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The Young American
from Lectures, published as part of Nature; Addresses and
Lectures
by
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A Lecture read before the Mercantile Library Association,
Boston, February 7, 1844
GENTLEMEN:
It is remarkable, that our people have their intellectual
culture from one country, and their duties from another.
This false state of things is newly in a way to be
corrected. America is beginning to assert itself to the
senses and to the imagination of her children, and Europe is
receding in the same degree. This their reaction on
education gives a new importance to the internal
improvements and to the politics of the country. Who has not
been stimulated to reflection by the facilities now in
progress of construction for travel and the transportation
of goods in the United States?
This rage for road building is beneficent for America,
where vast distance is so main a consideration in our
domestic politics and trade, inasmuch as the great political
promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose
days seemed already numbered by the mere inconvenience of
transporting representatives, judges, and officers across
such tedious distances of land and water. Not only is
distance annihilated, but when, as now, the locomotive and
the steamboat, like enormous shuttles, shoot every day
across the thousand various threads of national descent and
employment, and bind them fast in one web, an hourly
assimilation goes forward, and there is no danger that local
peculiarities and hostilities should be preserved.
1. But I hasten to speak of the utility of these
improvements in creating an American sentiment. An unlooked
for consequence of the railroad, is the increased
acquaintance it has given the American people with the
boundless resources of their own soil. If this invention has
reduced England to a third of its size, by bringing people
so much nearer, in this country it has given a new celerity
to _time_, or anticipated by fifty years the planting of
tracts of land, the choice of water privileges, the working
of mines, and other natural advantages. Railroad iron is a
magician's rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping energies
of land and water.
The railroad is but one arrow in our quiver, though it
has great value as a sort of yard-stick, and surveyor's
line. The bountiful continent is ours, state on state, and
territory on territory, to the waves of the Pacific sea;
"Our garden is the immeasurable earth, The heaven's blue
pillars are Medea's house."
The task of surveying, planting, and building upon this
immense tract, requires an education and a sentiment
commensurate thereto. A consciousness of this fact, is
beginning to take the place of the purely trading spirit and
education which sprang up whilst all the population lived on
the fringe of sea-coast. And even on the coast, prudent men
have begun to see that every American should be educated
with a view to the values of land. The arts of engineering
and of architecture are studied; scientific agriculture is
an object of growing attention; the mineral riches are
explored; limestone, coal, slate, and iron; and the value of
timber-lands is enhanced.
Columbus alleged as a reason for seeking a continent in
the West, that the harmony of nature required a great tract
of land in the western hemisphere, to balance the known
extent of land in the eastern; and it now appears that we
must estimate the native values of this broad region to
redress the balance of our own judgments, and appreciate the
advantages opened to the human race in this country, which
is our fortunate home. The land is the appointed remedy for
whatever is false and fantastic in our culture. The
continent we inhabit is to be physic and food for our mind,
as well as our body. The land, with its tranquilizing,
sanative influences, is to repair the errors of a scholastic
and traditional education, and bring us into just relations
with men and things.
The habit of living in the presence of these invitations
of natural wealth is not inoperative; and this habit,
combined with the moral sentiment which, in the recent
years, has interrogated every institution, usage, and law,
has, naturally, given a strong direction to the wishes and
aims of active young men to withdraw from cities, and
cultivate the soil. This inclination has appeared in the
most unlooked for quarters, in men supposed to be absorbed
in business, and in those connected with the liberal
professions. And, since the walks of trade were crowded,
whilst that of agriculture cannot easily be, inasmuch as the
farmer who is not wanted by others can yet grow his own
bread, whilst the manufacturer or the trader, who is not
wanted, cannot, -- this seemed a happy tendency. For, beside
all the moral benefit which we may expect from the farmer's
profession, when a man enters it considerately, this
promised the conquering of the soil, plenty, and beyond
this, the adorning of the country with every advantage and
ornament which labor, ingenuity, and affection for a man's
home, could suggest.
