It cannot be wondered at, that this general inquest into abuses should

arise in the bosom of society, when one considers the practical

impediments that stand in the way of virtuous young men. The young man,

on entering life, finds the way to lucrative employments blocked with

abuses. The ways of trade are grown selfish to the borders of theft, and

supple to the borders (if not beyond the borders) of fraud. The

employments of commerce are not intrinsically unfit for a man, or less

genial to his faculties, but these are now in their general course so

vitiated by derelictions and abuses at which all connive, that it

requires more vigor and resources than can be expected of every young

man, to right himself in them; he is lost in them; he cannot move hand

or foot in them. Has he genius and virtue? the less does he find them

fit for him to grow in, and if he would thrive in them, he must

sacrifice all the brilliant dreams of boyhood and youth as dreams; he

must forget the prayers of his childhood; and must take on him the

harness of routine and obsequiousness. If not so minded, nothing is left

him but to begin the world anew, as he does who puts the spade into the

ground for food. We are all implicated, of course, in this charge; it is

only necessary to ask a few questions as to the progress of the articles

of commerce from the fields where they grew, to our houses, to become

aware that we eat and drink and wear perjury and fraud in a hundred

commodities. How many articles of daily consumption are furnished us

from the West Indies; yet it is said, that, in the Spanish islands, the

venality of the officers of the government has passed into usage, and

that no article passes into our ships which has not been fraudulently

cheapened. In the Spanish islands, every agent or factor of the

Americans, unless he be a consul, has taken oath that he is a Catholic,

or has caused a priest to make that declaration for him. The

abolitionist has shown us our dreadful debt to the southern negro. In

the island of Cuba, in addition to the ordinary abominations of slavery,

it appears, only men are bought for the plantations, and one dies in ten

every year, of these miserable bachelors, to yield us sugar. I leave for

those who have the knowledge the part of sifting the oaths of our

custom-houses; I will not inquire into the oppression of the sailors; I

will not pry into the usages of our retail trade. I content myself with

the fact, that the general system of our trade, (apart from the blacker

traits, which, I hope, are exceptions denounced and unshared by all

reputable men,) is a system of selfishness; is not dictated by the high

sentiments of human nature; is not measured by the exact law of

reciprocity; much less by the sentiments of love and heroism, but is a

system of distrust, of concealment, of superior keenness, not of giving

but of taking advantage. It is not that which a man delights to unlock

to a noble friend; which he meditates on with joy and self-approval in

his hour of love and aspiration; but rather what he then puts out of

sight, only showing the brilliant result, and atoning for the manner of

acquiring, by the manner of expending it. I do not charge the merchant

or the manufacturer. The sins of our trade belong to no class, to no

individual. One plucks, one distributes, one eats. Every body partakes,

every body confesses,--with cap and knee volunteers his confession, yet

none feels himself accountable. He did not create the abuse; he cannot

alter it. What is he? an obscure private person who must get his bread.

That is the vice,--that no one feels himself called to act for man, but

only as a fraction of man. It happens therefore that all such ingenuous

souls as feel within themselves the irrepressible strivings of a noble

aim, who by the law of their nature must act simply, find these ways of

trade unfit for them, and they come forth from it. Such cases are

becoming more numerous every year.

But by coming out of trade you have not cleared yourself. The trail of

the serpent reaches into all the lucrative professions and practices of

man. Each has it own wrongs. Each finds a tender and very intelligent

conscience a disqualification for success. Each requires of the

practitioner a certain shutting of the eyes, a certain dapperness and

compliance, an acceptance of customs, a sequestration from the

sentiments of generosity and love, a compromise of private opinion and

lofty integrity. Nay, the evil custom reaches into the whole institution

of property, until our laws which establish and protect it, seem not to

be the issue of love and reason, but of selfishness. Suppose a man is so

unhappy as to be born a saint, with keen perceptions, but with the

conscience and love of an angel, and he is to get his living in the

world; he finds himself excluded from all lucrative works; he has no

farm, and he cannot get one; for, to earn money enough to buy one,

requires a sort of concentration toward money, which is the selling

himself for a number of years, and to him the present hour is as sacred

and inviolable as any future hour. Of course, whilst another man has no

land, my title to mine, your title to yours, is at once vitiated.

Inextricable seem to be the twinings and tendrils of this evil, and we

all involve ourselves in it the deeper by forming connections, by wives

and children, by benefits and debts.

Considerations of this kind have turned the attention of many

philanthropic and intelligent persons to the claims of manual labor, as

a part of the education of every young man. If the accumulated wealth of

the past generation is thus tainted,--no matter how much of it is

offered to us,--we must begin to consider if it were not the nobler part

to renounce it, and to put ourselves into primary relations with the

soil and nature, and abstaining from whatever is dishonest and unclean,

to take each of us bravely his part, with his own hands, in the manual

labor of the world.

But it is said, ‘What! will you give up the immense advantages reaped

from the division of labor, and set every man to make his own shoes,

bureau, knife, wagon, sails, and needle? This would be to put men back

into barbarism by their own act.’ I see no instant prospect of a

virtuous revolution; yet I confess, I should not be pained at a change

which threatened a loss of some of the luxuries or conveniences of

society, if it proceeded from a preference of the agricultural life out

of the belief, that our primary duties as men could be better discharged

in that calling. Who could regret to see a high conscience and a purer

taste exercising a sensible effect on young men in their choice of

occupation, and thinning the ranks of competition in the labors of

commerce, of law, and of state? It is easy to see that the inconvenience

would last but a short time. This would be great action, which always

opens the eyes of men. When many persons shall have done this, when the

majority shall admit the necessity of reform in all these institutions,

their abuses will be redressed, and the way will be open again to the

advantages which arise from the division of labor, and a man may select

the fittest employment for his peculiar talent again, without

compromise.

But quite apart from the emphasis which the times give to the doctrine,

that the manual labor of society ought to be shared among all the

members, there are reasons proper to every individual, why he should not

be deprived of it. The use of manual labor is one which never grows

obsolete, and which is inapplicable to no person. A man should have a

farm or a mechanical craft for his culture. We must have a basis for our

higher accomplishments, our delicate entertainments of poetry and

philosophy, in the work of our hands. We must have an antagonism in the

tough world for all the variety of our spiritual faculties, or they will

not be born. Manual labor is the study of the external world. The

advantage of riches remains with him who procured them, not with the

heir. When I go into my garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such

an exhileration and health, that I discover that I have been defrauding

myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have

done with my own hands. But not only health, but education is in the

work. Is it possible that I who get indefinite quantities of sugar,

hominy, cotton, buckets, crockery ware, and letter paper, by simply

signing my name once in three months to a cheque in favor of John Smith

and Co. traders, get the fair share of exercise to my faculties by that

act, which nature intended for me in making all these farfetched matters

important to my comfort? It is Smith himself, and his carriers, and

dealers, and manufacturers; it is the sailor, the hidedrogher, the

butcher, the negro, the hunter, and the planter, who have intercepted

the sugar of the sugar, and the cotton of the cotton. They have got the

education, I only the commodity. This were all very well if I were

necessarily absent, being detained by work of my own, like theirs, work

of the same faculties; then should I be sure of my hands and feet, but

now I feel some shame before my wood-chopper, my ploughman, and my cook,

for they have some sort of self-sufficiency, they can contrive without

my aid to bring the day and year round, but I depend on them, and have

not earned by use a right to my arms and feet.

Consider further the difference between the first and second owner of

property. Every species of property is preyed on by its own enemies, as

iron by rust; timber by rot; cloth by moths; provisions by mould,

putridity, or vermin; money by thieves; an orchard by insects; a planted

field by weeds and the inroad of cattle; a stock of cattle by hunger; a

road by rain and frost; a bridge by freshets. And whoever takes any of

these things into his possession, takes the charge of defending them

from this troop of enemies, or of keeping them in repair. A man who

supplies his own want, who builds a raft or a boat to go a fishing,

finds it easy to caulk it, or put in a thole-pin, or mend the rudder.

What he gets only as fast as he wants for his own ends, does not

embarrass him, or take away his sleep with looking after. But when he

comes to give all the goods he has year after year collected, in one

estate to his son, house, orchard, ploughed land, cattle, bridges,

hardware, wooden-ware, carpets, cloths, provisions, books, money, and

cannot give him the skill and experience which made or collected these,

and the method and place they have in his own life, the son finds his

hands full,--not to use these things,--but to look after them and defend

them from their natural enemies. To him they are not means, but masters.

Their enemies will not remit; rust, mould, vermin, rain, sun, freshet,

fire, all seize their own, fill him with vexation, and he is converted

from the owner into a watchman or a watch-dog to this magazine of old

and new chattels. What a change! Instead of the masterly good humor, and

sense of power, and fertility of resource in himself; instead of those

strong and learned hands, those piercing and learned eyes, that supple

body, and that mighty and prevailing heart, which the father had, whom

nature loved and feared, whom snow and rain, water and land, beast and

fish seemed all to know and to serve, we have now a puny, protected

person, guarded by walls and curtains, stoves and down beds, coaches,

and men servants and women-servants from the earth and the sky, and who,

bred to depend on all these, is made anxious by all that endangers those

possessions, and is forced to spend so much time in guarding them, that

he has quite lost sight of their original use, namely, to help him to

his ends,--to the prosecution of his love; to the helping of his friend,

to the worship of his God, to the enlargement of his knowledge, to the

serving of his country, to the indulgence of his sentiment, and he is

now what is called a rich man,--the menial and runner of his riches.

Hence it happens that the whole interest of history lies in the fortunes

of the poor. Knowledge, Virtue, Power are the victories of man over his

necessities, his march to the dominion of the world. Every man ought to

have this opportunity to conquer the world for himself. Only such

persons interest us, Spartans, Romans, Saracens, English, Americans, who

have stood in the jaws of need, and have by their own wit and might

extricated themselves, and made man victorious.

