Like strong beliefs had they about the profession of teaching as separate from parenthood and investigation. It meant disloyalty on the part of most citizens to their most immediate duties. Who could develop the instincts of youth and be so deeply interested in his future welfare as those who were bound to him by the ties of nature? And then, when he had matured and needed the wider education, who could give it him so well as those who were most familiar with its special objects and themes? If he was to follow the art and knowledge of some other family, the sooner he went under the tutelage of its representatives after his intellectual life began the better. The only portion of their youth that the young men and women could spend with profit under others than their parents or proparents was the period of general knowledge, of summarising the results of the whole past. The representative of one of the supervising families alone could give with ease a survey of the whole field of knowledge and art and action. They and they alone were in any way an approach to the profession of teaching, and they were saved from the petrifying influence of pedagogy by their wider duties in correlating the sciences and arts, the fields of knowledge and action. Thus reason and the emotions were kept from getting benumbed by the vanity of a too easy superiority. The beings they pitied most in the world were the despot and the professional teacher; for these get buried in unreality before the life is out of them, and are so unquestionably supreme that nothing but what is pleasing to their minds dare approach them. They fall out of relation to truth, and it is difficult for them ever to regain that wholesome fear of contradiction and that shyness before destiny which constitute the essence of sanity; they have to become intolerant. The schoolmaster soon becomes intellectually barren; the despot soon falls the victim of luxury and of illusion. For the sake of the grown men and women who might be sacrificed to it, as well as of the children and youth, they abolished the profession of teacher. Individual training was the only true foundation of a sound progress. Two might be permitted to form a companionship in education and study, just as two might form the friendship of marriage; but that was only when the periods of possible atavism had been safely traversed. Nor must they be wholly given up to their comradeship; the parental influence and solitude must continue to govern their lives. Thyriel and I had become educational companions and friends; but every item of our education was supervised without our noticing or feeling galled by it. There was no prying into details; but every change in our character and every stage in our training was tested at the periodical investigation of the citizens. Our parents or proparents took the keenest interest in all that we did and all that we tended to become.