Meantime, with cheap land, and the pacific disposition of
the people, every thing invites to the arts of agriculture,
of gardening, and domestic architecture. Public gardens, on
the scale of such plantations in Europe and Asia, are now
unknown to us. There is no feature of the old countries that
strikes an American with more agreeable surprise than the
beautiful gardens of Europe; such as the Boboli in Florence,
the Villa Borghese in Rome, the Villa d'Este in Tivoli, the
gardens at Munich, and at Frankfort on the Maine: works
easily imitated here, and which might well make the land
dear to the citizen, and inflame patriotism. It is the fine
art which is left for us, now that sculpture, painting, and
religious and civil architecture have become effete, and
have passed into second childhood. We have twenty degrees of
latitude wherein to choose a seat, and the new modes of
travelling enlarge the opportunity of selection, by making
it easy to cultivate very distant tracts, and yet remain in
strict intercourse with the centres of trade and population.
And the whole force of all the arts goes to facilitate the
decoration of lands and dwellings. A garden has this
advantage, that it makes it indifferent where you live. A
well-laid garden makes the face of the country of no
account; let that be low or high, grand or mean, you have
made a beautiful abode worthy of man. If the landscape is
pleasing, the garden shows it, -- if tame, it excludes it. A
little grove, which any farmer can find, or cause to grow
near his house, will, in a few years, make cataracts and
chains of mountains quite unnecessary to his scenery; and he
is so contented with his alleys, woodlands, orchards, and
river, that Niagara, and the Notch of the White Hills, and
Nantasket Beach, are superfluities. And yet the selection of
a fit houselot has the same advantage over an indifferent
one, as the selection to a given employment of a man who has
a genius for that work. In the last case, the culture of
years will never make the most painstaking apprentice his
equal: no more will gardening give the advantage of a happy
site to a house in a hole or on a pinnacle. In America, we
have hitherto little to boast in this kind. The cities drain
the country of the best part of its population: the flower
of the youth, of both sexes, goes into the towns, and the
country is cultivated by a so much inferior class. The land,
-- travel a whole day together, -- looks poverty-stricken,
and the buildings plain and poor. In Europe, where society
has an aristocratic structure, the land is full of men of
the best stock, and the best culture, whose interest and
pride it is to remain half the year on their estates, and to
fill them with every convenience and ornament. Of course,
these make model farms, and model architecture, and are a
constant education to the eye of the surrounding population.
Whatever events in progress shall go to disgust men with
cities, and infuse into them the passion for country life,
and country pleasures, will render a service to the whole
face of this continent, and will further the most poetic of
all the occupations of real life, the bringing out by art
the native but hidden graces of the landscape.
I look on such improvements, also, as directly tending to
endear the land to the inhabitant. Any relation to the land,
the habit of tilling it, or mining it, or even hunting on
it, generates the feeling of patriotism. He who keeps shop
on it, or he who merely uses it as a support to his desk and
ledger, or to his manufactory, values it less. The vast
majority of the people of this country live by the land, and
carry its quality in their manners and opinions. We in the
Atlantic states, by position, have been commercial, and
have, as I said, imbibed easily an European culture. Luckily
for us, now that steam has narrowed the Atlantic to a
strait, the nervous, rocky West is intruding a new and
continental element into the national mind, and we shall yet
have an American genius. How much better when the whole land
is a garden, and the people have grown up in the bowers of a
paradise. Without looking, then, to those extraordinary
social influences which are now acting in precisely this
direction, but only at what is inevitably doing around us, I
think we must regard the _land_ as a commanding and
increasing power on the citizen, the sanative and
Americanizing influence, which promises to disclose new
virtues for ages to come.
2. In the second place, the uprise and culmination of the
new and anti-feudal power of Commerce, is the political fact
of most significance to the American at this hour.
We cannot look on the freedom of this country, in
connexion with its youth, without a presentiment that here
shall laws and institutions exist on some scale of
proportion to the majesty of nature. To men legislating for
the area betwixt the two oceans, betwixt the snows and the
tropics, somewhat of the gravity of nature will infuse
itself into the code. A heterogeneous population crowding on
all ships from all corners of the world to the great gates
of North America, namely, Boston, New York, and New Orleans,
and thence proceeding inward to the prairie and the
mountains, and quickly contributing their private thought to
the public opinion, their toll to the treasury, and their
vote to the election, it cannot be doubted that the
legislation of this country should become more catholic and
cosmopolitan than that of any other. It seems so easy for
America to inspire and express the most expansive and humane
spirit; new-born, free, healthful, strong, the land of the
laborer, of the democrat, of the philanthropist, of the
believer, of the saint, she should speak for the human race.
