In our time, when we have gradually excluded moral teaching and training almost entirely from our schools and our methods of education, this phase of the ideal education of the masses is particularly interesting. Milton declared that "the main skill and groundwork of education will be to temper the pupils with such lectures and explanations as will draw them into willing obedience, inflamed with the study of learning and the admiration of virtue, stirred up with high hopes of living to be brave men and worthy patriots." Their great stone-books, the cathedrals, where all who came could read the life of the Lord, the frequent reminders of the lives of the saints, doers among men who forgot themselves and thought of others, the fraternal obligations of the gilds and their intercourse with each other, all these constituted the essence of an education as nearly like that demanded by Milton as can well be imagined. It seems far-fetched to go back five, six, even seven centuries to find such ideals in practice, but the educator who is serious and candid with himself will find it easy to discover the elements of a wonderful intellectual and, above all, moral training of the people, that is the whole people from the lowest to the highest, in these early days. {197} CYCLES OF FEMININE EDUCATION AND INFLUENCE {198} "And if I am right nothing can be more foolish than our modern fashion of training men and women differently, whereby one-half of the power of the city is lost. For reflect--if women are not to have the education of men some other must be found for them, and what other can we propose?" --Plato, _Laws_ (Jowett), p. 82. Scribner, 1902. {199} CYCLES OF FEMININE EDUCATION AND INFLUENCE [Footnote 15] [Footnote 15: The material for this was gathered for a lecture on the History of Education delivered for the Academy of the Sacred Heart, Kenwood, Albany, N. Y., and St. Joseph's College, Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, Pa. Very nearly in its present form the address was delivered before the League for the Civic Education of Women, at the Colony Club, New York City, in the winter of 1910.]