MAN THE REFORMER
By Ralph Waldo Emerson
[A Lecture read before the
Mechanics' Apprentices' Library Association, at the Masonic Temple,
Boston, 25th January, 1841, and now published at their request.]
Mr. President, and Gentlemen,
I wish to offer to
your consideration some thoughts on the particular and general relations
of man as a reformer. I shall assume that the aim of each young man in
this association is the very highest that belongs to a rational mind. Let
it be granted, that our life, as we lead it, is common and mean; that some
of those offices and functions for which we were mainly created are grown
so rare in society, that the memory of them is only kept alive in old
books and in dim traditions; that prophets and poets, that beautiful and
perfect men, we are not now, no, nor have even seen such; that some
sources of human instruction are almost unnamed and unknown among us; that
the community in which we live will hardly bear to be told that every man
should be open to ecstasy or a divine illumination, and his daily walk
elevated by intercourse with the spiritual world. Grant all this, as we
must, yet I suppose none of my auditors will deny that we ought to seek to
establish ourselves in such disciplines and courses as will deserve that
guidance and clearer communication with the spiritual nature. And further,
I will not dissemble my hope, that each person whom I address has felt his
own call to cast aside all evil customs, timidities, and limitations, and
to be in his place a free and helpful man, a reformer, a benefactor, not
content to slip along through the world like a footman or a spy, escaping
by his nimbleness and apologies as many knocks as he can, but a brave and
upright man, who must find or cut a straight road to everything excellent
in the earth, and not only go honorably himself, but make it easier for
all who follow him, to go in honor and with benefit.
In the history of
the world the doctrine of Reform had never such scope as at the present
hour. Lutherans, Hernhutters, Jesuits, Monks, Quakers, Knox, Wesley,
Swedenborg, Bentham, in their accusations of society, all respected
something,—church or state, literature or history, domestic usages, the
market town, the dinner table, coined money. But now all these and all
things else hear the trumpet, and must rush to judgment,—Christianity,
the laws, commerce, schools, the farm, the laboratory; and not a kingdom,
town, statute, rite, calling, man, or woman, but is threatened by the new
spirit.
What if some of the
objections whereby our institutions are assailed are extreme and
speculative, and the reformers tend to idealism; that only shows the
extravagance of the abuses which have driven the mind into the opposite
extreme. It is when your facts and persons grow unreal and fantastic by
too much falsehood, that the scholar flies for refuge to the world of
ideas, and aims to recruit and replenish nature from that source. Let
ideas establish their legitimate sway again in society, let life be fair
and poetic, and the scholars will gladly be lovers, citizens, and
philanthropists.
It will afford no
security from the new ideas, that the old nations, the laws of centuries,
the property and institutions of a hundred cities, are built on other
foundations. The demon of reform has a secret door into the heart of every
lawmaker, of every inhabitant of every city. The fact, that a new thought
and hope have dawned in your breast, should apprize you that in the same
hour a new light broke in upon a thousand private hearts. That secret
which you would fain keep,—as soon as you go abroad, lo! there is one
standing on the doorstep, to tell you the same. There is not the most
bronzed and sharpened money-catcher, who does not, to your consternation,
almost, quail and shake the moment he hears a question prompted by the new
ideas. We thought he had some semblance of ground to stand upon, that such
as he at least would die hard; but he trembles and flees. Then the scholar
says, `Cities and coaches shall never impose on me again; for, behold
every solitary dream of mine is rushing to fulfilment. That fancy I had,
and hesitated to utter because you would laugh,—the broker, the
attorney, the market-man are saying the same thing. Had I waited a day
longer to speak, I had been too late. Behold, State Street thinks, and
Wall Street doubts, and begins to prophesy!'
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 its 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 generations 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 exhilaration 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
far-fetched 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 caenobite, 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; 't is 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 Lacedaemon,
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 is 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 road-ready 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 Remaker 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.
A
Note on the Text:
-
1st
published in The Dial (April 1841) pp. 523-538.
-
Source:
The Dial (April 1841) pp. 523-538.
-
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