Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Politics volume 4 .djvu/117

Rh nations have done the same thing, and we only repeat their experiment. The old devil of conformity says to our American Adam and Eve, " Do this and you shall be as gods," a promise as likely to hold good as the devil's did in the beginning. A man was meant for something more than a tassel to a large estate, and a woman to be more than a rich housekeeper. With this offensive materialism we copy the vices of feudal aristocracy abroad, making our vulgarity still more ridiculous. We are ambitious or proud of wealth, which is but labour stored up, and at the same time are ashamed of labour, which is wealth in process. With all our talk about democracy, labour is thought less honourable in Boston than in Berlin and Leipsic. Thriving men are afraid their children will be shoemakers, or ply some such honourable and useful craft. Yet little pains are taken to elevate the condition or improve the manners and morals of those who do all the manual work of society. The strong man takes care that his children and himself escape that condition. We do not believe that all stations are alike honourable if honourably filled; we have little desire to equalize the burdens of life, so that there shall be no degraded class; none cursed with work, none with idleness. It is popular to endow a college; vulgar to take an interest in common schools. Liberty is a fact, equality a word, and fraternity, we do not think of yet.

In this struggle for material wealth and the social rank which is based thereon, it is amusing to see the shifting of the scenes; the social aspirations of one, and the contempt with which another rebuts the aspirant. An old man can remember when the most exclusive of men, and the most golden, had scarce a penny in their purse, and grumbled at not finding a place where they would. Now the successful man is ashamed of the steps he rose by. The gentleman who came to Boston half a century ago, with all his worldly goods tied up in a cotton handkerchief, and that not of so large a pattern as are made now-a-days, is ashamed to recollect that his father was a currier, or a blacksmith, or a skipper at Barnstable or Beverly; ashamed, also, of his forty or fifty country cousins, remarkable for nothing but their large hands and their excellent memory. Nay, he is ashamed of his own humble beginnings, and