It is the country of the Future. From Washington,
proverbially `the city of magnificent distances,' through
all its cities, states, and territories, it is a country of
beginnings, of projects, of designs, and expectations.
Gentlemen, there is a sublime and friendly Destiny by which
the human race is guided, -- the race never dying, the
individual never spared, -- to results affecting masses and
ages. Men are narrow and selfish, but the Genius or Destiny
is not narrow, but beneficent. It is not discovered in their
calculated and voluntary activity, but in what befalls, with
or without their design. Only what is inevitable interests
us, and it turns out that love and good are inevitable, and
in the course of things. That Genius has infused itself into
nature. It indicates itself by a small excess of good, a
small balance in brute facts always favorable to the side of
reason. All the facts in any part of nature shall be
tabulated, and the results shall indicate the same security
and benefit; so slight as to be hardly observable, and yet
it is there. The sphere is flattened at the poles, and
swelled at the equator; a form flowing necessarily from the
fluid state, yet _the_ form, the mathematician assures us,
required to prevent the protuberances of the continent, or
even of lesser mountains cast up at any time by earthquakes,
from continually deranging the axis of the earth. The census
of the population is found to keep an invariable equality in
the sexes, with a trifling predominance in favor of the
male, as if to counterbalance the necessarily increased
exposure of male life in war, navigation, and other
accidents. Remark the unceasing effort throughout nature at
somewhat better than the actual creatures: _amelioration in
nature_, which alone permits and authorizes amelioration in
mankind. The population of the world is a conditional
population; these are not the best, but the best that could
live in the existing state of soils, gases, animals, and
morals: the best that could _yet_ live; there shall be a
better, please God. This Genius, or Destiny, is of the
sternest administration, though rumors exist of its secret
tenderness. It may be styled a cruel kindness, serving the
whole even to the ruin of the member; a terrible communist,
reserving all profits to the community, without dividend to
individuals. Its law is, you shall have everything as a
member, nothing to yourself. For Nature is the noblest
engineer, yet uses a grinding economy, working up all that
is wasted to-day into to-morrow's creation; -- not a
superfluous grain of sand, for all the ostentation she makes
of expense and public works. It is because Nature thus saves
and uses, laboring for the general, that we poor particulars
are so crushed and straitened, and find it so hard to live.
She flung us out in her plenty, but we cannot shed a hair,
or a paring of a nail, but instantly she snatches at the
shred, and appropriates it to the general stock. Our
condition is like that of the poor wolves: if one of the
flock wound himself, or so much as limp, the rest eat him up
incontinently.
That serene Power interposes the check upon the caprices
and officiousness of our wills. Its charity is not our
charity. One of its agents is our will, but that which
expresses itself in our will, is stronger than our will. We
are very forward to help it, but it will not be accelerated.
It resists our meddling, eleemosynary contrivances. We
devise sumptuary and relief laws, but the principle of
population is always reducing wages to the lowest pittance
on which human life can be sustained. We legislate against
forestalling and monopoly; we would have a common granary
for the poor; but the selfishness which hoards the corn for
high prices, is the preventive of famine; and the law of
self-preservation is surer policy than any legislation can
be. We concoct eleemosynary systems, and it turns out that
our charity increases pauperism. We inflate our paper
currency, we repair commerce with unlimited credit, and are
presently visited with unlimited bankruptcy.
It is easy to see that the existing generation are
conspiring with a beneficence, which, in its working for
coming generations, sacrifices the passing one, which
infatuates the most selfish men to act against their private
interest for the public welfare. We build railroads, we know
not for what or for whom; but one thing is certain, that we
who build will receive the very smallest share of benefit.
