Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/32

Rh common school. Many a Methodist and Universalist minister, many a member of Congress, has been graduated at that beneficent institution. The intelligence and riches of the North are due to the common schools. In the free States books are ubundant; newspapers in all hands; skilled labour abounds. Body runs to brain, and work to thought. The head saves the hands. Under the benignant influence of public education, the children of the Irish emigrant, poor and despised, grow up to equality with the descendants of the rich; two generations will efface the difference between them. I have seen, of a Sunday afternoon, a thousand young Irish women, coming out of a Catholic church, all well dressed, with ribbons and cheap ornaments, to help elevate their self-respect; and when remembering the condition of these same women in their native land, barefoot, dirty, mendicant, perhaps thievish, glad of a place to serve at two pounds a year, I have begun to see the importance of America to the world; and have felt as John Adams, when he wrote in his diary, "I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design of Providence, for the illumination of the ignorant, and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind, all over the earth." The educational value of American institutions, in the free States is seldom appreciated. The schools open to all, where all classes of the people freely mingle, and the son of a rude man is brought into contact with the good manners and self-respectful. deportment of children from more fortunate homes; the churches, where everybody is welcome (if not black); the business which demands intelligence, and educates the great mass of the people; the public lectures, delivered in all the considerable towns of New England, the winter through; the newspapers abundant, cheap, discussing everything with as little reserve as the summer wind ; the various social meetings of incorporated companies to discuss their affairs ; the constitution of the towns, with their meetings, two or three times a year, when officers are chosen, and taxes voted, and all municipal affairs abundantly discussed; the public pro-