Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/197

Rh difference in this respect between the North and South. There was never before such industry, such intense activity of head and hand in any nation in a time of peace.

The press encourages the same activity, enterprise, perseverance. Both of these encourage generosity; neither honours the miser, who gets for the sake of getting, or "starves, cheats, and pilfers to enrich an heir he does mot die respectably in Boston, who dies rich and bequeaths nothing to any noble public charity. It encourages industry which accumulates with the usual honesty, and for a rather generous use. The press furnishes us with books exceedingly cheap. We manufacture literature cheaper than any nation except the Chinese. Even the best books, the works of the great masters of thought, are within the reach of an industrious farmer or mechanic, if half-a-dozen families combine for that purpose. The educational power of a few good books scattered through a community is well known.

Then the press circulates, cheap and wide, its newspapers, emphatically the literature of meu who read nothing else; they convey inteiligenoe from all parts of the world, and broaden the minds of home-keeping youths, who need not now have homely wits.

The State also promotes activity, enterprise, hardihood, perseverance, and thrift. The American Government is eminently distinguished by these five qualities. The form of government stimulates patriotism, each man has a share in the public lot. The theocracies, monarchies, and aristocracies of old time have produced good and great examples of patriotism, in the few or the many; but the nobler forms of love of country, of self-denial and disinterested zeal for its sake, are left for a democracy to bring to light.

Here all men. are voters, and all great questions are, apparently and in theory, left to the decision of the whole people. This popular form of government is a great instrument in developing and instructing the mind of the nation. It helps extend and intensify the intelligent activity which is excited by business and the press. Such is the nature of our political institutions that, in the free States, we have produced the greatest degree of national unity of action, with the smallest restriction of personal