I do not wish to overstate this doctrine of labor, or insist that every

man should be a farmer, any more than that every man should be a

lexicographer. In general, one may say, that the husbandman’s is the

oldest, and most universal profession, and that where a man does not yet

discover in himself any fitness for one work more than another, this may

be preferred. But the doctrine of the Farm is merely this, that every

man ought to stand in primary relations with the work of the world,

ought to do it himself, and not to suffer the accident of his having a

purse in his pocket, or his having been bred to some dishonorable and

injurious craft, to sever him from those duties; and for this reason,

that labor is God’s education; that he only is a sincere learner, he

only can become a master, who learns the secrets of labor, and who by

real cunning extorts from nature its sceptre.

Neither would I shut my ears to the plea of the learned professions, of

the poet, the priest, the lawgiver, and men of study generally; namely,

that in the experience of all men of that class, the amount of manual

labor which is necessary to the maintenance of a family, indisposes and

disqualifies for intellectual exertion. I know, it often, perhaps

usually, happens, that where there is a fine organization apt for poetry

and philosophy, that individual finds himself compelled to wait on his

thoughts, to waste several days that he may enhance and glorify one; and

is better taught by a moderate and dainty exercise, such as rambling in

the fields, rowing, skating, hunting, than by the downright drudgery of

the farmer and the smith. I would not quite forget the venerable counsel

of the Egyptian mysteries, which declared that “there were two pairs of

eyes in man, and it is requisite that the pair which are beneath should

be closed, when the pair that are above them perceive, and that when the

pair above are closed, those which are beneath should be opened.” Yet I

will suggest that no separation from labor can be without some loss of

power and of truth to the seer himself; that, I doubt not, the faults

and vices of our literature and philosophy, their too great fineness,

effeminacy, and melancholy, are attributable to the enervated and sickly

habits of the literary class. Better that the book should not be quite

so good, and the bookmaker abler and better, and not himself often a

ludicrous contrast to all that he has written.

But granting that for ends so sacred and dear, some relaxation must be

had, I think, that if a man find in himself any strong bias to poetry,

to art, to the contemplative life, drawing him to these things with a

devotion incompatible with good husbandry, that man ought to reckon

early with himself, and, respecting the compensations of the Universe,

ought to ransom himself from the duties of economy, by a certain rigor

and privation in his habits. For privileges so rare and grand, let him

not stint to pay a great tax. Let him be a cænobite, a pauper, and if

need be, celibate also. Let him learn to eat his meals standing, and to

relish the taste of fair water and black bread. He may leave to others

the costly conveniences of housekeeping, and large hospitality, and the

possession of works of art. Let him feel that genius is a hospitality,

and that he who can create works of art needs not collect them. He must

live in a chamber, and postpone his self-indulgence, forewarned and

forearmed against that frequent misfortune of men of genius,--the taste

for luxury. This is the tragedy of genius,--attempting to drive along

the ecliptic with one horse of the heavens and one horse of the earth,

there is only discord and ruin and downfall to chariot and charioteer.

The duty that every man should assume his own vows, should call the

institutions of society to account, and examine their fitness to him,

gains in emphasis, if we look at our modes of living. Is our

housekeeping sacred and honorable? Does it raise and inspire us, or does

it cripple us instead? I ought to be armed by every part and function of

my household, by all my social function, by my economy, by my feasting,

by my voting, by my traffic. Yet I am almost no party to any of these

things. Custom does it for me, gives me no power therefrom, and runs me

in debt to boot. We spend our incomes for paint and paper, for a hundred

trifles, I know not what, and not for the things of a man. Our expense

is almost all for conformity. It is for cake that we run in debt; ’tis

not the intellect, not the heart, not beauty, not worship, that costs so

much. Why needs any man be rich? Why must he have horses, fine

garments, handsome apartments, access to public houses and places of

amusement? Only for want of thought. Give his mind a new image, and he

flees into a solitary garden or garret to enjoy it, and is richer with

that dream, than the fee of a county could make him. But we are first

thoughtless, and then find that we are moneyless. We are first sensual,

and then must be rich. We dare not trust our wit for making our house

pleasant to our friend, and so we buy ice-creams. He is accustomed to

carpets, and we have not sufficient character to put floor cloths out of

his mind whilst he stays in the house, and so we pile the floor with

carpets. Let the house rather be a temple of the Furies of Lacedæmon,

formidable and holy to all, which none but a Spartan may enter or so

much as behold. As soon as there is faith, as soon as there is society,

comfits and cushions will be left to slaves. Expense will be inventive

and heroic. We shall eat hard and lie hard, we shall dwell like the

ancient Romans in narrow tenements, whilst our public edifices, like

theirs, will be worthy for their proportion of the landscape in which we

set them, for conversation, for art, for music, for worship. We shall be

rich to great purposes; poor only for selfish ones.

Now what help for these evils? How can the man who has learned but one

art, procure all the conveniences of life honestly? Shall we say all we

think?--Perhaps with his own hands. Suppose he collects or makes them

ill;--yet he has learned their lesson. If he cannot do that.--Then

perhaps he can go without. Immense wisdom and riches are in that. It is

better to go without, than to have them at too great a cost. Let us

learn the meaning of economy. Economy is a high, humane office, a

sacrament, when its aim is grand; when it is the prudence of simple

tastes, when it practised for freedom, or love, or devotion. Much of the

economy which we see in houses, is of a base origin, and is best kept

out of sight. Parched corn eaten to-day that I may have roast fowl to my

dinner on Sunday, is a baseness; but parched corn and a house with one

apartment, that I may be free of all perturbations, that I may be serene

and docile to what the mind shall speak, and girt and roadready for the

lowest mission of knowledge or goodwill, is frugality for gods and

heroes.

Can we not learn the lesson of self-help? Society is full of infirm

people, who incessantly summon others to serve them. They contrive

everywhere to exhaust for their single comfort the entire means and

appliances of that luxury to which our invention has yet attained.

Sofas, ottomans, stoves, wine, game-fowl, spices, perfumes, rides, the

theatre, entertainments,--all these they want, they need, and whatever

can be suggested more than these, they crave also, as if it was the

bread which should keep them from starving; and if they miss any one,

they represent themselves as the most wronged and most wretched persons

on earth. One must have been born and bred with them to know how to

prepare a meal for their learned stomach. Meantime, they never bestir

themselves to serve another person; not they! they have a great deal

more to do for themselves than they can possibly perform, nor do they

once perceive the cruel joke of their lives, but the more odious they

grow, the sharper is the tone of their complaining and craving. Can

anything be so elegant as to have few wants and to serve them one’s

self, so as to have somewhat left to give, instead of being always

prompt to grab? It is more elegant to answer one’s own needs, than to be

richly served; inelegant perhaps it may look to-day, and to a few, but

it is an elegance forever and to all.

I do not wish to be absurd and pedantic in reform. I do not wish to push

my criticism on the state of things around me to that extravagant mark,

that shall compel me to suicide, or to an absolute isolation from the

advantages of civil society. If we suddenly plant our foot, and say,--I

will neither eat nor drink nor wear nor touch any food or fabric which I

do not know to be innocent, or deal with any person whose whole manner

of life is not clear and rational, we shall stand still. Whose is so?

Not mine; not thine; not his. But I think we must clear ourselves each

one by the interrogation, whether we have earned our bread to-day by the

hearty contribution of our energies to the common benefit? and we must

not cease to _tend_ to the correction of these flagrant wrongs, by

laying one stone aright every day.

But the idea which now begins to agitate society has a wider scope than

our daily employments, our households, and the institutions of property.

We are to revise the whole of our social structure, the state, the

school, religion, marriage, trade, science, and explore their

foundations in our own nature; we are to see that the world not only

fitted the former men, but fits us, and to clear ourselves of every

usage which has not its roots in our own mind. What is a man born for

but to be a Reformer, a Re-maker of what man has made; a renouncer of

lies; a restorer of truth and good, imitating that great Nature which

embosoms us all, and which sleeps no moment on an old past, but every

hour repairs herself, yielding us every morning a new day, and with

every pulsation a new life? Let him renounce everything which is not

true to him, and put all his practices back on their first thoughts, and

do nothing for which he has not the whole world for his reason. If there

are inconveniences, and what is called ruin in the way, because we have

so enervated and maimed ourselves, yet it would be like dying of

perfumes to sink in the effort to reattach the deeds of every day to the

holy and mysterious recesses of life.

The power, which is at once spring and regulator in all efforts of

reform, is the conviction that there is an infinite worthiness in man

which will appear at the call of worth, and that all particular reforms

are the removing of some impediment. Is it not the highest duty that man

should be honored in us? I ought not to allow any man, because he has

broad lands, to feel that he is rich in my presence. I ought to make him

feel that I can do without his riches, that I cannot be bought,--neither

by comfort, neither by pride,--and though I be utterly penniless, and

receiving bread from him, that he is the poor man beside me. And if, at

the same time, a woman or a child discovers a sentiment of piety, or a

juster way of thinking than mine, I ought to confess it by my respect

and obedience, though it go to alter my whole way of life.

The Americans have many virtues, but they have not Faith and Hope. I

know no two words whose meaning is more lost sight of. We use these

words as if they were as obsolete as Selah and Amen. And yet they have

the broadest meaning, and the most cogent application to Boston in 1841.

