Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/143

Rh Franklin be poor, and a tallow-chandler, nobody thinks much better of him because he had the greatest of all Americans for his ancestor; and if he is rich, nobody will much care whether he is the son of a tallow-chandler or the greatest American. In Boston, when men set up a picture or statue of that great, noble man, they do not ask the tallow-chandlers, the working men, nor the philosophers, the thinking men, to come and do it; they ask only the rich men, who represent the wealth of labour, and rhetoricians, whose words but ventilate the thought of some great actual thinker, probably a dead one; they do not ask either the present or the future Franklins to do the work.

In a New England town, within forty years, four men—each poor at first, rather mean and dishonourable, with great mercantile talent for acquisition, the hungry eye of covetousness, and the iron fist of accumulation—have died and left some eight millions of dollars: their children now occupy the foremost social positions in that town. So long as the live money is above ground and circulating, nobody counts them dishonoured by the humble station or pecuniary vices of the dead covetousness beneath. If they have money, wit is imputed: when the money fails, the respectability will slide with it. In the industrial democracy money is proportionally more powerful than elsewhere, for “it answereth all things.” Hence it is the chief object of ambition with the hopeful youth, and the chief object of veneration with servile men, young or old. This is better than of old time: it is better that we worship the dollar, which represents creative toil, than the sword, which is the symbol of destruction and violence.

Property is created by toil and thought. In the free States it is commonly easy for the industrious, forecasting, and temperate man to obtain a generous competence; but great fortunes are made only by using the toil and thought of many men. In the North great fortunes are commonly made in trade. The merchant is a trader: he buys to sell, and hires to let. If honest, he thereby injures no one; but if also successful, he grows rich through help of the toil and thought of other men, who are stimulated and served by him as much as he by them. Yet the prizes