We may pass to another important question with which Mulcaster deals in a spirit in harmony with his enlightened conception of general instruction. His assumption that the day-school is the normal arrangement, and that either an entirely private or a boarding-school education requires to be justified by special circumstances, gives him a far wider outlook and a safer standpoint than can be claimed for theorists, whose ideal, like that of Locke, regards only the upbringing of a gentleman’s son at home under a tutor, or, like that of Milton, involves the collection of large numbers in boarding establishments of a conventual nature. This is a matter that is naturally related to the extension of educational opportunities throughout all classes of the community. As long as only a select few were thought fit for learning, residence in the monastery was almost an affair of necessary convenience, but when teaching came to be more widely offered, the day-school became a recognised institution, and such other arrangements as implied greater expenditure were retained only by the rich, as instruments of social exclusiveness. It is in countries where distinctions of rank are comparatively little marked that the day-school system has flourished most, and the partiality shown in Mulcaster’s day for the services of a private tutor, and in subsequent times for the boarding-school, is certainly to be taken in great measure as an assertion of class superiority. Mulcaster was no democrat, but he saw that the rich had more to lose than to gain by arrangements that unduly restricted their experience. Moreover he clearly discerned the importance of the family as the true social unit, the nursery of the virtues that should be developed in the school, and find exercise in the public, as well as the private, conduct of life. It is not his fault that his countrymen have become bound hand and foot to a system under which the vast majority of well-to-do parents hand over their children, body and soul, from the tenderest years to the care of professional upbringers, divesting themselves with a light heart of the most precious responsibilities that nature has conferred on them. “How can education be private?” he asks, “It is an abuse of the name as well as of the thing.” But on the other hand he urges--“All the considerations which persuade people rather to have their children taught at home than along with others outside, especially with regard to their manners and behaviour, form arguments for their boarding at least at home, if the parents will take their position seriously.... They are distinct offices, to be a parent, and a teacher, and the difficulties of upbringing are too serious for all the responsibilities to be thrown into the hands of one alone.”