The Americans have no faith. They rely on the power of a dollar; they

are deaf to a sentiment. They think you may talk the north wind down as

easily as raise society; and no class more faithless than the scholars

or intellectual men. Now if I talk with a sincere wise man, and my

friend, with a poet, with a conscientious youth who is still under the

dominion of his own wild thoughts, and not yet harnessed in the team of

society to drag with us all in the ruts of custom, I see at once how

paltry is all this generation of unbelievers, and what a house of cards

their institutions are, and I see what one brave man, what one great

thought executed might effect. I see that the reason of the distrust of

the practical man in all theory, is his inability to perceive the means

whereby we work. Look, he says, at the tools with which this world of

yours is to be built. As we cannot make a planet, with atmosphere,

rivers, and forests, by means of the best carpenters’ or engineers’

tools, with chemist’s laboratory and smith’s forge to boot,--so neither

can we ever construct that heavenly society you prate of, out of

foolish, sick, selfish men and women, such as we know them to be. But

the believer not only beholds his heaven to be possible, but already to

begin to exist,--not by the men or materials the statesman uses, but by

men transfigured and raised above themselves by the power of principles.

To principles something else is possible that transcends all the power

of expedients.

Every great and commanding moment in the annals of the world is the

triumph of some enthusiasm. The victories of the Arabs after Mahomet,

who, in a few years, from a small and mean beginning, established a

larger empire than that of Rome, is an example. They did they knew not

what. The naked Derar, horsed on an idea, was found an overmatch for a

troop of Roman cavalry. The women fought like men, and conquered the

Roman men. They were miserably equipped, miserably fed. They were

Temperance troops. There was neither brandy nor flesh needed to feed

them. They conquered Asia, and Africa, and Spain, on barley. The Caliph

Omar’s walking-stick struck more terror into those who saw it, than

another man’s sword. His diet was barley bread; his sauce was salt; and

oftentimes by way of abstinence he ate his bread without salt. His drink

was water. His palace was built of mud; and when he left Medina to go to

the conquest of Jerusalem, he rode on a red camel, with a wooden platter

hanging at his saddle, with a bottle of water and two sacks, one holding

barley, and the other dried fruits.

But there will dawn ere long on our politics, on our modes of living, a

nobler morning than that Arabian faith, in the sentiment of love. This

is the one remedy for all ills, the panacea of nature. We must be

lovers, and at once the impossible becomes possible. Our age and

history, for these thousand years, has not been the history of kindness,

but of selfishness. Our distrust is very expensive. The money we spend

for courts and prisons is very ill laid out. We make, by distrust, the

thief, and burglar, and incendiary, and by our court and jail we keep

him so. An acceptance of the sentiment of love throughout Christendom

for a season, would bring the felon and the outcast to our side in

tears, with the devotion of his faculties to our service. See this wide

society of laboring men and women. We allow ourselves to be served by

them, we live apart from them, and meet them without a salute in the

streets. We do not greet their talents, nor rejoice in their good

fortune, nor foster their hopes, nor in the assembly of the people vote

for what is dear to them. Thus we enact the part of the selfish noble

and king from the foundation of the world. See, this tree always bears

one fruit. In every household, the peace of a pair is poisoned by the

malice, slyness, indolence, and alienation of domestics. Let any two

matrons meet, and observe how soon their conversation turns on the

troubles from their “_help_,” as our phrase is. In every knot of

laborers, the rich man does not feel himself among his friends,--and at

the polls he finds them arrayed in a mass in distinct opposition to him.

We complain that the politics of masses of the people are controlled by

designing men, and led in opposition to manifest justice and the common

weal, and to their own interest. But the people do not wish to be

represented or ruled by the ignorant and base. They only vote for these,

because they were asked with the voice and semblance of kindness. They

will not vote for them long. They inevitably prefer wit and probity. To

use an Egyptian metaphor, it is not their will for any long time “to

raise the nails of wild beasts, and to depress the heads of the sacred

birds.” Let our affection flow out to our fellows; it would operate in a

day the greatest of all revolutions. It is better to work on

institutions by the sun than by the wind. The state must consider the

poor man, and all voices must speak for him. Every child that is born

must have a just chance for his bread. Let the amelioration in our laws

of property proceed from the concession of the rich, not from the

grasping of the poor. Let us begin by habitual imparting. Let us

understand that the equitable rule is, that no one should take more than

his share, let him be ever so rich. Let me feel that I am to be a lover.

I am to see to it that the world is the better for me, and to find my

reward in the act. Love would put a new face on this weary old world in

which we dwell as pagans and enemies too long, and it would warm the

heart to see how fast the vain diplomacy of statesmen, the impotence of

armies, and navies, and lines of defence, would be superseded by this

unarmed child. Love will creep where it cannot go, will accomplish that

by imperceptible methods,--being its own lever, fulcrum, and

power,--which force could never achieve. Have you not seen in the woods,

in a late autumn morning, a poor fungus or mushroom,--a plant without

any solidity, nay, that seemed nothing but a soft mush or jelly,--by its

constant, total, and inconceivably gentle pushing, manage to break its

way up through the frosty ground, and actually to lift a hard crust on

its head? It is the symbol of the power of kindness. The virtue of this

principle in human society in application to great interests is obsolete

and forgotten. Once or twice in history it has been tried in illustrious

instances, with signal success. This great, overgrown, dead Christendom

of ours still keeps alive at least the name of a lover of mankind. But

one day all men will be lovers; and every calamity will be dissolved in

the universal sunshine.

Will you suffer me to add one trait more to this portrait of man the

reformer? The mediator between the spiritual and the actual world should

have a great prospective prudence. An Arabian poet describes his hero by

saying,

“Sunshine was he

In the winter day;

And in the midsummer

Coolness and shade.”

He who would help himself and others, should not be a subject of

irregular and interrupted impulses of virtue, but a continent,

persisting, immovable person,--such as we have seen a few scattered up

and down in time for the blessing of the world; men who have in the

gravity of their nature a quality which answers to the fly-wheel in a

mill, which distributes the motion equably over all the wheels, and

hinders it from falling unequally and suddenly in destructive shocks. It

is better that joy should be spread over all the day in the form of

strength, than that it should be concentrated into ecstasies, full of

danger and followed by reactions. There is a sublime prudence, which is

the very highest that we know of man, which, believing in a vast

future,--sure of more to come than is yet seen,--postpones always the

present hour to the whole life; postpones talent to genius, and special

results to character. As the merchant gladly takes money from his income

to add to his capital, so is the great man very willing to lose

particular powers and talents, so that he gain in the elevation of his

life. The opening of the spiritual senses disposes men ever to greater

sacrifices, to leave their signal talents, their best means and skill of

procuring a present success their power and their fame,--to cast all

things behind, in the insatiable thirst for divine communications. A

purer fame, a greater power rewards the sacrifice. It is the conversion

of our harvest into seed. As the farmer casts into the ground the

finest ears of his grain, the time will come when we too shall hold

nothing back, but shall eagerly convert more than we now possess into

means and powers, when we shall be willing to sow the sun and the moon

for seeds.

LECTURE ON THE TIMES.

READ AT THE MASONIC TEMPLE, BOSTON, DECEMBER 2, 1841.

LECTURE ON THE TIMES.

The Times, as we say--or the present aspects of our social state, the

Laws, Divinity, Natural Science, Agriculture, Art, Trade, Letters, have

their root in an invisible spiritual reality. To appear in these

aspects, they must first exist, or have some necessary foundation.

Beside all the small reasons we assign, there is a great reason for the

existence of every extant fact; a reason which lies grand and immovable,

often unsuspected behind it in silence. The Times are the masquerade of

the eternities; trivial to the dull, tokens of noble and majestic agents

to the wise; the receptacle in which the Past leaves its history; the

quarry out of which the genius of to-day is building up the Future. The

Times--the nations, manners, institutions, opinions, votes, are to be

studied as omens, as sacred leaves, whereon a weighty sense is

inscribed, if we have the wit and the love to search it out. Nature

itself seems to propound to us this topic, and to invite us to explore

the meaning of the conspicuous facts of the day. Everything that is

popular, it has been said, deserves the attention of the philosopher:

and this for the obvious reason, that although it may not be of any

worth in itself, yet it characterizes the people.

Here is very good matter to be handled, if we are skilful; an abundance

of important practical questions which it behoves us to understand. Let

us examine the pretensions of the attacking and defending parties. Here

is this great fact of Conservatism, entrenched in its immense redoubts,

with Himmaleh for its front, and Atlas for its flank, and Andes for its

rear, and the Atlantic and Pacific seas for its ditches and trenches,

which has planted its crosses, and crescents, and stars and stripes, and

various signs and badges of possession, over every rood of the planet,

and says, ‘I will hold fast; and to whom I will, will I give; and whom I

will, will I exclude and starve:’ so says Conservatism; and all the

children of men attack the colossus in their youth, and all, or all but

a few, bow before it when they are old. A necessity not yet commanded, a

negative imposed on the will of man by his condition, a deficiency in

his force, is the foundation on which it rests. Let this side be fairly

stated. Meantime, on the other part, arises Reform, and offers the

sentiment of Love as an overmatch to this material might. I wish to

consider well this affirmative side, which has a loftier port and reason

than heretofore, which encroaches on the other every day, puts it out of

countenance, out of reason, and out of temper, and leaves it nothing but

silence and possession.

The fact of aristocracy, with its two weapons of wealth and manners, is

as commanding a feature of the nineteenth century, and the American

republic, as of old Rome, or modern England. The reason and influence of

wealth, the aspect of philosophy and religion, and the tendencies which

have acquired the name of Transcendentalism in Old and New England; the

aspect of poetry, as the exponent and interpretation of these things;

the fuller development and the freer play of Character as a social and

political agent;--these and other related topics will in turn come to be

considered.

