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THE EDUCATION TO BE.

1. Principles and Practice of Early and Infant School Education.  By James Currie, A.M.  Third edition.  Edinburgh:  1861.

2. Papers for the Teacher.  No. 1:  American Contributions to Pedagogy.  Edited by Henry Barnard, LL.D.  New York:  1860.

3. Education; Intellectual, Moral, and Physical.  By Herbert Spencer.  New York:  1861.

4. A Series of School and Family Readers.  Compiled by Marcius Willson.  New York:  1860-1.

5. Primary Object Lessons, for a Graduated Course of Development.  By N.A.  Calkins.  New York:  1861.

6. Annual Reports of Superintendents of Schools:  City of New York, 1861; Oswego, 1860; Chicago, 1861.

7. The New York Teacher.  Monthly.  Albany, Vols. 7-10:  1858-61.

‘The most certain means,’ Beccaria wrote in the preceding century, ’of rendering a people free and happy, is, to establish a perfect method of education.’  If, in this conclusion, Beccaria only reiterates an opinion at least tacitly held long before his time by some of the Grecian sages, still, the later assertion of the principle should, it seems, derive some additional weight from the circumstance of the time allowed in the interim for repeated reconsiderations of the question.  The theologian may interpose, that, toward rendering a people free and happy, the influences of religion must constitute 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,