42 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings out of the Church (1659). 
Here Milton desires better schools in different parts of England 
for the purpose of educating the clergy, without the necessity of 
their attending the University.- Again, in The Ready and Easy 
Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, Milton’s last direct effort 
in what he believed to be the cause of liberty, he has these remark¬ 
able words on the relation of education to representative govern¬ 
ment : ' ‘ To make the people fittest to choose, and the chosen fittest 
to govern, will be to mend our corrupt and faulty education, to 
teach the people faith, not without virtue, temperance, modesty, 
sobriety, parsimony, justice; not to admire wealth or honor; to 
hate turbulence and ambition; to place every one his private wel¬ 
fare and happiness in the public peace, liberty, and safety.”^ 
Sound education, therefore, is the very basis of Milton’s political 
structure. Even in Paradise Lost, as a friend of mine at a neigh¬ 
boring university has recently pointed out, Milton’s thought was 
occupied with education as well as with theology and ethics.^ 
These examples show that the idea of a better education was 
by no means a Utopian scheme of Milton’s. He connected it with 
practical matters which he believed to be of the highest importance. 
Moreover, the Tractate Of Education, Milton’s principal expres¬ 
sion of his views on the subject, is not a casual or isolated essay. 
In The Second Defense of the People of England there is a passage 
where Milton, in defending himself from the personal attacks of 
a foreign writer, gives rather an extended account of his own life 
and works. After mentioning his writings on the reform of church 
government and on marriage, he says: “I then discussed the 
principles of education in a summary manner, but sufficiently 
copious for those who attend seriously to the subject; than which 
nothing can be more necessary to principle the minds of men in 
virtue, the only genuine source of political and individual liberty, 
the only true safeguard of states, the bulwark of their prosperity 
and renown.”^ Thus Milton represents this work as merely in¬ 
cidental to his earlier writings in the cause of reform. 
That Milton’s opinions were valued, by at least one of his con¬ 
temporaries, is evident, for the Tractate was written at the earnest 
solicitation of a friend—a man of some note in the London of 
^ Prose Works, ed. by St. John, 3:27. 
s lUd., 2:126. 
^ Murray W. Bundy, “Milton’s View of Education in Paradise Lost,” Journal of 
English and Germ. Philology, 21:127. 
Prose Works, 1:259. 
