Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/230

226 should remain always a thought; while in their own heart they disdain all authority but that of truth, justice, and love, they leave tho people subject to no rule but the priest, tho magistrate, and old custom, which usurp the place of reason, conscience, and the affections. There is a very enlightened pulpit, and a very dull audience. In America, it is said, for every dough-faced representative there is a dough-faced constituency; but in Germany there is not an intelligent people for each intelligent scholar. So on condition a great thought be true and revolutionary, it is hard to get it made a thing. Ideas go into a nunnery, not a family. Phidias must keep his awful Jove only in his head; there is no marble to carve it on. Eichhorn and Strauss, and Kant and Hegel, with all their pother among the learned, have kept no boor from the communion-table, nor made him discontented with the despotism of the State. They wrote for scholars, perhaps for gentlemen, for the enlightened, not for the great mass of the people, in whom they had no confidence. There is no class of hucksters of thought, who retail philosophy to the million. The million have as yet no appetite for it. So the German scholar is hindered from his function on either hand by the power of the government, or the ignorance of the people. He talks to scholars and not men; his great ideas are often as idle as shells in a lady's cabinet.

In America all is quite different. There are no royal or patrician patrons, no plebeian clients in literature, no immoveable aristocracy to withstand or even retard the new genius, talent, or skill of the scholar. There is no class organized, accredited, and confided in, to resist a new idea only the unorganised inertia of mankind retards the circulation of thought and the march of men. Our historical men do not found historical families; our famous names of to-day are all new names in the State. American aristocracy is bottomed on money which no unnatural laws make steadfast and immoveable. To exclude a scholar from the company of rich men, is not to exclude him from an audience that will welcome and appreciate.

Then the government does not Interfere to prohibit the free exercise of thought. Speaking is free, preaching free, printing free. No administration in America could put down a newspaper or suppress the discussion of an unwel-