Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/123

Rh rich and poor, good and bad, study the phenomena, of trade as astronomers tho phenomena of the heavens, and from the observed facts, by the inductive method of philosophy, construct the ethics of trade, and you will find one great maxim to underlie tho whole: Money must he made. Money-making is to the ethics of trade what attraction is to the material world; what truth is to the intellect, and justice in morals. Other things must yield to that; that to nothing. In the effort to comply with this universal law of trade, many a character gives way; many a virtue gets pushed aside; the higher, nobler qualities of a man are held in small esteem.

This characteristic of the trading class appears in the thought of the people as well as their actions. You see it in the secular literature of our times; in the laws, even in. the sermons; nobler things give way to love of gold. So in an ill-tended garden, in some bed where violets sought to open their fragrant bosoms to the sun, have I seen a cabbage come up and grow apace, with thick and vulgar stalk, with coarse and vulgar leaves, with rank unsavoury look; it thrust aside the little violet, which, underneath that impenetrable leaf, lacking the morning sunshine and the dew of night, faded and gave up its tender life; but above tho grave of the violet there stood the cabbage, green, expanding, triumphant, and all fearless of the frost. Yet the cabbage also had its value and its use.

There are men in Boston, some rich, some poor, old and young, who are free from this reproach ; men that have a well-proportioned love of money, and make the pursuit thereof an effort for all the noble qualities of a man. I know some such men. not very numerous anywhere, men who show that the common business of life is the place to mature great virtues in; that the pursuit of wealth, successful or not, need hinder the growth of no excellence, but may promote all manly life. Such men stand here as violets among the cabbages, making a fragrance and a loveliness all their own; attractive anywhere, but marvellous in such a neighbourhood as that. Look next on the morals of Boston, as indicated by the newspapers, the daily and the weekly press. Take the whole newspaper literature of Boston, cheap and costly,