Crimes were sanctified in war and politics; the evil past became a fetich; impetuosity, anger, hatred, revenge, falsehood, lust, were tricked out in the apparel of virtues, and made the aims and the glories of the leisured. It was the associative method of education that produced such results. And, after the great purgation of the race, they were amazed to see how blind they had been. Would any civilised parents agree to send out their child into the wilderness there to spend the educable period of life amongst savages, primitive in their instincts and habits, even if the savages had the most persuasive and influential missionaries amongst them who would change them in a few years into civilised beings? Yet this was what their ancestors had been doing when they concentrated youth in schools and universities. Never before the age of twenty-five were the Limanoran youth allowed any freedom of social intercourse, and then only for brief periods and under the supervision of sages. And if there was any sign of atavism apparent in them at their first draught of social life, back they were sent into isolation, that their character might be strengthened, and the stage of peril passed. Even when socially enfranchised, their first companions had lived beyond their fiftieth year. By that boundary-line, it was held, all the risk of atavism had passed, and all the chances and possibilities of the character had been discovered and provided for. It was not till the seventy-fifth year that anyone was supposed to be fit for parenthood; for then, though the faculties and powers still went on improving even till death, most of them had reached the maturity of self-control and intersubordination; then reason had begun to be master, and all the stages of the development of man before the final purgation of the race had been traversed.