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 that in which the broad generalizations of genius in the materials of science surpass the poor conceptions that the wild Australian must almost utter audibly in his own ear to realize that he at all possesses them.