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First
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 ever 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 apprise 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 door - step 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 fulfillment. 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 grown 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. Everybody partakes,
everybody 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 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
check in favor of John Smith and Co., traders, get the fair share of exercise
to my faculties by that act, which Nature intended for me in making all these
farfetched matters important to my comfort? It is Smith himself, and his
carriers, and dealers, and manufacturers, it is the sailor, the hidedrogher,
the butcher, the negro, the hunter, and the planter who have intercepted the
sugar of the sugar, and the cotton of the cotton. They have got the education,
I only the commodity. This were all very well if I were necessarily absent,
being detained by work of my own, like theirs, work of the same faculties;
then should I be sure of my hands and feet, but now I feel some shame before
my wood - chopper, my ploughman, and my cook, for they have some sort of self
- sufficiency, they can contrive without my aid to bring the day and year
round, but I depend on them, and have not earned by use a right to my arms and
feet.
Consider further the difference between the first and second owner of
property. Every species of property is preyed on by its own enemies, as iron
by rust; timber by rot; cloth by moths; provisions by mould, putridity, or
vermin; money by thieves; an orchard by insects; a planted field by weeds and
the inroad of cattle; a stock of cattle by hunger; a road by rain and frost; a
bridge by freshets. And whoever takes any of these things into his possession,
takes the charge of defending them from this troop of enemies, or of keeping
them in repair. A man who supplies his own want, who builds a raft or a boat
to go a - fishing, finds it easy to calk 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, woodenware,
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 the 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 law - giver, 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 pair 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; `tis not the intellect, not the heart, not beauty, not worship, that
costs so much. Why needs any man be rich? Why must he have horses, fine
garments, handsome apartments, access to public houses and places of
amusement? Only for want of thought. Give his mind a new image, and he flees
into a solitary garden or garret to enjoy it, and is richer with that dream
than the fee of a county could make him. But we are first thoughtless, and
then find that we are moneyless. We are first sensual, and then must be rich.
We dare not trust our wit for making our house pleasant to our friend, and so
we buy ice-creams. He is accustomed to carpets, and we have not sufficient
character to put floor-cloths out of his mind whilst he stays in the house,
and so we pile the floor with carpets. Let the house rather be a temple of the
Furies of 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, and 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 exists, - 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 walkingstick 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 oppositionbto 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 must 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 meditator 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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