Comenius and Pestalozzi stand almost alone among the great educational reformers in proclaiming the doctrine of universal education—training for the poor as well as the rich, for the lowly born as well as for the privileged classes, for girls as well as boys. “Popular education,” says Pestalozzi, “once lay before me like an immense marsh, in the mire of which I waded about, until I had discovered the source from which its waters sprang, as well as the causes by which their free course is obstructed, and made myself acquainted with those points from which a hope of draining its pools might be conceived. Ever since my youthful days, the course of my feelings, which rolled on like a mighty stream, was directed to this one point,—to stop the sources of that misery in which I saw the people around me immersed.” Such regeneration he thought could be brought about by consecrated and intelligent schoolmasters, and particularly, as G. Stanley Hall notes in his admirable introduction to the American translation of _Leonard and Gertrude_,[46] “by the love and devotion of noble women overflowing from the domestic circle into the community, by the good Gertrudes of all stations in life, the born educators of the race, whose work and whose ‘key-words’ we men pedagogues must ponder well if our teaching is to be ethically inspired.” The study of nature, and this at first hand, was likewise an inheritance from Comenius. Pestalozzi makes observation the basis of all knowledge. “If I look back and ask myself what I have really done toward the improvement of methods of elementary instruction, I find that in recognizing observation as the absolute basis of all knowledge, I have established the first and most important principle of instruction. I have endeavored to discover what ought to be the character of the instruction itself, and what are the fundamental laws according to which the education of the human race must be determined by nature.”