Benefit will accrue; they are essential to the country, but
that will be felt not until we are no longer countrymen. We
do the like in all matters: --"Man's heart the Almighty to
the Future set By secret and inviolable springs."
We plant trees, we build stone houses, we redeem the
waste, we make prospective laws, we found colleges and
hospitals, for remote generations. We should be mortified to
learn that the little benefit we chanced in our own persons
to receive was the utmost they would yield.
The history of commerce, is the record of this beneficent
tendency. The patriarchal form of government readily becomes
despotic, as each person may see in his own family. Fathers
wish to be the fathers of the minds of their children, and
behold with impatience a new character and way of thinking
presuming to show itself in their own son or daughter. This
feeling, which all their love and pride in the powers of
their children cannot subdue, becomes petulance and tyranny
when the head of the clan, the emperor of an empire, deals
with the same difference of opinion in his subjects.
Difference of opinion is the one crime which kings never
forgive. An empire is an immense egotism. "I am the State,"
said the French Louis. When a French ambassador mentioned to
Paul of Russia, that a man of consequence in St. Petersburg
was interesting himself in some matter, the Czar interrupted
him, -- "There is no man of consequence in this empire, but
he with whom I am actually speaking; and so long only as I
am speaking to him, is he of any consequence." And Nicholas,
the present emperor, is reported to have said to his
council, "The age is embarrassed with new opinions; rely on
me, gentlemen, I shall oppose an iron will to the progress
of liberal opinions."
It is easy to see that this patriarchal or family
management gets to be rather troublesome to all but the
papa; the sceptre comes to be a crowbar. And this unpleasant
egotism, Feudalism opposes, and finally destroys. The king
is compelled to call in the aid of his brothers and cousins,
and remote relations, to help him keep his overgrown house
in order; and this club of noblemen always come at last to
have a will of their own; they combine to brave the
sovereign, and call in the aid of the people. Each chief
attaches as many followers as he can, by kindness,
maintenance, and gifts; and as long as war lasts, the
nobles, who must be soldiers, rule very well. But when peace
comes, the nobles prove very whimsical and uncomfortable
masters; their frolics turn out to be insulting and
degrading to the commoner. Feudalism grew to be a bandit and
brigand.
Meantime Trade had begun to appear: Trade, a plant which
grows wherever there is peace, as soon as there is peace,
and as long as there is peace. The luxury and necessity of
the noble fostered it. And as quickly as men go to foreign
parts, in ships or caravans, a new order of things springs
up; new command takes place, new servants and new masters.
Their information, their wealth, their correspondence, have
made them quite other men than left their native shore.
_They_ are nobles now, and by another patent than the
king's. Feudalism had been good, had broken the power of the
kings, and had some good traits of its own; but it had grown
mischievous, it was time for it to die, and, as they say of
dying people, all its faults came out. Trade was the strong
man that broke it down, and raised a new and unknown power
in its place. It is a new agent in the world, and one of
great function; it is a very intellectual force. This
displaces physical strength, and instals computation,
combination, information, science, in its room. It calls out
all force of a certain kind that slumbered in the former
dynasties. It is now in the midst of its career. Feudalism
is not ended yet. Our governments still partake largely of
that element. Trade goes to make the governments
insignificant, and to bring every kind of faculty of every
individual that can in any manner serve any person, _on
sale_. Instead of a huge Army and Navy, and Executive
Departments, it converts Government into an
Intelligence-Office, where every man may find what he wishes
to buy, and expose what he has to sell, not only produce and
manufactures, but art, skill, and intellectual and moral
values. This is the good and this the evil of trade, that it
would put everything into market, talent, beauty, virtue,
and man himself.
By this means, however, it has done its work. It has its
faults, and will come to an end, as the others do. The
philosopher and lover of man have much harm to say of trade;
but the historian will see that trade was the principle of
Liberty; that trade planted America and destroyed Feudalism;
that it makes peace and keeps peace, and it will abolish
slavery. We complain of its oppression of the poor, and of
its building up a new aristocracy on the ruins of the
aristocracy it destroyed. But the aristocracy of trade has
no permanence, is not entailed, was the result of toil and
talent, the result of merit of some kind, and is continually
falling, like the waves of the sea, before new claims of the
same sort. Trade is an instrument in the hands of that
friendly Power which works for us in our own despite. We
design it thus and thus; it turns out otherwise and far
better. This beneficent tendency, omnipotent without
violence, exists and works. Every line of history inspires a
confidence that we shall not go far wrong; that things mend.
