as well as in political and social ideals, Rousseau’s educational machinery was destined to be infused, by some of his zealous followers, with a piousness which he never would have sanctioned. Training should be natural, says Rousseau; the child should discover beauty, not be told about it; should recognise spontaneously what he is now taught. Education should be progressive; at the same time it should be negative. This sounds contradictory, but Rousseau would keep his child a child until the age of twelve; he would prevent him from knowing through any mental effort; he would have him grow like “Topsy” in animal spirits, his mind unbridled and imbibing facts as his lungs breathe in air. Yet inconsistency is evident from the outset: the child must observe, at the same time he must not remember. Is it possible, as Professor Payne challenges, to form the mind before furnishing it? Rousseau’s precepts are wise and brilliant. We hear him exclaiming: “It is less consequence to prevent him [the child] from dying than to teach him how to live;” “The man who has lived most is not he who has numbered the most years, but he who has had the keenest sense of life;” “The best bed is that which brings us the best sleep.” These aphorisms are as apt as those of Franklin; but in their exercise it is necessary to consider the concomitants brought into play.