onstitute the most efficacious, the
dominant agency. But when we admit that man is _one_,--that heart and
hand are not only alike, but together subjects for culture,--then it
will be seen that religion falls into its place in the one comprehensive
scheme of human education; and we discover that Beccaria's position,
instead of being assailed from this point of view, becomes, according as
our conception of the case is truthful and clear, correspondingly
strengthened.

The ease, however, with which we utter those little qualifiers, 'free'
and 'happy,' observed to stand here in the positive or absolute degree,
and not in any degree of comparison, is noticeable. For 'degrees of
comparison' are always concessions of steps _down_, even when they most
stoutly present themselves as steps _up_. Were all men simply wise and
just, all predicating of certain men that they were _more_, or _most,
wise_ or _just_, would be at once absurd and without utility. It is our
intensified adjective that confesses fatally the prior fact of a coming
short, and by an amount indefinitely great, of the simple, absolute
standard. So, to come once for all to ridding ourselves of comparative
forms of speech, and to be warranted to look for the rendering of a
people, in the simple, positive sense, free and happy, would be, in the
expressive language of one 'aunt Chloe' respecting the 'glory' to which
she aspired, 'a mighty thing!' On the other hand, so far have our race,
up to this moment, and without a single decided instance in exception,
fallen short of aught that could be styled a perfect method of
education, and so closely must educational training affect every nascent
man or woman in those vitalest particulars,--character and
capability,--that, could the perfect method sought once be brought into
effective operation on the plastic child-manhood of a nation, or of all
nations, we are not prepared to deny the possibility of any results
therefrom to humanity, even the grandest utterable or conceivable.
Admitting such method found, and in process, Beccaria could have
dispensed with his tell-tale 'most,' and written, The certain means of
rendering a people free and happy, is, to establish a perfect method of
education.

To secure, therefore, so great an end: First, find--the perfect
educational method! The recipe is brief; the labor it imposes is more
than Herculean. To measure it, we should have to find the ratio in
which mind transcends matter, or