As to the subsequent stages of human life, Froebel never fulfilled his promise to write about them. The attention and efforts of his later years were entirely concerned with a plan for the education of early childhood. And thus he is remembered and is to be remembered forever as the founder of the kindergarten system. The idea of the kindergarten rests on the belief that on the complete unfolding of the inner power of childhood in its all-sidedness, on the full gratification of its peculiar needs and requirements, depends the normal development of boyhood, of youth, of man--the entire destiny of human life. This has been recognized by every educator, but never before so keenly and clearly as by Froebel. Moreover, for Rousseau, early childhood was looked upon as purely a physical stage, when education should be purely negative. “Stand aside and let Nature herself work” was his motto. But Froebel saw plenty of room here for human coöperation with the working of Nature. Not “Stand aside,” but “Come, let us live with and for our children,” was what he exclaimed (5: p. 89). He saw that the school cannot do much with the spoiled and neglected child sent from the imperfect home, and that the present home does not well understand nor provide sufficiently for the nature and requirements of the child’s soul as well as body. Thus he proclaimed: “All school education was yet without a proper initial foundation, and that, therefore, until the education of the nursery was reformed, nothing solid and worthy could be attained” (2: p. 35). The kindergarten movement was originally a movement for nursery reform. It was intended to show mothers an ideal nursery, and also to supplement, where needed, the work of the home. It is evident that he had a sort of education of parents in view when he first started the kindergarten. “He repeated this again and again,” Baroness von Marenholz-Bülow, the champion of the kindergarten movement, tells us. “‘The destiny of nations lies far more in the hands of women--the mothers--than in the possessors of power, or of those innovators who for the most part do not understand themselves. We must cultivate women who are the educators of the human race, else the new generation cannot accomplish its task.’ This was almost always the sum of his discourse” (14: p. 4). Certainly his kindergarten was set as the model for mothers to copy in their homes. We find the following passage in one of his letters: “Let young women go there and see the development of child life going on before their eyes, noticing and understanding the laws and working of it.” “There is little hope for improvement until mothers will begin to educate themselves. Let them attend kindergarten and study the system themselves” (8: p. 64).