In free states, again, the contrary course will best promote the ends of government; the schools must be strictly public, and not merely theoretically but practically open to all. There should be no compulsion to attend them, but ignorance of the things there taught should involve a forfeiture of civil rights as much as being of unsound mind; for in truth, an ignorant man is not of sound mind, any more than one unable to use all his limbs is of sound body. Here the discipline must be very severe. A spirit rigidly puritanical must pervade the studies and preside over the amusements. Every tendency irreligious, immoral, ungentlemanly, as unworthy the dignity of freedom, should be nipped in the bud. The students must be taught to despise all other distinctions but those of virtue and genius, in other words the power to serve the community. They should be taught to contemplate humanity as in other respects wholly on the same level, with nothing above it but the laws. The teachers must be dependent on the people alone, and owe their success to their own abilities and popular manners. And this last in a great measure was the spirit of Athenian education.[804] Footnote 804: The advantages of which were so much coveted by foreigners, that they sent their children in crowds to be educated at Athens.—Æsch. Epist. Orat. Att. xii. 214. The best proof[805] that could be furnished of the excellence of a system of education would be its rendering a people almost independent of government, that is swayed more by their habits than by the laws. This was preëminently the case with the Athenians. They required to be very little meddled with by their rulers. Instructed in their duties and the reason which rendered them duties, accustomed from childhood to perform them, they lived as moral and educated men live still, independent of the laws. Footnote 805: A commonwealth, says Plato, once well constituted will proceed like an ever rolling circle. For by persevering in good training and instruction, the minds and disposition of the people will be rendered good, and these again in their turn will improve the system of training and instruction, and even the race of man itself, as the breed of other animals, is rendered more excellent by care.—De Rep. t. vi. p. 173. Cf. Isocrates, Areop. § 14. seq.