Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/45

Rh unjust labour, can learn to read, at least radical newspapers, and the Bible, still more radical in a false state of things. Experience daily shows us men who, never relaxing their shoulders from the burthen of manly toil, yet attain an education of mind better than that of the most cultivated Englishman seven centuries ago. No man needs dogmatize in this matter. Few will venture to prophesy; but, reasoning from history, and the gradual progress it reveals, are we to suppose the world will stop with us? Is it too much to hope, that in our free, wealthy, Christian land, the time will come when that excellence of education, that masterly accomplishment of mind, which we think now is attainable only by four or five men out of ten thousand, shall become so common that he will be laughed at, or pitied, who has it not? Certainly, the expectation of this result is not so visionary as that of our present state would have appeared a single century ago. To win this result we must pay its price. An old proverb represents the Deity saying to man, “What would you have? Pay for it, and take it.” The rule holds good in education, as in all things else. A man cannot filch it, as coin, from his neighbours, nor inherit it from his fathers; for David had never a good son, nor Solomon a wise one. It must be won, each man toiling for himself. But many are born of the ignorant and the poor; they see not how to gain this pearl for themselves; as things now are, they find no institution to aid them, and thus grow up and die bodies, and no more. The good sense, the manly energy, of the natives of New England, their courage, and fortitude, and faith—the brain in the head, the brain in the hand—have hitherto made them successful in all they undertake. We have attained physical comfort to such a degree that the average duration of human life with us is many times greater than in Italy, the most civilized of states, sixteen centuries ago; physical comfort with philanthropists, they never dreamed of in their gayest visions. We have attained, also, a measure of political and civil freedom to which the fairest states of antiquity, whether in Greece, Egypt, or Judea, were all strangers; civil freedom which neither the Roman nor Athenian sage deemed possible in his ideal state. Is it, then, too much to hope—reasoning from the past—that when