Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/228

224 own advantage; he is also to represent truth, Justice, beauty, philanthropy, and religion—the highest facts of human experience ; ho must be common, but not vulgar, and, as a star, must dwell apart from the vulgarity of the selfish and the low. He may win money without doing this, get fame and power, and thereby seem to pay mankind for their advance to him, while he rides upon their neck; but as he has not paid back the scholar's cost, and in the scholar's way, he is a debtor still, and owes for his past culture and present position.

Such is the position of the scholar everywhere, and such his consequent obligation. But in America there are some circumstances which make the position and the duty still more important. Beside the natural aristocracy of genius, talent, and educated skill, in most countries there is also a conventional and permanent nobility based on royal or patrician descent and immoveable aristocracy. Its members monopolize the high places of society, and if not strong by nature are so by position. Those men check the natural power of the class of scholars. The descendant of some famous chief of old time takes rank before the Bacons, the Shakespeares, and the Miltons of new families,—born yesterday, to-day gladdened and gladdening with the joy of their genius,—usurps their place, and for a time "shoves away the worthy bidden guest" from the honours of the public board. Here there is no such class: a man born at all is well born ; with a great nature, nobly born; the career opens to all that can run, to all men that wish to try; our aristocracy is moveable, and the scholar has scope and verge enough.

Germany has the largest class of scholars ; men of talent, sometimes of genius, of great working power, exceedingly well furnished for their work, with a knowledge of the past and the present. On the whole, they seem to have a greater power of thought than the scholars of any other land. They live in a country where intellectual worth is rated at its highest value. As England is the paradise of the patrician and the millionnaire, so is Germany for the man of thought; Goethe and Schiller and the Humboldts took precedence of the mere conventional aristocracy. The empire of money is for England; that of mind is for