Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/193

Rh got along with tho smallest amount that is possible or reputable. Only a few will strive for the most they can get. There will be many a thousand farmers, traders, and mechanics in their various callings, manual and intellectual, to a single philosopher. This also is as it should be, and corresponds with the nature of man and his function on the earth. Still all have the natural right to the means of education to this extent, by fulfilling its condition.

To accomplish this work, tho democratic education of the whole people, with the aim of making them men, wo want public institutions founded by the people, paid for by the public money; institutions well endowed, well attended, watched over well, and proportion ably honoured; we want teachers, able men, well disciplined, well paid, and honoured in proportion to their work. It is a good thing to educate the privileged classes, priests in a theocracy, and gentlemen in an aristocracy. Though they are few in number, it is a great work; the servants thereof are not too well paid, nor too much held in esteem in England, nor in Rome, nor too well furnished with apparatus. But tho public education of a whole people is a greater work, far more difficult, and should be attended with corresponding honour, and watched over even more carefully by the State.

After the grown men of any country have provided for their own physical wants, and insured the needful physical comforts, their most important business is to educate themselves still further, and train up the rising generation to their own level. It is important to leave behind us cultivated lands, houses and shops, railroads and mills, but more important to leave behind us men grown, men that are men; such are the seed of material wealth,—not it of them. The highest use of material wealth is its educational function.

Now the attainments of the human race increase with each generation; the four leading nations of Christendom, England, France, Germany, and the United States, within a hundred years, have apparently, at the least, doubled their spiritual attainments in the free States of America, there is a constant and rapid increase of wealth, far beyond the simultaneous increase of numbers; so not only does the educational achievement of mankind become greater each age, but the power of the State to afford each man a