Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Politics volume 4 .djvu/204

192 the summer wind,—what would the lighthouse be to look upon or to imagine? What a candlestick for what a candle! Praise it as much as you will; flatter it in the newspapers; vote it "adequate" and the "tallest beacon in the world;" call it the "Pharos of America;" it is all in vain; at the best, it can only attract moths and mosquitoes on a serene night; and, when the storm thunders on that sepulchral rock, it is no light at all; and the whaler may be split asunder, and the Indiaman go to the grave, and the wealth of the merchant be scattered as playthings for the sea, and the bones of the mariner may blanch the bottom of the deep, for all the aid which that thin dazzle can furnish, spite of its lofty tower and loftier praise!

To rule a bank, a factory, or a railroad, when the officer is chosen for business and not charity, to command a packet-ship or a steamboat, you will get a man of real talent in his line of work ; one that has some history, who has made his proof-shot, and shown that he has some mettle in him. But to such a pass has the business of ruling a nation arrived, that, of all the sovereigns of Christian Europe, it is said not more than two, Nicholas of Russia, and Oscar of Sweden, would have been distinguished if born in private stations. The most practical and commercial nation in the world, possessing at this moment a power more eminently great than that of the Roman empire in its palmy time, has for a ruler a quite ordinary woman, who contributes neither ideas nor organizations, and probably could not administer wisely the affairs of a single shire in the island. In this respect, the highest stations of political life seem to have become as barren as the Dead Sea. In selecting our rulers in America, it is long since we have had a man of large powers, even of the sort which the majority of men appreciate in a contemporary, I have sometimes thought men were selected who were thought not strong enough to hurt us much, forgetting that a weak man may sometimes hurt us as much more than a strong one would.

After all this preliminary, let me now say something of the late President Taylor, only further premising that I am here to tell the truth about him, so far as I know it.