It was on January 14, 1789, in the desolate town of Stanz, “alone, destitute of all tools of teaching, alone!--superintendent, bursar, steward, and even maidservant, in a half-ruined house--surrounded by ignorance, disease, and unwonted things of all kinds,” that a fantastic Swiss began his career of “schoolmaster.” He had in his charge a group of orphan children, which “increased by degrees to eighty; all of different ages, some of good origin, others from the ranks of beggary, and all, with a few exceptions, wholly ignorant” (13: p. 186). As his faithful disciple Krüsi tells us, “in the matter of ordinary acquirements and methods of teaching he was inferior to any good village dominie” (13: p. 188, footnote). Without steadiness, without patience, without order, without art of speech, without clearness of thought, all that he possessed was the burning, self-forgetting enthusiasm of a loving heart, “_die Vaterkraft meines Herzens_.” “What a task,” he says, “imagine it; to elevate these children. What a task!” But he “attempted it, and stood in their midst, uttered various sounds and made them imitate them.” Lo! what was the response that came to this seemingly nonsensical teaching? “Whoever saw it was struck with the effect,” he writes later. “Truly it was a meteor that flashes through the air and vanishes. No one understood its nature. I did not understand it myself. It was the result of a simple psychological idea which had been revealed to inward consciousness, but which I myself was far from clearly understanding” (13: p. 186). Is not this the beginning whereby “the laughing-stock of the passer-by,” “a straw not fit to sustain a cat,” became the corner-stone of modern elementary education? If one looks for an example in which the singleness of a noble purpose and the purity of a loving zeal alone could accomplish a great thing in the world, he will probably find no better one than that of Pestalozzi. Indeed, there is no more interesting and inspiring, though pathetic life, than that of this “greatest pedagogical genius who has ever lived,” as Ziegler calls him. It is a living drama, in which a new spirit of the age, or rather a new prophecy, struggles to realize itself, through the fetters of misunderstanding, the opposition of tradition, and the blows of adverse fate.