Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Politics volume 4 .djvu/151

Rh men of facts and figures, not so full of ideas as of precedents. They are called common-sense men; not having too much common-sense to be understood. They are not likely to be fallen in with far off at sea; quite as seldom out of their reckoning in ordinary weather. Such men are excellent statesmen in common times, but in times of trouble, when old precedents will not suit the new case, and men must be guided by the nature of man, not his history, they are not strong enough for the place, and get pushed off by more constructive heads.

These men are the administrators, or managers. If they have a little less of practical sense, such men fall a little below, and turn out only critics, of whom I will not now stop to discourse.

To have a railroad, there must have been first the discoverers, who found out the properties of wood and iron, fire and water, and their latent power to carry men over the earth; next the organizers, who put these elements together, surveyed the route, planned the structure, set men to grade the hill, to till the valley, and pave the road with iron bars; and then the administrators, who after all that is done, procure the engines, engineers, conductors, ticket-distributors, and the rest of the "hands;" they buy the coal and see it is not wasted, fix the rates of fare, calculate the savings, and distribute the dividends. The discoverers and organizers often fare hard in the world, lean men, ill-clad and suspected, often laughed at, while the administrator is thought the greater man, because he rides over their graves and pays the dividends, where the organizer only called for the assessments, and the discoverer told what men called a dream. What happens in a railroad happens also in a Church, or a State.

Let us for a moment compare these three classes of great men. Measured by the test referred to, the discoverers are the greatest of all. They anticipate the human race, with long steps, striding before their kind. They learn not only from the history of man, but man's nature ; not by empirical experience alone, but by a transcendent intuition of truth, now seen as a law, now as an idea. They are wiser than experience, and by divination through their nobler nature, know at once what the human race has not learned in its thousands of years, kindling their lamp at