That is the moral of all we learn, that it warrants Hope,
the prolific mother of reforms. Our part is plainly not to
throw ourselves across the track, to block improvement, and
sit till we are stone, but to watch the uprise of successive
mornings, and to conspire with the new works of new days.
Government has been a fossil; it should be a plant. I
conceive that the office of statute law should be to
express, and not to impede the mind of mankind. New
thoughts, new things. Trade was one instrument, but Trade is
also but for a time, and must give way to somewhat broader
and better, whose signs are already dawning in the sky.
3. I pass to speak of the signs of that which is the
sequel of trade.
In consequence of the revolution in the state of society
wrought by trade, Government in our times is beginning to
wear a clumsy and cumbrous appearance. We have already seen
our way to shorter methods. The time is full of good signs.
Some of them shall ripen to fruit. All this beneficent
socialism is a friendly omen, and the swelling cry of voices
for the education of the people, indicates that Government
has other offices than those of banker and executioner.
Witness the new movements in the civilized world, the
Communism of France, Germany, and Switzerland; the Trades'
Unions; the English League against the Corn Laws; and the
whole _Industrial Statistics_, so called. In Paris, the
blouse, the badge of the operative, has begun to make its
appearance in the saloons. Witness, too, the spectacle of
three Communities which have within a very short time sprung
up within this Commonwealth, besides several others
undertaken by citizens of Massachusetts within the territory
of other States. These proceeded from a variety of motives,
from an impatience of many usages in common life, from a
wish for greater freedom than the manners and opinions of
society permitted, but in great part from a feeling that the
true offices of the State, the State had let fall to the
ground; that in the scramble of parties for the public
purse, the main duties of government were omitted, -- the
duty to instruct the ignorant, to supply the poor with work
and with good guidance. These communists preferred the
agricultural life as the most favorable condition for human
culture; but they thought that the farm, as we manage it,
did not satisfy the right ambition of man. The farmer after
sacrificing pleasure, taste, freedom, thought, love, to his
work, turns out often a bankrupt, like the merchant. This
result might well seem astounding. All this drudgery, from
cockcrowing to starlight, for all these years, to end in
mortgages and the auctioneer's flag, and removing from bad
to worse. It is time to have the thing looked into, and with
a sifting criticism ascertained who is the fool. It seemed a
great deal worse, because the farmer is living in the same
town with men who pretend to know exactly what he wants. On
one side, is agricultural chemistry, coolly exposing the
nonsense of our spendthrift agriculture and ruinous expense
of manures, and offering, by means of a teaspoonful of
artificial guano, to turn a sandbank into corn; and, on the
other, the farmer, not only eager for the information, but
with bad crops and in debt and bankruptcy, for want of it.
Here are Etzlers and mechanical projectors, who, with the
Fourierists, undoubtingly affirm that the smallest union
would make every man rich; -- and, on the other side, a
multitude of poor men and women seeking work, and who cannot
find enough to pay their board. The science is confident,
and surely the poverty is real. If any means could be found
to bring these two together!
This was one design of the projectors of the Associations
which are now making their first feeble experiments. They
were founded in love, and in labor. They proposed, as you
know, that all men should take a part in the manual toil,
and proposed to amend the condition of men, by substituting
harmonious for hostile industry. It was a noble thought of
Fourier, which gives a favorable idea of his system, to
distinguish in his Phalanx a class as the Sacred Band, by
whom whatever duties were disagreeable, and likely to be
omitted, were to be assumed.
At least, an economical success seemed certain for the
enterprise, and that agricultural association must, sooner
or later, fix the price of bread, and drive single farmers
into association, in self-defence; as the great commercial
and manufacturing companies had already done. The Community
is only the continuation of the same movement which made the
joint-stock companies for manufactures, mining, insurance,
banking, and so forth. It has turned out cheaper to make
calico by companies; and it is proposed to plant corn, and
to bake bread by companies.
