Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/215

Rh America has nothing to fear from any foreign foe; for nearly forty-years she has had no quarrel but of her own making. Such is our enterprise and our strength, that few nations would carelessly engage in war with us; none without great provocation. In the midst of us is our danger; not in foreign arms, but in tho ignorance and the wickedness of our own children, tho ignorance of the many, the wickedness of the few who will load tho many to their ruin. Tho bulwark of America is not the army and navy of the United States, with all the men at public cost instructed in the art of war; it is not the swords and muskets idly bristling in our armouries; it is not the cannon and the powder carefully laid by; no, nor is it yet the forts, which frown in all their grim barbarity of stone along the coast, defacing tho landscape, else so fair; these might all be destroyed to-night, and tho nation be as safe as now. Tho more effectual bulwark of America is her schools. The cheap spelling-book, or tho vane on her school-house is a better symbol of the nation than "the star-spangled banner;" the printing-press does more than the cannon; the press is mightier than the sword. The army that is to keep our liberties—you are part of that, the noble army of teachers. It is you who are to make a great nation greater, even wise and good,—the next generation better than their sires.

Europe shows us, by experiment, that a republic cannot be made by a few well-minded men, however well-meaning. They tried for it at Rome, full of enlightened priests; in Germany, the paradise of the scholar, but there was not a people well educated, and a democracy could not stand upright long enough to be set a going. In France, where men arc better fitted for the experiment than elsewhere in continental Europe, you see what comes of it—the first step is a stumble, and for their president the raw republicans chose an autocrat, not a democrat; not a mere soldier, but only the name of a soldier one that thinks it an insult if liberty, equality, and fraternity be but named! Think you a democracy can stand without the education of all; not barely tho smallest pittance thereof which will keep a live soul in a live body, but a large, generous cultivation of mind and conscience, heart and soul? A