Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/65

Rh almshouses, hospitals, schools, colleges, churches, and post-offices; coins money as a standard measure of all values; builds roads of earth, of water, or of iron; carries letters; surveys the land; prints books telling of its minerals, plants, and living things that swim, or creep, or fly, or walk; puts lighthouses along the coast, and breakwaters to protect a port. Thus society furnishes its members a positive help for the mind, body, and estate; helps the individual become a complete and perfect man, by affording him facilities for the development of his substance and the possession of his accidents. This is the domestic part of the positive function of society. Some men, as the Socialists in France, wish to extend it much further, making the government patriarchal to bless—not, as of old, despotic to curse. This also is done with a distinct self-consciousness of the immediate end and the means thereto.

But the greater part of this positive work is done with no such distinct consciousness thereof; it is brought about by the men living together; is done, not by government, but by society. The presence of numbers increases the intellectual temperature, so to say, and quickens the social pulse. Machines are invented, science extended, new truths in morals and religion are found out, literature and art create new loveliness, and men become greater and more noble, while society takes no heed; and so all are helped. The government often only checks this work.

By most subtle contrivances, though not of you and me, a provision is made for the great. Without willing it, we prepare a cradle for every giant, ready to receive him as soon as he is born. A young woman has a rare genius for music: no legal and constitutional provision has been made for her, society having no instinctive and prophetic consciousness of such an advent; but men with music in their souls, and spell-bound by their ears, are drawn together, and encourage her sweet soul into all the wildest, sweetest, and most bewildering witchery of song. If some lad of marvellous genius is born in the woods, men seek him out, and train him up with the accumulated wisdom of ten thousand years, that this newest diamond from the mine of God may be appropriately set. So it is with a thousand other things; and thus society calls out the dainties of the cook, the machine of the inventor, the