Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/222

218 and an implied promise to pay back when he comes of age and takes possession of his educated faculties. He therefore has not only the general debt which he shares with all men, but an obligation quite special and peculiar for his support while at study.

This rule is general, and applies to the class of educated men, with some apparent exceptions, and a very few real ones. Some men are born of poor but strong-bodied parents, and endowed with great abilities; they inherit nothing except their share of the general civilization of mankind, and the onward impulse which that has given. These men devote themselves to study; and having behind them an ancestry of broad-shouldered, hard-handed, stalwart, temperate men, and deep-bosomed, red-armed, and industrious mothers, they are able to do the work of two or three men at the time. Such men work while they study; they teach while they learn; they hew their own way through the wood by superior strength and skill born in their bones, with an axe themselves have chipped out from the stone, or forged of metal, or paid for with the result of their first hewings. They are specially indebted to nobody for their culture. They pay as they go, owing the academic ferryman nothing for setting them over into the elysium of the scholar.

Only few men ever make this heroic and crucial experiment. None but poor men's sons essay the trial. Nothing but poverty has whips sharp enough to sting indolent men, even of genius, to such exertion of the manly part. But even this proud race often runs into another debt: they run up long scores with the body, which must one day be paid "with aching head and squeamish heart-burnings." The credit on account of the hardy fathers is not without limit. It is soon exhausted; especially in a land where the atmosphere, the institutions, and the youth of the people all excite to premature and excessive prodigality of effort. The body takes a mortgage on the spendthrift spirit, demands certain regular periodic payments, and will one day foreclose for breach of condition, impede the spirit's action in the premises, putting a very disagreeable keeper there, and finally expel the prodigal, mortgagor. So it often happens that a man, who in his youth scorned a pecuniary debt to mankind and would receive no favour, even to buy culture with, has yet, unconsciously and against