But the subject of the Times is not an abstract question. We talk of the

world, but we mean a few men and women. If you speak of the age, you

mean your own platoon of people, as Milton and Dante painted in colossal

their platoons, and called them Heaven and Hell. In our idea of

progress, we do not go out of this personal picture. We do not think the

sky will be bluer, or honey sweeter, or our climate more temperate, but

only that our relation to our fellows will be simpler and happier. What

is the reason to be given for this extreme attraction which _persons_

have for us, but that they are the Age? they are the results of the

Past; they are the heralds of the Future. They indicate,--these witty,

suffering, blushing, intimidating figures of the only race in which

there are individuals or changes, how far on the Fate has gone, and what

it drives at. As trees make scenery, and constitute the hospitality of

the landscape, so persons are the world to persons. A cunning mystery by

which the Great Desart of thoughts and of planets takes this engaging

form, to bring, as it would seem, its meanings nearer to the mind.

Thoughts walk and speak, and look with eyes at me, and transport me into

new and magnificent scenes. These are the pungent instructors who thrill

the heart of each of us, and make all other teaching formal and cold.

How I follow them with aching heart, with pining desire! I count myself

nothing before them. I would die for them with joy. They can do what

they will with me. How they lash us with those tongues! How they make

the tears start, make us blush and turn pale, and lap us in Elysium to

soothing dreams, and castles in the air! By tones of triumph; of dear

love; by threats; by pride that freezes; these have the skill to make

the world look bleak and inhospitable, or seem the nest of tenderness

and joy. I do not wonder at the miracles which poetry attributes to the

music of Orpheus, when I remember what I have experienced from the

varied notes of the human voice. They are an incalculable energy which

countervails all other forces in nature, because they are the channel of

supernatural powers. There is no interest or institution so poor and

withered, but if a new strong man could be born into it, he would

immediately redeem and replace it. A personal ascendency,--that is the

only fact much worth considering. I remember, some years ago, somebody

shocked a circle of friends of order here in Boston, who supposed that

our people were identified with their religious denominations, by

declaring that an eloquent man,--let him be of what sect soever,--would

be ordained at once in one of our metropolitan churches. To be sure he

would; and not only in ours, but in any church, mosque, or temple, on

the planet; but he must be eloquent, able to supplant our method and

classification, by the superior beauty of his own. Every fact we have

was brought here by some person; and there is none that will not change

and pass away before a person, whose nature is broader than the person

which the fact in question represents. And so I find the Age walking

about in happy and hopeful natures, in strong eyes, and pleasant

thoughts, and think I read it nearer and truer so, than in the

statute-book, or in the investments of capital, which rather celebrate

with mournful music the obsequies of the last age. In the brain of a

fanatic; in the wild hope of a mountain boy, called by city boys very

ignorant, because they do not know what his hope has certainly apprised

him shall be; in the love-glance of a girl; in the hair-splitting

conscientiousness of some eccentric person, who has found some new

scruple to embarrass himself and his neighbors withal; is to be found

that which shall constitute the times to come, more than in the now

organized and accredited oracles. For, whatever is affirmative and now

advancing, contains it. I think that only is real, which men love and

rejoice in; not what they tolerate, but what they choose; what they

embrace and avow, and not the things which chill, benumb, and terrify

them.

And so why not draw for these times a portrait gallery? Let us paint

the painters. Whilst the Daguerreotypist, with camera-obscura and silver

plate, begins now to traverse the land, let us set up our Camera also,

and let the sun paint the people. Let us paint the agitator, and

the man of the old school, and the member of Congress, and the

college-professor, the formidable editor, the priest, and reformer, the

contemplative girl, and the fair aspirant for fashion and opportunities,

the woman of the world who has tried and knows;--let us examine how well

she knows. Could we indicate the indicators, indicate those who most

accurately represent every good and evil tendency of the general mind,

in the just order which they take on this canvass of Time; so that all

witnesses should recognise a spiritual law, as each well known form

flitted for a moment across the wall, we should have a series of

sketches which would report to the next ages the color and quality of

ours.

Certainly, I think, if this were done, there would be much to admire as

well as to condemn; souls of as lofty a port, as any in Greek or Roman

fame, might appear; men of great heart, of strong hand, and of

persuasive speech; subtle thinkers, and men of wide sympathy, and an

apprehension which looks over all history, and everywhere recognises its

own. To be sure, there will be fragments and hints of men, more than

enough: bloated promises, which end in nothing or little. And then truly

great men, but with some defect in their composition, which neutralizes

their whole force. Here is a Damascus blade, such as you may search

through nature in vain to parallel, laid up on the shelf in some village

to rust and ruin. And how many seem not quite available for that idea

which they represent? Now and then comes a bolder spirit, I should

rather say, a more surrendered soul, more informed and led by God, which

is much in advance of the rest, quite beyond their sympathy, but

predicts what shall soon be the general fulness; as when we stand by the

seashore, whilst the tide is coming in, a wave comes up the beach far

higher than any foregoing one, and recedes; and for a long while none

comes up to that mark; but after some time the whole sea is there and

beyond it.

But we are not permitted to stand as spectators of the pageant which the

times exhibit; we are parties also, and have a responsibility which is

not to be declined. A little while this interval of wonder and

comparison is permitted us, but to the end that we shall play a manly

part. As the solar system moves forward in the heavens, certain stars

open before us, and certain stars close up behind us; so is man’s life.

The reputations that were great and inaccessible change and tarnish. How

great were once Lord Bacon’s dimensions! he is now reduced almost to the

middle height; and many another star has turned out to be a planet or an

asteroid: only a few are the fixed stars which have no parallax, or none

for us. The change and decline of old reputations are the gracious marks

of our own growth. Slowly, like light of morning, it steals on us, the

new fact, that we, who were pupils or aspirants, are now society: do

compose a portion of that head and heart we are wont to think worthy of

all reverence and heed. We are the representatives of religion and

intellect, and stand in the light of Ideas, whose rays stream through us

to those younger and more in the dark. What further relations we

sustain, what new lodges we are entering, is now unknown. To-day is a

king in disguise. To-day always looks mean to the thoughtless, in the

face of an uniform experience, that all good and great and happy actions

are made up precisely of these blank to-days. Let us not be so deceived.

Let us unmask the king as he passes. Let us not inhabit times of

wonderful and various promise without divining their tendency. Let us

not see the foundations of nations, and of a new and better order of

things laid, with roving eyes, and an attention preoccupied with

trifles.

The two omnipresent parties of History, the party of the Past and the

party of the Future, divide society to-day as of old. Here is the

innumerable multitude of those who accept the state and the church from

the last generation, and stand on no argument but possession. They have

reason also, and, as I think, better reason than is commonly stated. No

Burke, no Metternich has yet done full justice to the side of

conservatism. But this class, however large, relying not on the

intellect but on the instinct, blends itself with the brute forces of

nature, is respectable only as nature is, but the individuals have no

attraction for us. It is the dissenter, the theorist, the aspirant, who

is quitting this ancient domain to embark on seas of adventure, who

engages our interest. Omitting then for the present all notice of the

stationary class, we shall find that the movement party divides itself

into two classes, the actors, and the students.

The actors constitute that great army of martyrs who, at least in

America, by their conscience and philanthropy, occupy the ground which

Calvinism occupied in the last age, and compose the visible church of

the existing generation. The present age will be marked by its harvest

of projects for the reform of domestic, civil, literary, and

ecclesiastical institutions. The leaders of the crusades against War,

Negro slavery, Intemperance, Government based on force, Usages of trade,

Court and Custom-house Oaths, and so on to the agitators on the system

of Education and the laws of Property, are the right successors of

Luther, Knox, Robinson, Fox, Penn, Wesley, and Whitfield. They have the

same virtues and vices; the same noble impulse, and the same bigotry.

These movements are on all accounts important; they not only check the

special abuses, but they educate the conscience and the intellect of the

people. How can such a question as the Slave-trade be agitated for forty

years by all the Christian nations, without throwing great light on

ethics into the general mind? The fury, with which the slave-trader

defends every inch of his bloody deck, and his howling auction-platform,

is a trumpet to alarm the ear of mankind, to wake the dull, and drive

all neutrals to take sides, and to listen to the argument and the

verdict. The Temperance-question, which rides the conversation of ten

thousand circles, and is tacitly recalled at every public and at every

private table, drawing with it all the curious ethics of the Pledge, of

the Wine-question, of the equity of the manufacture and the trade, is a

gymnastic training to the casuistry and conscience of the time.

Antimasonry had a deep right and wrong, which gradually emerged to sight

out of the turbid controversy. The political questions touching the

Banks; the Tariff; the limits of the executive power; the right of the

constituent to instruct the representative; the treatment of the

Indians; the Boundary wars; the Congress of nations; are all pregnant

with ethical conclusions; and it is well if government and our social

order can extricate themselves from these alembics, and find themselves

still government and social order. The student of history will hereafter

compute the singular value of our endless discussion of questions, to

the mind of the period.

Whilst each of these aspirations and attempts of the people for the

Better is magnified by the natural exaggeration of its advocates, until

it excludes the others from sight, and repels discreet persons by the

unfairness of the plea, the movements are in reality all parts of one

movement. There is a perfect chain,--see it, or see it not,--of reforms

emerging from the surrounding darkness, each cherishing some part of the

general idea, and all must be seen, in order to do justice to any one.

Seen in this their natural connection, they are sublime. The conscience

of the Age demonstrates itself in this effort to raise the life of man

by putting it in harmony with his idea of the Beautiful and the Just.

