If the mediæval thinkers were convinced that, on the whole, nothing could be done to rectify men’s institutions, while men themselves were so easily bitten by corruption, their successors in the nineteenth century committed the opposite kind of error and absurdity: they believed that human nature was unsocial and obstreperous only because the church, the state, or the institution of property perverted every human impulse. Men like Rousseau, Bentham, Godwin, Fourier, and Owen might be miles apart from one another in their criticism of society, but there was an underlying consensus in their belief in human nature. They looked upon human institutions as altogether external to men; these were so many straitjackets that cunning rulers had thrown over the community to make sane and kindly people behave like madmen; and they could conceive of changing the institutions without changing the habits and redirecting the impulses of the people by whom and for whom they had been created. If one devised neat political constitutions, with plenty of checks and balances, or laid out pauper colonies and invited the countryside to make use of them--well, all would be to the good. There was, it is true, one great exception to this notion that institutions might be reformed without, in that process, making over men. I refer to the belief in education which accompanied these classic criticisms of human institutions; for this seems to point to a perception that men needed a special training and discipline before they could enter freely into the life of a reconstituted community. But upon examination, this exception melts away. The emphasis in the new programs of education was upon the formal, institutional acquirement of the apparatus of knowledge; and they, too, began with the clean slate of a new generation, whereas the critical difficulty was that of getting the adult community sufficiently educated, in a realistic sense, to be able to make over its educational institutions; and in this respect the reformers were just as much in Cuckooland as--well, Campanella. So it follows that the Country House and Coketown shared honors in building up the new educational organizations; and the outcome of the sort of education that the public school and college provided was to make these redoubtable utopias practically unassailable. Besides, there were the adults: consider Robert Owen!