Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/35



is sometimes fancied that here in New England the education of the mass of men and women, who do all the work of the world, is so near perfection that little need be done but keep what we have got to attain the highest destination of any people. But as things are sometimes seen more clearly by their reflection in an artificial mirror, than when looked at in the natural way, let us illustrate our own condition by contrasting it with another widely different. Let us suppose we were to go to some region in the heart of the African continent, and should find a highly cultivated nation, with towns and cities, and factories and commerce, equipped with the thousand arts which diffuse comfort all over society, but should find the whole class of lawyers were ignorant men. That they could scarcely read and write, and never read anything beyond the newspapers, books of legal forms, and similar matters of the most trifling magnitude. That they could repeat the laws inherited from their ancestors, or enacted from time to time by their contemporaries, but never dreamed of inquiring whether these laws were right or wrong, still less of examining the principle on which they rested, or ought to rest, and then of attempting to improve them. That they generally aimed to get on with the smallest outlay of education, the least possible expenditure of thought wherewith they could keep their sorry station