Undoubtedly, abundant mistakes will be made by these
first adventurers, which will draw ridicule on their
schemes. I think, for example, that they exaggerate the
importance of a favorite project of theirs, that of paying
talent and labor at one rate, paying all sorts of service at
one rate, say ten cents the hour. They have paid it so; but
not an instant would a dime remain a dime. In one hand it
became an eagle as it fell, and in another hand a copper
cent. For the whole value of the dime is in knowing what to
do with it. One man buys with it a land-title of an Indian,
and makes his posterity princes; or buys corn enough to feed
the world; or pen, ink, and paper, or a painter's brush, by
which he can communicate himself to the human race as if he
were fire; and the other buys barley candy. Money is of no
value; it cannot spend itself. All depends on the skill of
the spender. Whether, too, the objection almost universally
felt by such women in the community as were mothers, to an
associate life, to a common table, and a common nursery,
&c., setting a higher value on the private family with
poverty, than on an association with wealth, will not prove
insuperable, remains to be determined.
But the Communities aimed at a higher success in securing
to all their members an equal and thorough education. And on
the whole, one may say, that aims so generous, and so forced
on them by the times, will not be relinquished, even if
these attempts fail, but will be prosecuted until they
succeed.
This is the value of the Communities; not what they have
done, but the revolution which they indicate as on the way.
Yes, Government must educate the poor man. Look across the
country from any hill-side around us, and the landscape
seems to crave Government. The actual differences of men
must be acknowledged, and met with love and wisdom. These
rising grounds which command the champaign below, seem to
ask for lords, true lords, _land_-lords, who understand the
land and its uses, and the applicabilities of men, and whose
government would be what it should, namely, mediation
between want and supply. How gladly would each citizen pay a
commission for the support and continuation of good
guidance. None should be a governor who has not a talent for
governing. Now many people have a native skill for carving
out business for many hands; a genius for the disposition of
affairs; and are never happier than when difficult practical
questions, which embarrass other men, are to be solved. All
lies in light before them; they are in their element. Could
any means be contrived to appoint only these! There really
seems a progress towards such a state of things, in which
this work shall be done by these natural workmen; and this,
not certainly through any increased discretion shown by the
citizens at elections, but by the gradual contempt into
which official government falls, and the increasing
disposition of private adventurers to assume its fallen
functions. Thus the costly Post Office is likely to go into
disuse before the private transportation-shop of Harnden and
his competitors. The currency threatens to fall entirely
into private hands. Justice is continually administered more
and more by private reference, and not by litigation. We
have feudal governments in a commercial age. It would be but
an easy extension of our commercial system, to pay a private
emperor a fee for services, as we pay an architect, an
engineer, or a lawyer. If any man has a talent for righting
wrong, for administering difficult affairs, for counselling
poor farmers how to turn their estates to good husbandry,
for combining a hundred private enterprises to a general
benefit, let him in the county-town, or in Court-street, put
up his sign-board, Mr. Smith, _Governor_, Mr. Johnson,
_Working king_.
How can our young men complain of the poverty of things
in New England, and not feel that poverty as a demand on
their charity to make New England rich? Where is he who
seeing a thousand men useless and unhappy, and making the
whole region forlorn by their inaction, and conscious
himself of possessing the faculty they want, does not hear
his call to go and be their king?
We must have kings, and we must have nobles. Nature
provides such in every society, -- only let us have the real
instead of the titular. Let us have our leading and our
inspiration from the best. In every society some men are
born to rule, and some to advise. Let the powers be well
directed, directed by love, and they would everywhere be
greeted with joy and honor. The chief is the chief all the
world over, only not his cap and his plume. It is only their
dislike of the pretender, which makes men sometimes unjust
to the accomplished man. If society were transparent, the
noble would everywhere be gladly received and accredited,
and would not be asked for his day's work, but would be felt
as benefit, inasmuch as he was noble. That were his duty and
stint, -- to keep himself pure and purifying, the leaven of
his nation. I think I see place and duties for a nobleman in
every society; but it is not to drink wine and ride in a
fine coach, but to guide and adorn life for the multitude by
forethought, by elegant studies, by perseverance,
self-devotion, and the remembrance of the humble old friend,
by making his life secretly beautiful.
