As soon as the great exilings had been completed, the Limanorans recognised that the best chance of swift progress was the selection and preservation of the finest variants in their character and thoughts. They therefore abolished the profession of teacher, that manufacturer of uniformity, and all schools and universities, hot-beds of convention, worship of antiquity, and retrogression. They by no means abolished education; they recreated it, intensified it, and made it the chief function of the community. The whole time and energies of the parents, or, as the case might be, of the proparents, were given up for a period of from fifty to seventy years to the training and moulding of each child. Nothing was left to nature or haphazard. And every new tendency or faculty that was discovered in the pupil was recorded and reported to the council of sages. It was discussed by them, and, if judged to be hostile to the progress of the race, the parents were assisted in eradicating it; if manifestly progressive, every means was taken to make it grow; if doubtful in its results, it was submitted to the community, and their instincts soon brought them to a decision. Thus it was that their world was being continually renovated. Never was an idea or method of action rejected simply because it was new. Every opportunity of advance was seized and tested. Every suggestion of a new direction of progress was investigated and followed out till it was seen to be impracticable. And, to prevent emphasising the old and outworn or reviving the past, the young were isolated from one another; for, as the embryo records in its growth the stages of animalism through which terrestrial life passed upwards from the unicellular to the complex human organisation, so the immature periods that come between infancy and full manhood record human development, prehistoric as well as historic. The long ages of primitive futility in presence of the powers of nature are abbreviated into the helpless years of infancy. Prehistoric savagery shows itself in various traces in the rebellious, adventure-loving, omnivorous phase of boyhood. The first stages of civilisation appear in the early years of puberty; its later stages in the approach to full manhood. The imperfect past ever springs up like weeds amid the growth of the new life, and will choke it if encouraged. And nothing, they held, gave such persistence to the evils and imperfections of the past, thus appearing in early life, as the gregariousness of youth. Nothing had done so great a wrong to the race, or had so hindered its progress, as their former education system with its schools and universities. To throw men in the immature stages of their life into close intercourse was to confirm their immaturities, to encourage atavism, to make the past tyrannise over the future. As long as their old system continued, their civilisation was enslaved to the times that were gone, and imagination deified the world as it had been.