The history of reform is always identical; it is the comparison of the

idea with the fact. Our modes of living are not agreeable to our

imagination. We suspect they are unworthy. We arraign our daily

employments. They appear to us unfit, unworthy of the faculties we spend

on them. In conversation with a wise man, we find ourselves apologizing

for our employments; we speak of them with shame. Nature, literature,

science, childhood, appear to us beautiful; but not our own daily work;

not the ripe fruit and considered labors of man. This beauty which the

fancy finds in everything else, certainly accuses the manner of life we

lead. Why should it be hateful? Why should it contrast thus with all

natural beauty? Why should it not be poetic, and invite and raise us? Is

there a necessity that the works of man should be sordid? Perhaps

not.--Out of this fair Idea in the mind springs the effort at the

Perfect. It is the interior testimony to a fairer possibility of life

and manners, which agitates society every day with the offer of some new

amendment. If we would make more strict inquiry concerning its origin,

we find ourselves rapidly approaching the inner boundaries of thought,

that term where speech becomes silence, and science conscience. For the

origin of all reform is in that mysterious fountain of the moral

sentiment in man, which, amidst the natural, ever contains the

supernatural for men. That is new and creative. That is alive. That

alone can make a man other than he is. Here or nowhere resides unbounded

energy, unbounded power.

The new voices in the wilderness crying “Repent,” have revived a hope,

which had wellnigh perished out of the world, that the thoughts of the

mind may yet, in some distant age, in some happy hour, be executed by

the hands. That is the hope, of which all other hopes are parts. For

some ages, these ideas have been consigned to the poet and musical

composer, to the prayers and the sermons of churches; but the thought,

that they can ever have any footing in real life, seems long since to

have been exploded by all judicious persons. Milton, in his best tract,

describes a relation between religion and the daily occupations, which

is true until this time.

“A wealthy man, addicted to his pleasure and to his profits, finds

religion to be a traffic so entangled, and of so many piddling accounts,

that of all mysteries he cannot skill to keep a stock going upon that

trade. What should he do? Fain he would have the name to be religious;

fain he would bear up with his neighbors in that. What does he,

therefore, but resolve to give over toiling, and to find himself out

some factor, to whose care and credit he may commit the whole managing

of his religious affairs; some divine of note and estimation that must

be. To him he adheres, resigns the whole warehouse of his religion, with

all the locks and keys, into his custody; and indeed makes the very

person of that man his religion; esteems his associating with him a

sufficient evidence and commendatory of his own piety. So that a man may

say, his religion is now no more within himself, but is become a

dividual moveable, and goes and comes near him, according as that good

man frequents the house. He entertains him, gives him gifts, feasts him,

lodges him; his religion comes home at night, prays, is liberally

supped, and sumptuously laid to sleep, rises, is saluted, and after the

malmsey, or some well spiced beverage, and better breakfasted than he

whose morning appetite would have gladly fed on green figs between

Bethany and Jerusalem, his religion walks abroad at eight, and leaves

his kind entertainer in the shop, trading all day without his

religion.”

This picture would serve for our times. Religion was not invited to eat

or drink or sleep with us, or to make or divide an estate, but was a

holiday guest. Such omissions judge the church; as the compromise made

with the slaveholder, not much noticed at first, every day appears more

flagrant mischief to the American constitution. But now the purists are

looking into all these matters. The more intelligent are growing uneasy

on the subject of Marriage. They wish to see the character represented

also in that covenant. There shall be nothing brutal in it, but it shall

honor the man and the woman, as much as the most diffusive and universal

action. Grimly the same spirit looks into the law of Property, and

accuses men of driving a trade in the great boundless providence which

had given the air, the water, and the land to men, to use and not to

fence in and monopolize. It casts its eye on Trade, and Day Labor, and

so it goes up and down, paving the earth with eyes, destroying privacy

and making thorough-lights. Is all this for nothing? Do you suppose that

the reformers, which are preparing, will be as superficial as those we

know?

By the books it reads and translates, judge what books it will presently

print. A great deal of the profoundest thinking of antiquity, which had

become as good as obsolete for us, is now re-appearing in extracts and

allusions, and in twenty years will get all printed anew. See how daring

is the reading, the speculation, the experimenting of the time. If now

some genius shall arise who could unite these scattered rays! And always

such a genius does embody the ideas of each time. Here is great variety

and richness of mysticism, each part of which now only disgusts, whilst

it forms the sole thought of some poor Perfectionist or “Comer out,”

yet, when it shall be taken up as the garniture of some profound and

all-reconciling thinker, will appear the rich and appropriate decoration

of his robes.

These reforms are our contemporaries; they are ourselves; our own light,

and sight, and conscience; they only name the relation which subsists

between us and the vicious institutions which they go to rectify. They

are the simplest statements of man in these matters; the plain right and

wrong. I cannot choose but allow and honor them. The impulse is good,

and the theory; the practice is less beautiful. The Reformers affirm the

inward life, but they do not trust it, but use outward and vulgar means.

They do not rely on precisely that strength which wins me to their

cause; not on love, not on a principle, but on men, on multitudes, on

circumstances, on money, on party; that is, on fear, on wrath, and

pride. The love which lifted men to the sight of these better ends, was

the true and best distinction of this time, the disposition to trust a

principle more than a material force. I think _that_ the soul of reform;

the conviction, that not sensualism, not slavery, not war, not

imprisonment, not even government, are needed,--but in lieu of them all,

reliance on the sentiment of man, which will work best the more it is

trusted; not reliance on numbers, but, contrariwise, distrust of

numbers, and the feeling that then are we strongest, when most private

and alone. The young men, who have been vexing society for these last

years with regenerative methods, seem to have made this mistake; they

all exaggerated some special means, and all failed to see that the

Reform of Reforms must be accomplished without means.

The Reforms have their high origin in an ideal justice, but they do not

retain the purity of an idea. They are quickly organized in some low,

inadequate form, and present no more poetic image to the mind, than the

evil tradition which they reprobated. They mix the fire of the moral

sentiment with personal and party heats, with measureless exaggerations,

and the blindness that prefers some darling measure to justice and

truth. Those, who are urging with most ardor what are called the

greatest benefits of mankind, are narrow, self-pleasing, conceited men,

and affect us as the insane do. They bite us, and we run mad also. I

think the work of the reformer as innocent as other work that is done

around him; but when I have seen it near, I do not like it better. It is

done in the same way, it is done profanely, not piously; by management,

by tactics, and clamor. It is a buzz in the ear. I cannot feel any

pleasure in sacrifices which display to me such partiality of character.

We do not want actions, but men; not a chemical drop of water, but rain;

the spirit that sheds and showers actions, countless, endless actions.

You have on some occasion played a bold part. You have set your heart

and face against society, when you thought it wrong, and returned it

frown for frown. Excellent: now can you afford to forget it, reckoning

all your action no more than the passing of your hand through the air,

or a little breath of your mouth? The world leaves no track in space,

and the greatest action of man no mark in the vast idea. To the youth

diffident of his ability, and full of compunction at his unprofitable

existence, the temptation is always great to lend himself to public

movements, and as one of a party accomplish what he cannot hope to

effect alone. But he must resist the degradation of a man to a measure.

I must act with truth, though I should never come to act, as you call

it, with effect. I must consent to inaction. A patience which is grand;

a brave and cold neglect of the offices which prudence exacts, so it be

done in a deep upper piety; a consent to solitude and inaction, which

proceeds out of an unwillingness to violate character, is the century

which makes the gem. Whilst therefore I desire to express the respect

and joy I feel before this sublime connection of reforms, now in their

infancy around us, I urge the more earnestly the paramount duties of

self-reliance. I cannot find language of sufficient energy to convey my

sense of the sacredness of private integrity. All men, all things, the

state, the church, yea the friends of the heart are phantasms and unreal

beside the sanctuary of the heart. With so much awe, with so much fear,

let it be respected.

The great majority of men, unable to judge of any principle until its

light falls on a fact, are not aware of the evil that is around them,

until they see it in some gross form, as in a class of intemperate men,

or slaveholders, or soldiers, or fraudulent persons. Then they are

greatly moved; and magnifying the importance of that wrong, they fancy

that if that abuse were redressed, all would go well, and they fill the

land with clamor to correct it. Hence the missionary and other religious

efforts. If every island and every house had a Bible, if every child was

brought into the Sunday School, would the wounds of the world heal, and

man be upright?

But the man of ideas, accounting the circumstance nothing, judges of the

commonwealth from the state of his own mind. ‘If,’ he says, ‘I am

selfish, then is there slavery, or the effort to establish it, wherever

I go. But if I am just, then is there no slavery, let the laws say what

they will. For if I treat all men as gods, how to me can there be any

such thing as a slave?’ But how frivolous is your war against

circumstances. This denouncing philanthropist is himself a slaveholder

in every word and look. Does he free me? Does he cheer me? He is the

state of Georgia, or Alabama, with their sanguinary slave-laws, walking

here on our northeastern shores. We are all thankful he has no more

political power, as we are fond of liberty ourselves. I am afraid our

virtue is a little geographical. I am not mortified by our vice; that is

obduracy; it colors and palters, it curses and swears, and I can see to

the end of it; but, I own, our virtue makes me ashamed; so sour and

narrow, so thin and blind, virtue so vice-like. Then again, how trivial

seem the contests of the abolitionist, whilst he aims merely at the

circumstance of the slave. Give the slave the least elevation of

religious sentiment, and he is no slave: you are the slave: he not only

in his humility feels his superiority, feels that much deplored

condition of his to be a fading trifle, but he makes you feel it too. He

is the master. The exaggeration, which our young people make of his

wrongs, characterizes themselves. What are no trifles to them, they

naturally think are no trifles to Pompey.

We say, then, that the reforming movement is sacred in its origin; in

its management and details timid and profane. These benefactors hope to

raise man by improving his circumstances: by combination of that which

is dead, they hope to make something alive. In vain. By new infusions

alone of the spirit by which he is made and directed, can he be re-made

and reinforced. The sad Pestalozzi, who shared with all ardent spirits

the hope of Europe on the outbreak of the French Revolution, after

witnessing its sequel, recorded his conviction, that “the amelioration

of outward circumstances will be the effect, but can never be the means

of mental and moral improvement.” Quitting now the class of actors, let

us turn to see how it stands with the other class of which we spoke,

namely, the students.