I call upon you, young men, to obey your heart, and be
the nobility of this land. In every age of the world, there
has been a leading nation, one of a more generous sentiment,
whose eminent citizens were willing to stand for the
interests of general justice and humanity, at the risk of
being called, by the men of the moment, chimerical and
fantastic. Which should be that nation but these States?
Which should lead that movement, if not New England? Who
should lead the leaders, but the Young American? The people,
and the world, is now suffering from the want of religion
and honor in its public mind. In America, out of doors all
seems a market; in doors, an air-tight stove of
conventionalism. Every body who comes into our houses savors
of these habits; the men, of the market; the women, of the
custom. I find no expression in our state papers or
legislative debate, in our lyceums or churches, specially in
our newspapers, of a high national feeling, no lofty
counsels that rightfully stir the blood. I speak of those
organs which can be presumed to speak a popular sense. They
recommend conventional virtues, whatever will earn and
preserve property; always the capitalist; the college, the
church, the hospital, the theatre, the hotel, the road, the
ship, of the capitalist, -- whatever goes to secure, adorn,
enlarge these, is good; what jeopardizes any of these, is
damnable. The `opposition' papers, so called, are on the
same side. They attack the great capitalist, but with the
aim to make a capitalist of the poor man. The opposition is
against those who have money, from those who wish to have
money. But who announces to us in journal, or in pulpit, or
in the street, the secret of heroism,
"Man alone Can perform the impossible?"
I shall not need to go into an enumeration of our
national defects and vices which require this Order of
Censors in the state. I might not set down our most
proclaimed offences as the worst. It is not often the worst
trait that occasions the loudest outcry. Men complain of
their suffering, and not of the crime. I fear little from
the bad effect of Repudiation; I do not fear that it will
spread. Stealing is a suicidal business; you cannot
repudiate but once. But the bold face and tardy repentance
permitted to this local mischief, reveal a public mind so
preoccupied with the love of gain, that the common sentiment
of indignation at fraud does not act with its natural force.
The more need of a withdrawal from the crowd, and a resort
to the fountain of right, by the brave. The timidity of our
public opinion, is our disease, or, shall I say, the
publicness of opinion, the absence of private opinion.
Good-nature is plentiful, but we want justice, with heart of
steel, to fight down the proud. The private mind has the
access to the totality of goodness and truth, that it may be
a balance to a corrupt society; and to stand for the private
verdict against popular clamor, is the office of the noble.
If a humane measure is propounded in behalf of the slave, or
of the Irishman, or the Catholic, or for the succor of the
poor, that sentiment, that project, will have the homage of
the hero. That is his nobility, his oath of knighthood, to
succor the helpless and oppressed; always to throw himself
on the side of weakness, of youth, of hope, on the liberal,
on the expansive side, never on the defensive, the
conserving, the timorous, the lock and bolt system. More
than our good-will we may not be able to give. We have our
own affairs, our own genius, which chains us to our proper
work. We cannot give our life to the cause of the debtor, of
the slave, or the pauper, as another is doing; but to one
thing we are bound, not to blaspheme the sentiment and the
work of that man, not to throw stumbling-blocks in the way
of the abolitionist, the philanthropist, as the organs of
influence and opinion are swift to do. It is for us to
confide in the beneficent Supreme Power, and not to rely on
our money, and on the state because it is the guard of
money. At this moment, the terror of old people and of
vicious people, is lest the Union of these States be
destroyed: as if the Union had any other real basis than the
good pleasure of a majority of the citizens to be united.
But the wise and just man will always feel that he stands on
his own feet; that he imparts strength to the state, not
receives security from it; and that if all went down, he and
such as he would quite easily combine in a new and better
constitution. Every great and memorable community has
consisted of formidable individuals, who, like the Roman or
the Spartan, lent his own spirit to the state and made it
great. Yet only by the supernatural is a man strong; nothing
is so weak as an egotist. Nothing is mightier than we, when
we are vehicles of a truth before which the state and the
individual are alike ephemeral.
