Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/51

Rh No doubt we have done much. But how much more remains to be done! That absolute monarch, before spoken of, has done more than all the free Americans in this matter, and made his people our superiors in almost every department of intellectual, moral, and religious education. The American mind has never yet been applied in earnest to this great work, as to commerce, and clearing land, building factories and railroads. We do not yet realize the necessity of educating all men. Accordingly, men destined for the “learned” professions, as they are called, hasten through the preparatory studies thereof, and come half-educated to the work. The labouring man starts with a very small capital of knowledge or mental skill, and then thinks he has no time for anything but work; never reads a book which has thought in it; never attempts to make his trade teach him: “getting and spending, he lays waste his powers.” Children are hurried from the common school just as they begin to learn, and thus half its benefits are lost. The old rule, that “what is gained in time is lost in power,” is quite as true in education as in mechanics, as our experience is teaching us at great cost. Since the advantages of the common school are not fully enjoyed, many, whose voices might be heard, do not see the necessity of a higher series of free schools—at least one in a county—which should do for all what the college now does for a part. Those only feel the want of such who are without voice in the commonwealth, whose cry only Heaven hears. If such existed, or, even without them, if the common schools were what all might be, and some are, and their advantages properly used, then the mechanic, the farmer, the shopkeeper, might start with a good capital of knowledge, good habits of study, and his trade, if temperately pursued, would teach him as much as the professions teach men embarked therein. Were two men of the same ability, and the same intellectual discipline, to embark in life, one a clergyman and the other a farmer, each devoting eight or ten hours a day to his vocation, spending the rest of his time in the same wise way, the superiority in twenty years could scarcely be on the clergyman's side.

But besides this lack of mental capital with which labouring men set out in life, there is another evil, and