Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 2

[312] private individuals, that all their wealth belongs to the public; that it is mortgaged for the education of every child among us; that God gave it for mankind. I look upon the State, or rather I look upon society, composed of the religious and civil organizations — the one represented here, the other represented in the churches — as a great Normal School. I think the men who occupy these benches day by day are mere schoolmasters for the State. Their object is to arrange the best method to unfold and carry forward the public mind.

The friend who has just taken his seat, Isaac F. Shepard, Esq., has alluded to Greece. It reminds me that there were two civilizations in the old time,--one was Egyptian, the other was Greek. The Egyptian kept its knowledge for priests and nobles. Science hid itself in the cloister; it was confined to the aristocracy. Knowledge was the organ of despotism; it was the secret of the upper classes; it was the engine of government; it was used to over-awe the people; and when Cambyses came down from Persia, and thundered across Egypt, treading out under his horse's hoofs royalty and priesthood, he trod out science and civilization at the same time. The other side of the picture is Greece. Her civilization was democratic. It was for the mob of Athens, so to speak, that Pericles spoke and planned; that the tragedian wrote; that the historian elaborated, in his seven years labor, those perfect pictures of times and states and policies. It was for the people that the games, the theatres, the treasures of art, and the records of learning were kept. It busied itself with every man in the market-place, day by day; and the scholar thought life wasted if he did not hear, at the moment, the echo and the amen to his labors in the appreciation of the market-place. The Greek trusted the people; he laid