textfiles/etext/AUTHORS/EMERSON/emerson-man-235.txt

 
        MAN THE REFORMER
 
        _A Lecture read before the Mechanics' Apprentices' Library
Association, Boston, January 25, 1841_

        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.

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