A new disease has fallen on the life of man. Every Age, like every human

body, has its own distemper. Other times have had war, or famine, or a

barbarism domestic or bordering, as their antagonism. Our forefathers

walked in the world and went to their graves, tormented with the fear of

Sin, and the terror of the Day of Judgment. These terrors have lost

their force, and our torment is Unbelief, the Uncertainty as to what we

ought to do; the distrust of the value of what we do, and the distrust

that the Necessity (which we all at last believe in) is fair and

beneficent. Our Religion assumes the negative form of rejection. Out of

love of the true, we repudiate the false: and the Religion is an

abolishing criticism. A great perplexity hangs like a cloud on the brow

of all cultivated persons, a certain imbecility in the best spirits,

which distinguishes the period. We do not find the same trait in the

Arabian, in the Hebrew, in Greek, Roman, Norman, English periods; no,

but in other men a natural firmness. The men did not see beyond the need

of the hour. They planted their foot strong, and doubted nothing. We

mistrust every step we take. We find it the worst thing about time, that

we know not what to do with it. We are so sharp-sighted that we can

neither work nor think, neither read Plato nor not read him.

Then there is what is called a too intellectual tendency. Can there be

too much intellect? We have never met with any such excess. But the

criticism, which is levelled at the laws and manners, ends in thought,

without causing a new method of life. The genius of the day does not

incline to a deed, but to a beholding. It is not that men do not wish to

act; they pine to be employed, but are paralyzed by the uncertainty what

they should do. The inadequacy of the work to the faculties, is the

painful perception which keeps them still. This happens to the best.

Then, talents bring their usual temptations, and the current literature

and poetry with perverse ingenuity draw us away from life to solitude

and meditation. This could well be borne, if it were great and

involuntary; if the men were ravished by their thought, and hurried into

ascetic extravagances. Society could then manage to release their

shoulder from its wheel, and grant them for a time this privilege of

sabbath. But they are not so. Thinking, which was a rage, is become an

art. The thinker gives me results, and never invites me to be present

with him at his invocation of truth, and to enjoy with him its

proceeding into his mind.

So little action amidst such audacious and yet sincere profession, that

we begin to doubt if that great revolution in the art of war, which has

made it a game of posts instead of a game of battles, has not operated

on Reform; whether this be not also a war of posts, a paper blockade, in

which each party is to display the utmost resources of his spirit and

belief, and no conflict occur; but the world shall take that course

which the demonstration of the truth shall indicate.

But we must pay for being too intellectual, as they call it. People are

not as light-hearted for it. I think men never loved life less. I

question if care and doubt ever wrote their names so legibly on the

faces of any population. This _Ennui_, for which we Saxons had no name,

this word of France has got a terrific significance. It shortens life,

and bereaves the day of its light. Old age begins in the nursery, and

before the young American is put into jacket and trowsers, he says, ‘I

want something which I never saw before;’ and ‘I wish I was not I.’ I

have seen the same gloom on the brow even of those adventurers from the

intellectual class, who had dived deepest and with most success into

active life. I have seen the authentic sign of anxiety and perplexity on

the greatest forehead of the state. The canker worms have crawled to the

topmost bough of the wild elm, and swing down from that. Is there less

oxygen in the atmosphere? What has checked in this age the animal

spirits which gave to our forefathers their bounding pulse?

But have a little patience with this melancholy humor. Their unbelief

arises out of a greater Belief; their inaction out of a scorn of

inadequate action. By the side of these men, the hot agitators have a

certain cheap and ridiculous air; they even look smaller than the

others. Of the two, I own, I like the speculators best. They have some

piety which looks with faith to a fair Future, unprofaned by rash and

unequal attempts to realize it. And truly we shall find much to console

us, when we consider the cause of their uneasiness. It is the love of

greatness, it is the need of harmony, the contrast of the dwarfish

Actual with the exorbitant Idea. No man can compare the ideas and

aspirations of the innovators of the present day, with those of former

periods, without feeling how great and high this criticism is. The

revolutions that impend over society are not now from ambition and

rapacity, from impatience of one or another form of government, but from

new modes of thinking, which shall recompose society after a new order,

which shall animate labor by love and science, which shall destroy the

value of many kinds of property, and replace all property within the

dominion of reason and equity. There was never so great a thought

laboring in the breasts of men, as now. It almost seems as if what was

aforetime spoken fabulously and hieroglyphically, was now spoken

plainly, the doctrine, namely, of the indwelling of the Creator in man.

The spiritualist wishes this only, that the spiritual principle should

be suffered to demonstrate itself to the end, in all possible

applications to the state of man, without the admission of anything

unspiritual, that is, anything positive, dogmatic, or personal. The

excellence of this class consists in this, that they have believed;

that, affirming the need of new and higher modes of living and action,

they have abstained from the recommendation of low methods. Their fault

is that they have stopped at the intellectual perception; that their

will is not yet inspired from the Fountain of Love. But whose fault is

this? and what a fault, and to what inquiry does it lead! We have come

to that which is the spring of all power, of beauty and virtue, of art

and poetry; and who shall tell us according to what law its inspirations

and its informations are given or withholden?

I do not wish to be guilty of the narrowness and pedantry of inferring

the tendency and genius of the Age from a few and insufficient facts or

persons. Every age has a thousand sides and signs and tendencies; and it

is only when surveyed from inferior points of view, that great varieties

of character appear. Our time too is full of activity and performance.

Is there not something comprehensive in the grasp of a society which to

great mechanical invention, and the best institutions of property, adds

the most daring theories; which explores the subtlest and most universal

problems? At the manifest risk of repeating what every other Age has

thought of itself, we might say, we think the Genius of this Age more

philosophical than any other has been, righter in its aims, truer, with

less fear, less fable, less mixture of any sort.

But turn it how we will, as we ponder this meaning of the times, every

new thought drives us to the deep fact, that the Time is the child of

the Eternity. The main interest which any aspects of the Times can have

for us, is the great spirit which gazes through them, the light which

they can shed on the wonderful questions, What we are? and Whither we

tend? We do not wish to be deceived. Here we drift, like white sail

across the wild ocean, now bright on the wave, now darkling in the

trough of the sea;--but from what port did we sail? Who knows? Or to

what port are we bound? Who knows? There is no one to tell us but such

poor weather-tossed mariners as ourselves, whom we speak as we pass, or

who have hoisted some signal, or floated to us some letter in a bottle

from far. But what know they more than we? They also found themselves on

this wondrous sea. No; from the older sailors, nothing. Over all their

speaking-trumpets, the gray sea and the loud winds answer, Not in us;

not in Time. Where then but in Ourselves, where but in that Thought

through which we communicate with absolute nature, and are made aware

that, whilst we shed the dust of which we are built, grain by grain,

till it is all gone, the law which clothes us with humanity remains

anew? where, but in the intuitions which are vouchsafed us from within,

shall we learn the Truth? Faithless, faithless, we fancy that with the

dust we depart and are not; and do not know that the law and the

perception of the law are at last one; that only as much as the law

enters us, becomes us, we are living men,--immortal with the immortality

of this law. Underneath all these appearances, lies that which is, that

which lives, that which causes. This ever renewing generation of

appearances rests on a reality, and a reality that is alive.

To a true scholar the attraction of the aspects of nature, the

departments of life, and the passages of his experience, is simply the

information they yield him of this supreme nature which lurks within

all. That reality, that causing force is moral. The Moral Sentiment is

but its other name. It makes by its presence or absence right and wrong,

beauty and ugliness, genius or depravation. As the granite comes to the

surface, and towers into the highest mountains, and, if we dig down, we

find it below the superficial strata, so in all the details of our

domestic or civil life, is hidden the elemental reality, which ever and

anon comes to the surface, and forms the grand men, who are the leaders

and examples, rather than the companions of the race. The granite is

curiously concealed under a thousand formations and surfaces, under

fertile soils, and grasses, and flowers, under well-manured, arable

fields, and large towns and cities, but it makes the foundation of

these, and is always indicating its presence by slight but sure signs.

So is it with the Life of our life; so close does that also hide. I read

it in glad and in weeping eyes: I read it in the pride and in the

humility of people: it is recognized in every bargain and in every

complaisance, in every criticism, and in all praise: it is voted for at

elections; it wins the cause with juries; it rides the stormy eloquence

of the senate, sole victor; histories are written of it, holidays

decreed to it; statues, tombs, churches, built to its honor; yet men

seem to fear and to shun it, when it comes barely to view in our

immediate neighborhood.

For that reality let us stand: that let us serve: and for that speak.

Only as far as _that_ shines through them, are these times or any times

worth consideration. I wish to speak of the politics, education,

business, and religion around us, without ceremony or false deference.

You will absolve me from the charge of flippancy, or malignity, or the

desire to say smart things at the expense of whomsoever, when you see

that reality is all we prize, and that we are bound on our entrance into

nature to speak for that. Let it not be recorded in our own memories,

that in this moment of the Eternity, when we who were named by our

names, flitted across the light, we were afraid of any fact, or

disgraced the fair Day by a pusillanimous preference of our bread to our

freedom. What is the scholar, what is the man _for_, but for hospitality

to every new thought of his time? Have you leisure, power, property,

friends? you shall be the asylum and patron of every new thought, every

unproven opinion, every untried project, which proceeds out of good will

and honest seeking. All the newspapers, all the tongues of to-day will

of course at first defame what is noble; but you who hold not of to-day,

not of the times, but of the Everlasting, are to stand for it: and the

highest compliment man ever receives from heaven, is the sending to him

its disguised and discredited angels.

THE CONSERVATIVE.

