Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/12

8 of their wealth, their knowledge, and their power, and should be their boast and their glory. You see signs of this ignorance and this shame: there must not be shops under your Atheneum, it would not be in good taste; you may store tobacco, cider, rum, under the churches, out of sight, you must have no shop there; it would be vulgar. It is not thought needful, perhaps not proper, for the merchant's wife and daughter to understand business, it would not be becoming. Many are ashamed of their calling, and, becoming rich, paint on the doors of their coach, and engrave on their seal, some lion, griffin, or unicorn, with partisans and maces to suit ; arms they have no right to, perhaps have stolen out of some book of heraldry. No man paints thereon a box of sugar, or figs, or candles couchant; a bale of cotton rampant; an axe, a lapstone, or a shoe hammer saltant. Yet these would be noble, and Christian withal. The fighters gloried in their horrid craft, and so made it pass for noble, but with us a great many men would be thought "the tenth transmitter of a foolish face," rather than honest artists of their own fortune ; prouder of being born than of having lived never so manfully.

In virtue of its strength and position, this class is the controlling one in politics. It mainly enacts the Jaws of this State and the nation; makes them serve its turn. Acting consciously or without consciousness, it buys up legislators when they are in the market; breeds them when the market is bare. It can manufacture governors, senators, judges, to, suit its purposes, as easily as it can make cotton cloth. It pays them money and honours; pays them for doing its work, not another's. It is fairly and faithfully represented by them. Our popular legislators are made in its image; represent its wisdom, foresight, patriotism and conscience. Your Congress is its mirror.

This class is the controlling one in the churches, none the less, for with us fortunately the churches have no existence independent of the wealth and knowledge of the people. In the same way it buys up the clergymen, hunting them out all over the land; the clergymen who will do its work, putting them in comfortable places. It drives off such as interfere with its work, saying, "Go starve, you and your children! "It raises or manufactures others to suit its taste.