Yet it can hardly be denied that amid the vast mass of every practical observation and suggestion contained in the educational works with which we are familiar, or even among the really _scientific_ contributors to it, there is very little founded on the great social wants and tendencies of the age. Education is, at present, merely an _art_; it has a right, in common with every conceivable department of knowledge, to be raised to the rank of a _science_. This can only be done by putting it on a progressive basis, and placing it in such a position as to aid in supplying some great demand of the age. The great fact of the time is, the advance from mere art upward to science, from the blossom to the fruit. Practical wants, 'the greatest good for the greatest number,' the fullest development of free labor, the increase of capital, the diminution of suffering, the harmony of interests between capital and labor--all of these are the children of Science and Facts. During the feudal age, nearly all the resources of genius--all the capital of the day--was devoted to mere Art, for the sake of setting off social position and 'idealisms.' As with the nobility and royalty of England at the present day, society enormously overpaid what is, or was, really the police--whose mission it was to keep it in order. But from Friar Bacon to Lord Bacon, a movement was silently progressing, which the present century has just begun to realize. This movement was that of the development of all human ability and natural resources, guided by science. It was a tendency toward the practical, the positive, which is destined in time to bring forth its own new art and literature, is breaking away from the trammels of the old literary or imaginative sway.