A LECTURE DELIVERED AT THE MASONIC TEMPLE, BOSTON, DECEMBER 9, 1841.

THE CONSERVATIVE.

The two parties which divide the state, the party of Conservatism and

that of Innovation, are very old, and have disputed the possession of

the world ever since it was made. This quarrel is the subject of civil

history. The conservative party established the reverend hierarchies and

monarchies of the most ancient world. The battle of patrician and

plebeian, of parent state and colony, of old usage and accommodation to

new facts, of the rich and the poor, reappears in all countries and

times. The war rages not only in battle-fields, in national councils,

and ecclesiastical synods, but agitates every man’s bosom with opposing

advantages every hour. On rolls the old world meantime, and now one, now

the other gets the day, and still the fight renews itself as if for the

first time, under new names and hot personalities.

Such an irreconcilable antagonism, of course, must have a correspondent

depth of seat in the human constitution. It is the opposition of Past

and Future, of Memory and Hope, of the Understanding and the Reason. It

is the primal antagonism, the appearance in trifles of the two poles of

nature.

There is a fragment of old fable which seems somehow to have been

dropped from the current mythologies, which may deserve attention, as it

appears to relate to this subject.

Saturn grew weary of sitting alone, or with none but the great Uranus or

Heaven beholding him, and he created an oyster. Then he would act again,

but he made nothing more, but went on creating the race of oysters. Then

Uranus cried, ‘a new work, O Saturn! the old is not good again.’

Saturn replied, ‘I fear. There is not only the alternative of making and

not making, but also of unmaking. Seest thou the great sea, how it ebbs

and flows? so is it with me; my power ebbs; and if I put forth my hands,

I shall not do, but undo. Therefore I do what I have done; I hold what I

have got; and so I resist Night and Chaos.’

‘O Saturn,’ replied Uranus, ‘thou canst not hold thine own, but by

making more. Thy oysters are barnacles and cockles, and with the next

flowing of the tide, they will be pebbles and sea-foam.’

‘I see,’ rejoins Saturn, ‘thou art in league with Night, thou art become

an evil eye; thou spakest from love; now thy words smite me with hatred.

I appeal to Fate, must there not be rest?’--‘I appeal to Fate also,’

said Uranus, ‘must there not be motion?’--But Saturn was silent, and

went on making oysters for a thousand years.

After that, the word of Uranus came into his mind like a ray of the sun,

and he made Jupiter; and then he feared again; and nature froze, the

things that were made went backward, and, to save the world, Jupiter

slew his father Saturn.

This may stand for the earliest account of a conversation on politics

between a Conservative and a Radical, which has come down to us. It is

ever thus. It is the counteraction of the centripetal and the

centrifugal forces. Innovation is the salient energy; Conservatism the

pause on the last movement. ‘That which is was made by God,’ saith

Conservatism. ‘He is leaving that, he is entering this other;’ rejoins

Innovation.

There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism,

joined with a certain superiority in its fact. It affirms because it

holds. Its fingers clutch the fact, and it will not open its eyes to see

a better fact. The castle, which conservatism is set to defend, is the

actual state of things, good and bad. The project of innovation is the

best possible state of things. Of course, conservatism always has the

worst of the argument, is always apologizing, pleading a necessity,

pleading that to change would be to deteriorate; it must saddle itself

with the mountainous load of the violence and vice of society, must deny

the possibility of good, deny ideas, and suspect and stone the prophet;

whilst innovation is always in the right, triumphant, attacking, and

sure of final success. Conservatism stands on man’s confessed

limitations; reform on his indisputable infinitude; conservatism on

circumstance; liberalism on power; one goes to make an adroit member of

the social frame; the other to postpone all things to the man himself;

conservatism is debonnair and social; reform is individual and

imperious. We are reformers in spring and summer; in autumn and winter,

we stand by the old; reformers in the morning, conservers at night.

Reform is affirmative, conservatism negative; conservatism goes for

comfort, reform for truth. Conservatism is more candid to behold

another’s worth; reform more disposed to maintain and increase its own.

Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention; it

is all memory. Reform has no gratitude, no prudence, no husbandry. It

makes a great difference to your figure and to your thought, whether

your foot is advancing or receding. Conservatism never puts the foot

forward; in the hour when it does that, it is not establishment, but

reform. Conservatism tends to universal seeming and treachery, believes

in a negative fate; believes that men’s temper governs them; that for

me, it avails not to trust in principles; they will fail me; I must bend

a little; it distrusts nature; it thinks there is a general law without

a particular application,--law for all that does not include any one.

Reform in its antagonism inclines to asinine resistance, to kick with

hoofs; it runs to egotism and bloated self-conceit; it runs to a

bodiless pretension, to unnatural refining and elevation, which ends in

hypocrisy and sensual reaction.

And so whilst we do not go beyond general statements, it may be safely

affirmed of these two metaphysical antagonists, that each is a good

half, but an impossible whole. Each exposes the abuses of the other, but

in a true society, in a true man, both must combine. Nature does not

give the crown of its approbation, namely, beauty, to any action or

emblem or actor, but to one which combines both these elements; not to

the rock which resists the waves from age to age, nor to the wave which

lashes incessantly the rock, but the superior beauty is with the oak

which stands with its hundred arms against the storms of a century, and

grows every year like a sapling; or the river which ever flowing, yet is

found in the same bed from age to age; or, greatest of all, the man who

has subsisted for years amid the changes of nature, yet has distanced

himself, so that when you remember what he was, and see what he is, you

say, what strides! what a disparity is here!

Throughout nature the past combines in every creature with the present.

Each of the convolutions of the sea-shell, each node and spine marks one

year of the fish’s life, what was the mouth of the shell for one season,

with the addition of new matter by the growth of the animal, becoming an

ornamental node. The leaves and a shell of soft wood are all that the

vegetation of this summer has made, but the solid columnar stem, which

lifts that bank of foliage into the air to draw the eye and to cool us

with its shade, is the gift and legacy of dead and buried years.

In nature, each of these elements being always present, each theory has

a natural support. As we take our stand on Necessity, or on Ethics,

shall we go for the conservative, or for the reformer. If we read the

world historically, we shall say, Of all the ages, the present hour and

circumstance is the cumulative result; this is the best throw of the

dice of nature that has yet been, or that is yet possible. If we see it

from the side of Will, or the Moral Sentiment, we shall accuse the Past

and the Present, and require the impossible of the Future.

But although this bifold fact lies thus united in real nature, and so

united that no man can continue to exist in whom both these elements do

not work, yet men are not philosophers, but are rather very foolish

children, who, by reason of their partiality, see everything in the most

absurd manner, and are the victims at all times of the nearest object.

There is even no philosopher who is a philosopher at all times. Our

experience, our perception is conditioned by the need to acquire in

parts and in succession, that is, with every truth a certain falsehood.

As this is the invariable method of our training, we must give it

allowance, and suffer men to learn as they have done for six

millenniums, a word at a time, to pair off into insane parties, and

learn the amount of truth each knows, by the denial of an equal amount

of truth. For the present, then, to come at what sum is attainable to

us, we must even hear the parties plead as parties.

That which is best about conservatism, that which, though it cannot be

expressed in detail, inspires reverence in all, is the Inevitable. There

is the question not only, what the conservative says for himself? but,

why must he say it? What insurmountable fact binds him to that side?

Here is the fact which men call Fate, and fate in dread degrees, fate

behind fate, not to be disposed of by the consideration that the

Conscience commands this or that, but necessitating the question,

whether the faculties of man will play him true in resisting the facts

of universal experience? For although the commands of the Conscience are

_essentially_ absolute, they are _historically_ limitary. Wisdom does

not seek a literal rectitude, but an useful, that is, a conditioned one,

such a one as the faculties of man and the constitution of things will

warrant. The reformer, the partisan loses himself in driving to the

utmost some specialty of right conduct, until his own nature and all

nature resist him; but Wisdom attempts nothing enormous and

disproportioned to its powers, nothing which it cannot perform or

nearly perform. We have all a certain intellection or presentiment of

reform existing in the mind, which does not yet descend into the

character, and those who throw themselves blindly on this lose

themselves. Whatever they attempt in that direction, fails, and reacts

suicidally on the actor himself. This is the penalty of having

transcended nature. For the existing world is not a dream, and cannot

with impunity be treated as a dream; neither is it a disease; but it is

the ground on which you stand, it is the mother of whom you were born.

Reform converses with possibilities, perchance with impossibilities; but

here is sacred fact. This also was true, or it could not be: it had life

in it, or it could not have existed; it has life in it, or it could not

continue. Your schemes may be feasible, or may not be, but this has the

endorsement of nature and a long friendship and cohabitation with the

powers of nature. This will stand until a better cast of the dice is

made. The contest between the Future and the Past is one between

Divinity entering, and Divinity departing. You are welcome to try your

experiments, and, if you can, to displace the actual order by that ideal

republic you announce, for nothing but God will expel God. But plainly

the burden of proof must lie with the projector. We hold to this, until

you can demonstrate something better.

The system of property and law goes back for its origin to barbarous and

sacred times; it is the fruit of the same mysterious cause as the

mineral or animal world. There is a natural sentiment and prepossession

in favor of age, of ancestors, of barbarous and aboriginal usages, which

is a homage to the element of necessity and divinity which is in them.

The respect for the old names of places, of mountains, and streams, is

universal. The Indian and barbarous name can never be supplanted without

loss. The ancients tell us that the gods loved the Ethiopians for their

stable customs; and the Egyptians and Chaldeans, whose origin could not

be explored, passed among the junior tribes of Greece and Italy for

sacred nations.