Gentlemen, the development of our American internal
resources, the extension to the utmost of the commercial
system, and the appearance of new moral causes which are to
modify the state, are giving an aspect of greatness to the
Future, which the imagination fears to open. One thing is
plain for all men of common sense and common conscience,
that here, here in America, is the home of man. After all
the deductions which are to be made for our pitiful
politics, which stake every gravest national question on the
silly die, whether James or whether Jonathan shall sit in
the chair and hold the purse; after all the deduction is
made for our frivolities and insanities, there still remains
an organic simplicity and liberty, which, when it loses its
balance, redresses itself presently, which offers
opportunity to the human mind not known in any other region.
It is true, the public mind wants self-respect. We are
full of vanity, of which the most signal proof is our
sensitiveness to foreign and especially English censure. One
cause of this is our immense reading, and that reading
chiefly confined to the productions of the English press. It
is also true, that, to imaginative persons in this country,
there is somewhat bare and bald in our short history, and
unsettled wilderness. They ask, who would live in a new
country, that can live in an old? and it is not strange that
our youths and maidens should burn to see the picturesque
extremes of an antiquated country. But it is one thing to
visit the pyramids, and another to wish to live there. Would
they like tithes to the clergy, and sevenths to the
government, and horse-guards, and licensed press, and grief
when a child is born, and threatening, starved weavers, and
a pauperism now constituting one-thirteenth of the
population? Instead of the open future expanding here before
the eye of every boy to vastness, would they like the
closing in of the future to a narrow slit of sky, and that
fast contracting to be no future? One thing, for instance,
the beauties of aristocracy, we commend to the study of the
travelling American. The English, the most conservative
people this side of India, are not sensible of the
restraint, but an American would seriously resent it. The
aristocracy, incorporated by law and education, degrades
life for the unprivileged classes. It is a questionable
compensation to the embittered feeling of a proud commoner,
the reflection that a fop, who, by the magic of title,
paralyzes his arm, and plucks from him half the graces and
rights of a man, is himself also an aspirant excluded with
the same ruthlessness from higher circles, since there is no
end to the wheels within wheels of this spiral heaven.
Something may be pardoned to the spirit of loyalty when it
becomes fantastic; and something to the imagination, for the
baldest life is symbolic. Philip II. of Spain rated his
ambassador for neglecting serious affairs in Italy, whilst
he debated some point of honor with the French ambassador;
"You have left a business of importance for a ceremony." The
ambassador replied, "Your majesty's self is but a ceremony."
In the East, where the religious sentiment comes in to the
support of the aristocracy, and in the Romish church also,
there is a grain of sweetness in the tyranny; but in
England, the fact seems to me intolerable, what is commonly
affirmed, that such is the transcendent honor accorded to
wealth and birth, that no man of letters, be his eminence
what it may, is received into the best society, except as a
lion and a show. The English have many virtues, many
advantages, and the proudest history of the world; but they
need all, and more than all the resources of the past to
indemnify a heroic gentleman in that country for the
mortifications prepared for him by the system of society,
and which seem to impose the alternative to resist or to
avoid it. That there are mitigations and practical
alleviations to this rigor, is not an excuse for the rule.
Commanding worth, and personal power, must sit crowned in
all companies, nor will extraordinary persons be slighted or
affronted in any company of civilized men. But the system is
an invasion of the sentiment of justice and the native
rights of men, which, however decorated, must lessen the
value of English citizenship. It is for Englishmen to
consider, not for us; we only say, let us live in America,
too thankful for our want of feudal institutions. Our houses
and towns are like mosses and lichens, so slight and new;
but youth is a fault of which we shall daily mend. This
land, too, is as old as the Flood, and wants no ornament or
privilege which nature could bestow. Here stars, here woods,
here hills, here animals, here men abound, and the vast
tendencies concur of a new order. If only the men are
employed in conspiring with the designs of the Spirit who
led us hither, and is leading us still, we shall quickly
enough advance out of all hearing of other's censures, out
of all regrets of our own, into a new and more excellent
social state than history has recorded.
