The result appears to have been a conviction that the true element of human progress was to be found less in correction of the adult than in training of the youth. His mind imbued with the two great ideas of freedom and education, he returned to his native Bern; but taking part there against the French, he was banished, remaining in Germany an exile for several years, and during that period planning emigration, with several friends, to the United States. This intention he abandoned, on being recalled to his native country, and there offered important diplomatic and military service. In the latter capacity he quelled an insurrection of the peasantry in the Oberland; but, prompted by that sympathy for the laboring classes which was a strong element in his character, he granted these people terms so liberal that his Government refused to ratify them, whereupon he threw up his commission, recurring to his favorite educational projects, and serving for a time on the Board of Education in Bern. But it soon became apparent that the ideas of his colleagues and himself differed too widely to permit united action. They were thinking of the commonplace routine of school instruction,--reading, writing, arithmetic, and the like. He looked to education as the regenerating agent of the world,--that agent without the aid of which liberty runs into license, and the rule of the many, as he had witnessed it in terror-stricken France, may become one of the worst forms of despotism. He looked beyond mere pedagogical routine or formal learning, to the living spirit,--to the harmonious development of every human faculty and affection, intellectual, moral, spiritual. Resigning his situation on the Bernese Board of Education, Fellenberg expended a large fortune in the purchase of the estate of HOFWYL, about two leagues from Bern, and the erection there of the building necessary to carry into effect his own peculiar views. It was a favorite idea of his, that society can be most effectually influenced for good by training its extremes in social position: those, on the one hand, who are born to wealth and station, whence are usually chosen lawgivers, statesmen, leaders of public opinion; and those, on the other hand, born to a heritage of ignorance and neglect, and too often trained even from tender age to vice and violence. He sought to bring these extremes of European society into harmonious relation with each other,--to raise the one from hereditary dependence and degradation, to imbue the other with healthy ideas of true nobility in place of the morbid prejudices of artificial rank. In both these efforts he was eminently successful,--in the latter, more so, in my judgment, than any educator of his age.