Moreover, so deep is the foundation of the existing social system, that

it leaves no one out of it. We may be partial, but Fate is not. All men

have their root in it. You who quarrel with the arrangements of society,

and are willing to embroil all, and risk the indisputable good that

exists, for the chance of better, live, move, and have your being in

this, and your deeds contradict your words every day. For as you cannot

jump from the ground without using the resistance of the ground, nor

put out the boat to sea, without shoving from the shore, nor attain

liberty without rejecting obligation, so you are under the necessity of

using the Actual order of things, in order to disuse it; to live by it,

whilst you wish to take away its life. The past has baked your loaf, and

in the strength of its bread you would break up the oven. But you are

betrayed by your own nature. You also are conservatives. However men

please to style themselves, I see no other than a conservative party.

You are not only identical with us in your needs, but also in your

methods and aims. You quarrel with my conservatism, but it is to build

up one of your own; it will have a new beginning, but the same course

and end, the same trials, the same passions; among the lovers of the new

I observe that there is a jealousy of the newest, and that the seceder

from the seceder is as damnable as the pope himself.

On these and the like grounds of general statement, conservatism plants

itself without danger of being displaced. Especially before this

_personal_ appeal, the innovator must confess his weakness, must confess

that no man is to be found good enough to be entitled to stand champion

for the principle. But when this great tendency comes to practical

encounters, and is challenged by young men, to whom it is no

abstraction, but a fact of hunger, distress, and exclusion from

opportunities, it must needs seem injurious. The youth, of course, is an

innovator by the fact of his birth. There he stands, newly born on the

planet, a universal beggar, with all the reason of things, one would

say, on his side. In his first consideration how to feed, clothe, and

warm himself, he is met by warnings on every hand, that this thing and

that thing have owners, and he must go elsewhere. Then he says; If I am

born in the earth, where is my part? have the goodness, gentlemen of

this world, to show me my wood-lot, where I may fell my wood, my field

where to plant my corn, my pleasant ground where to build my cabin.

‘Touch any wood, or field, or house-lot, on your peril,’ cry all the

gentlemen of this world; ‘but you may come and work in ours, for us, and

we will give you a piece of bread.’

And what is that peril?

Knives and muskets, if we meet you in the act; imprisonment, if we find

you afterward.

And by what authority, kind gentlemen?

By our law.

And your law,--is it just?

As just for you as it was for us. We wrought for others under this law,

and got our lands so.

I repeat the question, Is your law just?

Not quite just, but necessary. Moreover, it is juster now than it was

when we were born; we have made it milder and more equal.

I will none of your law, returns the youth; it encumbers me. I cannot

understand, or so much as spare time to read that needless library of

your laws. Nature has sufficiently provided me with rewards and sharp

penalties, to bind me not to transgress. Like the Persian noble of old,

I ask “that I may neither command nor obey.” I do not wish to enter into

your complex social system. I shall serve those whom I can, and they who

can will serve me. I shall seek those whom I love, and shun those whom I

love not, and what more can all your laws render me?

With equal earnestness and good faith, replies to this plaintiff an

upholder of the establishment, a man of many virtues:

Your opposition is feather-brained and over-fine. Young man, I have no

skill to talk with you, but look at me; I have risen early and sat late,

and toiled honestly, and painfully for very many years. I never dreamed

about methods; I laid my bones to, and drudged for the good I possess;

it was not got by fraud, nor by luck, but by work, and you must show me

a warrant like these stubborn facts in your own fidelity and labor,

before I suffer you, on the faith of a few fine words, to ride into my

estate, and claim to scatter it as your own.

Now you touch the heart of the matter, replies the reformer. To that

fidelity and labor, I pay homage. I am unworthy to arraign your manner

of living, until I too have been tried. But I should be more unworthy,

if I did not tell you why I cannot walk in your steps. I find this vast

network, which you call property, extended over the whole planet. I

cannot occupy the bleakest crag of the White Hills or the Alleghany

Range, but some man or corporation steps up to me to show me that it is

his. Now, though I am very peaceable, and on my private account could

well enough die, since it appears there was some mistake in my creation,

and that I have been _mis_sent to this earth, where all the seats were

already taken,--yet I feel called upon in behalf of rational nature,

which I represent, to declare to you my opinion, that, if the Earth is

yours, so also is it mine. All your aggregate existences are less to me

a fact than is my own; as I am born to the earth, so the Earth is given

to me, what I want of it to till and to plant; nor could I, without

pusillanimity, omit to claim so much. I must not only have a name to

live, I must live. My genius leads me to build a different manner of

life from any of yours. I cannot then spare you the whole world. I love

you better. I must tell you the truth practically; and take that which

you call yours. It is God’s world and mine; yours as much as you want,

mine as much as I want. Besides, I know your ways; I know the symptoms

of the disease. To the end of your power, you will serve this lie which

cheats you. Your want is a gulf which the possession of the broad earth

would not fill. Yonder sun in heaven you would pluck down from shining

on the universe, and make him a property and privacy, if you could; and

the moon and the north star you would quickly have occasion for in your

closet and bed-chamber. What you do not want for use, you crave for

ornament, and what your convenience could spare, your pride cannot.

On the other hand, precisely the defence which was set up for the

British Constitution, namely, that with all its admitted defects, rotten

boroughs and monopolies, it worked well, and substantial justice was

somehow done; the wisdom and the worth did get into parliament, and

every interest did by right, or might, or sleight, get represented;--the

same defence is set up for the existing institutions. They are not the

best; they are not just; and in respect to you, personally, O brave

young man! they cannot be justified. They have, it is most true, left

you no acre for your own, and no law but our law, to the ordaining of

which you were no party. But they do answer the end, they are really

friendly to the good; unfriendly to the bad; they second the

industrious, and the kind; they foster genius. They really have so much

flexibility as to afford your talent and character, on the whole, the

same chance of demonstration and success which they might have, if there

was no law and no property.

It is trivial and merely superstitious to say that nothing is given you,

no outfit, no exhibition; for in this institution of _credit_, which is

as universal as honesty and promise in the human countenance, always

some neighbor stands ready to be bread and land and tools and stock to

the young adventurer. And if in any one respect they have come short,

see what ample retribution of good they have made. They have lost no

time and spared no expense to collect libraries, museums, galleries,

colleges, palaces, hospitals, observatories, cities. The ages have not

been idle, nor kings slack, nor the rich niggardly. Have we not atoned

for this small offence (which we could not help) of leaving you no

right in the soil, by this splendid indemnity of ancestral and national

wealth? Would you have been born like a gipsy in a hedge, and preferred

your freedom on a heath, and the range of a planet which had no shed or

boscage to cover you from sun and wind,--to this towered and citied

world? to this world of Rome, and Memphis, and Constantinople, and

Vienna, and Paris, and London, and New York? For thee Naples, Florence,

and Venice, for thee the fair Mediterranean, the sunny Adriatic; for

thee both Indies smile; for thee the hospitable North opens its heated

palaces under the polar circle; for thee roads have been cut in every

direction across the land, and fleets of floating palaces with every

security for strength, and provision for luxury, swim by sail and by

steam through all the waters of this world. Every island for thee has a

town; every town a hotel. Though thou wast born landless, yet to thy

industry and thrift and small condescension to the established

usage,--scores of servants are swarming in every strange place with cap

and knee to thy command, scores, nay hundreds and thousands, for thy

wardrobe, thy table, thy chamber, thy library, thy leisure; and every

whim is anticipated and served by the best ability of the whole

population of each country. The king on the throne governs for thee,

and the judge judges; the barrister pleads; the farmer tills, the joiner

hammers, the postman rides. Is it not exaggerating a trifle to insist on

a formal acknowledgment of your claims, when these substantial

advantages have been secured to you? Now can your children be educated,

your labor turned to their advantage, and its fruits secured to them

after your death. It is frivolous to say, you have no acre, because you

have not a mathematically measured piece of land. Providence takes care

that you shall have a place, that you are waited for, and come

accredited; and, as soon as you put your gift to use, you shall have

acre or acre’s worth according to your exhibition of desert,--acre, if

you need land;--acre’s worth, if you prefer to draw, or carve, or make

shoes, or wheels, to the tilling of the soil.

Besides, it might temper your indignation at the supposed wrong which

society has done you, to keep the question before you, how society got

into this predicament? Who put things on this false basis? No single

man, but all men. No man voluntarily and knowingly; but it is the result

of that degree of culture there is in the planet. The order of things is

as good as the character of the population permits. Consider it as the

work of a great and beneficent and progressive necessity, which, from

the first pulsation of the first animal life, up to the present high

culture of the best nations, has advanced thus far. Thank the rude

fostermother though she has taught you a better wisdom than her own, and

has set hopes in your heart which shall be history in the next ages. You

are yourself the result of this manner of living, this foul compromise,

this vituperated Sodom. It nourished you with care and love on its

breast, as it had nourished many a lover of the right, and many a poet,

and prophet, and teacher of men. Is it so irremediably bad? Then again,

if the mitigations are considered, do not all the mischiefs virtually

vanish? The form is bad, but see you not how every personal character

reacts on the form, and makes it new? A strong person makes the law and

custom null before his own will. Then the principle of love and truth

reappears in the strictest courts of fashion and property. Under the

richest robes, in the darlings of the selectest circles of European or

American aristocracy, the strong heart will beat with love of mankind,

with impatience of accidental distinctions, with the desire to achieve

its own fate, and make every ornament it wears authentic and real.

Moreover, as we have already shown that there is no pure reformer, so

it is to be considered that there is no pure conservative, no man who

from the beginning to the end of his life maintains the defective

institutions; but he who sets his face like a flint against every

novelty, when approached in the confidence of conversation, in the

presence of friendly and generous persons, has also his gracious and

relenting motions, and espouses for the time the cause of man; and even

if this be a shortlived emotion, yet the remembrance of it in private

hours mitigates his selfishness and compliance with custom.