Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/49

Rh To have a perfect people, said pagan Plato, we must have perfect institutions; which means, in plain English, to enable labouring men and women to obtain a good education, we must have some institution to go further than our common schools.

But this great subject of public education as yet excites but little interest among us. The talk made about it, by a few wise and good men, proves only that we have it not. It is only lost goods that men cry in the streets. We acknowledge that we have no scholars to match the learned clerks of other lands, where old institutions and the abundant leisure of the wealthy have trained men to accomplishment and skill we never reach. We boast, and with reason, of the superior education of the great mass of men and women with us. Certain it is that learning is more marked for its diffusion in the mass than its accumulation in the individual. It is with it as with bread in a besieged city. Each person gets a mouthful, but no one a full meal. This, no doubt, is better than it would be for many to perish with hunger, while a few had enough and to spare. Some other countries are worse off in this particular than ourselves. The more the pity. We may rather weep for them than rejoice for ourselves. We can only boast of building poorly on the foundation our fathers laid—laid so nobly in their toil and want and war. An absolute monarch in Europe, recently deceased, not holding his place by the people's choice, but kept on his throne by hired bayonets, and, therefore, feeling no judicial accountability to them, indebted to a large amount, has yet done more for the education of all classes of his people, than all the politicians of the twenty-six States have done with the wealth of the public lands and the surplus revenue before them, and the banner of freedom over their heads. We have orators enough to declaim at the corners of the street about the War of Independence, now the blows are all over; and the sins of George III., now he is dead and forgotten; in favour of a “National Bank” or a “Sub-treasury,” as the popular current happens to set; but very few to take up the holy and neglected cause of education, insisting that all men, rich and poor, and low and high, shall receive this priceless boon. Alas for us! These few are received with cold hands and empty houses,