Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/95

Rh last.” Every shoemaker looks on that proverb with appropriate contempt. He is a shoemaker; but he was a man first, a shoemaker next. Shoemaking is an accident of his manhood, not manhood an accident of his shoemaking. You know what haughty scorn the writer of the apocryphal book of Ecclesiasticus pours out on every farmer, “who glorieth in the goad,” every carpenter and blacksmith, every jeweller and potter. “They shall not be sought for,” says this aristocrat, “in the public councils; they shall not sit high in the congregation; they shall not sit in the judges' seat, nor understand the sentence of judgment; they cannot declare justice.” Aristotle and Cicero thought no better of the merchants: they were only busy in trading. Miserable people! quoth these great men, what have they to do with the affairs of State-merchants, mechanics, farmers? It is only for kings, nobles, and famous rich men, who do no business, but keep slaves! Still, a great many men at this day have just the same esteem for women that those haughty persons of whom I have spoken had for mechanics and for merchants. Many sour proverbs there are which look the same way. But, just now, such is the intellectual education of women of the richer class in all our largo towns, that these sour proverbs will not go down so well as of old. Even in Boston, spite of the attempts of the city government to prevent the higher public education of women—diligently persisted in for many years—the young women of wealthy families get a better education than the young men of wealthy families do; and that fact is going to report itself presently. The best-educated young men are commonly poor men's sons; but the best-educated young women are quite uniformly rich men's daughters.

A well-educated young woman, fond of Goethe, and Dante, and Shakspeare, and Cervantes, marrying an ill-educated young man, who cares for nothing but his horse, his cigar, and his bottle—who only knows how to sleep after dinner, a “great heap of husband,” curled up on the sofa, and in the evening can only laugh at a play, and not understand the Italian words of the opera, which his wife knows by heart—she, I say, marrying him, will not accept the idea that he is her natural lord and master; she cannot look up to him, but rather down. The domestic