Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/46

42 the exhaustless energies of the American mind are turned to this subject, we shall go further still, and, under these more favourable circumstances, rear up a noble population, where all shall be not only well fed, but well instructed also; where all classes, rich and poor, if they wish, may obtain the fairest culture of all their powers, and men be free in fact as well as in name? Certainly he must have the gift of prophecy who shall tell us this cannot be. As we look back, there is much in the retrospect to wound and make us bleed. But what then? what is not behind is before us. A future, to be worked for and won, is better than a past, to be only remembered.

If we look at the analogies of nature, all is full of encouragement. Each want is provided for at the table God spreads for his many children. Every sparrow in the fields of New England has “scope and verge enough,” and a chance to be all its organization will allow. Can it be, then, that man—of more value than many sparrows, of greater worth than the whole external creation—must of necessity have no chance to be all his nature will allow, but that seven-eighths of the human family are doomed to be “cabined, cribbed, confined,” kept on short allowance of everything but hard work, with no chance to obtain manhood, but forced to be always dwarfs and pigmies, manikins in intellect, not men? Let us beware how we pay God in Cæsar's pence, and fasten on eternal wisdom what is the reproach of our folly, selfishness, and sin. The old maxim, that any one, class or individual, must be subservient to the State, sacrificed to the sin and interest of the mass—that kindred doctrine, a fit corollary, that he who works with the hand can do little else—is a foul libel on nature and nature’s God. It came from a state of things false to its very bottom. Pity we had not left it there. We are all gifted with vast faculties, which we are sent into this world to mature; and if there is any occupation in life which precludes a man from the harmonious development of all his faculties, that occupation is false before reason and Christianity, and the sooner it ends the better.

We all know there are certain things which society owes to each man in it. Among them are a defence from violence;