Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/225

Rh But all men of a superior culture, though born to wealth, get their education in the same way, only there m this additional mischief to complicate the matter: the burden of self-denial is not borne by the man's own family, but by ether fathers and mothers, other brothers and sisters. They also pay the cost of his culture, bear the burden' for no special end, and have no personal or family joy in the success; they do not even know the scholar they help to train. They who hewed the topstone of society are far away when it is hoisted np with shouting. Most of the youths now-a-days trained at Harvard College are the sons of rich men, yet they also, not less, are educated at the public charge; beneficiaries not of the "Hopkins' Fund," but of the whole community. Society is not yet rich enough to afford so generous a culture to all who ask, who deserve, or who would pay for it a hundred-fold. The accomplished man who sits in his well-endowed scholar" ship at Oxford, or rejoices to be "Master of Trinity," though he have tho estate of tho Westminsters and fatherlands behind him, is still the beneficiary of the public, and owes for his schooling. In the general way, among the industrious classes of New England, a boy earns his living after he is twelve years old. If he gets the superior education of the scholar solely by the pecuniary aid of his father or others, when he is twenty-five and enters on his profession, law, medicine, or divinity, politics, school-keeping, or trade, he has not earned his Latin grammar; has rendered no appreciable service to mankind; others have worked that he, might study, and taught that he might learn. He has not paid the first cent towards his own schooling; he is indebted for it to the whole community. The ox-driver in the fields, the pavior in the city streets, the labourer on the railroad, the lumberer in the woods, the girl in the factory, each has a claim on him. If he despises these persons, or cuts himself off from sympathy with them; if he refuses to perform his function for them after they have done their possible to fit him for it; he is not only the perpetual and us grateful debtor, but is more guilty than the poor man's son who forgets the family that sent him to college: for that family consciously and willingly made tho sacrifice, and got some satisfaction for it in the visible success of