Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/50

46 while the village brawler, ranting of politics, collects the huzzaing crowd from nine towns round. The reason is plain: there are ins for those out, and outs for those in. A “National Bank” and a “Sub-treasury” have dollars in them, at least the people are told that it is so; men hope to get dollars out of them; while the most “promising” friend of education offers only wisdom, virtue, religion, things that never appear in the price-current, and will not weigh down an ounce in the town scales. We know the worth of dollars—which is something—yes, it is much. Give the dollars their due. But alas, the worth of educated men and women we do not know!

The fact that in our country and these times men find it necessary to leave a particular calling, which they like, and for which they are fitted by nature and choice—that of a shoemaker, a blacksmith, or a tanner—and enter one of the three professions, for which they have no fondness, nor even capacity, solely for the sake of an education, shows very plainly into what a false position we have been brought. We often lay the blame on Providence, and it seems generally thought to be a law of the Most High, that a man, with the faculties of an angel, should be born into the world, and live in it threescore years and ten, in the blameless pursuit of some calling indispensable to society, and yet die out of it without possibility of developing and maturing these faculties; thus at the last rather ending a long death, than completing a life. This seems no enactment of that Lawgiver. He made man upright, and we have sought out many inventions, some of them very foolish. As things now are, an excellent brazier, a tolerable tinker or tailor, is often spoiled, to make an indifferent lawyer, a sluggish physician, coadjutor of death, or a parson whose “drowsy tinkling lulls the distant fold,” solely because these men, innocent of sinister designs, wanted an education which, as things were, could not readily be got in the trade, but came as a requisite in the profession. Now, in all countries the mass of men must work; in our land they must work and rule likewise. Some method must, therefore, be found to educate this mass, or it is plain our free institutions must go to the ground, for ignorance and freedom cannot exist together more than fire and water in the same vessel.