Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/240

236 treachery, far more than Jesus who laid down his life for men whose money is deemed better than manhood. It must indeed be so. Any outrage that is profitable to the controlling portion of society is sure to bo welcome to the leaders of the State, and is soon pronounced divine by the leaders of the church.

It would seem as if the pen ought to represent the favourite mode of power at a college; but even there the waters of Pactolus are thought fairer than the Castalian, Heliconian spring, or "Silca’s brook that flowed fast by the oracle of God. "The college is named after the men of wealth, not genius. How few professorships in America bear the names of men of science or letters, and not of mere rich men! Which is thought the greatest benefactor of a college, he who endows it with money or with mind? Even there it is the purse, not the pen that is the symbol of honour, and the University is "up for California," not Parnassus.

Even in politics the purse turns the scale. Let a party wrestle never so hard, it cannot throw the dollar. Money controls and commands talent, not talent money. The successful shopkeeper frowns on and browbeats the accomplished politician, who has too much justice for the wharf and the board of brokers; he notices that the rich men avert their eye, or keep their beaver down, trembles and is sad, fearing that his daughter will never find a fitting spouse. The purse buys up able men of superior education, corrupts and keeps them as its retained attorneys, in congress or the church, not as counsel but advocate, bribed to make the worse appear the better reason, and so help money to control the State and wield its power against the interest of mankind. This is perfectly well known; but no politician or minister, bribed to silence or to speech, ever loses his respectability because he is bought by respectable men,—if he get his pay. In all countries but this the office is before the purse; here the State is chiefly an accessory of the Exchange, and our politics only mercantile. This appears sometimes against our will, in symbols not meant to tell the tale. Thus in the House of Representatives in Massachusetts, a cod-fish stares the speaker in the face—not a very intellectual looking fish. When it was put there it was a symbol of the riches of the