Contents:

Page No 1

Page No 2

Page No 3

Page No 4

THE YOUNG AMERICAN ...............................................................................................................................1

Ralph Waldo Emerson.............................................................................................................................1

It is remarkable, that our people have their intellectual cne country, and their duties from another. This false

state of things is newly in a way to be corrected. America is beginning to assert itself to the senses and to the

imagination of her children, and Europe is receding in the same degree. This their reaction on education gives

a new importance to the internal improvements and to the politics of the country. Who has not been

stimulated to reflection by the facilities now in progress of construction for travel and the transportation of

This rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our

domestic politics and trade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union

staunch, whose days seemed already numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives,

judges, and officers across such tedious distances of land and water. Not only is distance annihilated, but

when, as now, the locomotive and the steamboat, like enormous shuttles, shoot every day across the thousand

various threads of national descent and employment, and bind them fast in one web, an hourly assimilation

goes forward, and there is no danger that local peculiarities and hostilities should be preserved.

1. But I hasten to speak of the utility of these improvements in creating an American sentiment. An unlooked

for consequence of the railroad, is the increased acquaintance it has given the American people with the

boundless resources of their own soil. If this invention has reduced England to a third of its size, by bringing

people so much nearer, in this country it has given a new celerity to _time_, or anticipated by fifty years the

planting of tracts of land, the choice of water privileges, the working of mines, and other natural advantages.

Railroad iron is a magician's rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water.

The railroad is but one arrow in our quiver, though it has great value as a sort of yardstick, and surveyor's

line. The bountiful continent is ours, state on state, and territory on territory, to the waves of the Pacific sea;

The task of surveying, planting, and building upon this immense tract, requires an education and a sentiment

commensurate thereto. A consciousness of this fact, is beginning to take the place of the purely trading spirit

and education which sprang up whilst all the population lived on the fringe of seacoast. And even on the

coast, prudent men have begun to see that every American should be educated with a view to the values of

land. The arts of engineering and of architecture are studied; scientific agriculture is an object of growing

attention; the mineral riches are explored; limestone, coal, slate, and iron; and the value of timberlands is

Columbus alleged as a reason for seeking a continent in the West, that the harmony of nature required a great

tract of land in the western hemisphere, to balance the known extent of land in the eastern; and it now appears

that we must estimate the native values of this broad region to redress the balance of our own judgments, and

appreciate the advantages opened to the human race in this country, which is our fortunate home. The land is

the appointed remedy for whatever is false and fantastic in our culture. The continent we inhabit is to be

physic and food for our mind, as well as our body. The land, with its tranquilizing, sanative influences, is to

repair the errors of a scholastic and traditional education, and bring us into just relations with men and things.

The habit of living in the presence of these invitations of natural wealth is not inoperative; and this habit,

combined with the moral sentiment which, in the recent years, has interrogated every institution, usage, and

law, has, naturally, given a strong direction to the wishes and aims of active young men to withdraw from

cities, and cultivate the soil. This inclination has appeared in the most unlooked for quarters, in men supposed

to be absorbed in business, and in those connected with the liberal professions. And, since the walks of trade

were crowded, whilst that of agriculture cannot easily be, inasmuch as the farmer who is not wanted by others

can yet grow his own bread, whilst the manufacturer or the trader, who is not wanted, cannot, this seemed

a happy tendency. For, beside all the moral benefit which we may expect from the farmer's profession, when

a man enters it considerately, this promised the conquering of the soil, plenty, and beyond this, the adorning

of the country with every advantage and ornament which labor, ingenuity, and affection for a man's home,

Meantime, with cheap land, and the pacific disposition of the people, every thing invites to the arts of

agriculture, of gardening, and domestic architecture. Public gardens, on the scale of such plantations in

Europe and Asia, are now unknown to us. There is no feature of the old countries that strikes an American

with more agreeable surprise than the beautiful gardens of Europe; such as the Boboli in Florence, the Villa

Borghese in Rome, the Villa d'Este in Tivoli, the gardens at Munich, and at Frankfort on the Maine: works

easily imitated here, and which might well make the land dear to the citizen, and inflame patriotism. It is the

fine art which is left for us, now that sculpture, painting, and religious and civil architecture have become

effete, and have passed into second childhood. We have twenty degrees of latitude wherein to choose a seat,

and the new modes of travelling enlarge the opportunity of selection, by making it easy to cultivate very

distant tracts, and yet remain in strict intercourse with the centres of trade and population. And the whole

force of all the arts goes to facilitate the decoration of lands and dwellings. A garden has this advantage, that

it makes it indifferent where you live. A welllaid garden makes the face of the country of no account; let

that be low or high, grand or mean, you have made a beautiful abode worthy of man. If the landscape is

pleasing, the garden shows it, if tame, it excludes it. A little grove, which any farmer can find, or cause to

grow near his house, will, in a few years, make cataracts and chains of mountains quite unnecessary to his

scenery; and he is so contented with his alleys, woodlands, orchards, and river, that Niagara, and the Notch of

the White Hills, and Nantasket Beach, are superfluities. And yet the selection of a fit houselot has the same

advantage over an indifferent one, as the selection to a given employment of a man who has a genius for that

work. In the last case, the culture of years will never make the most painstaking apprentice his equal: no more

will gardening give the advantage of a happy site to a house in a hole or on a pinnacle. In America, we have

hitherto little to boast in this kind. The cities drain the country of the best part of its population: the flower of

the youth, of both sexes, goes into the towns, and the country is cultivated by a so much inferior class. The

land, travel a whole day together, looks povertystricken, and the buildings plain and poor. In Europe,

where society has an aristocratic structure, the land is full of men of the best stock, and the best culture,

whose interest and pride it is to remain half the year on their estates, and to fill them with every convenience

and ornament. Of course, these make model farms, and model architecture, and are a constant education to

the eye of the surrounding population. Whatever events in progress shall go to disgust men with cities, and

infuse into them the passion for country life, and country pleasures, will render a service to the whole face of

this continent, and will further the most poetic of all the occupations of real life, the bringing out by art the

I look on such improvements, also, as directly tending to endear the land to the inhabitant. Any relation to the

land, the habit of tilling it, or mining it, or even hunting on it, generates the feeling of patriotism. He who

keeps shop on it, or he who merely uses it as a support to his desk and ledger, or to his manufactory, values it

less. The vast majority of the people of this country live by the land, and carry its quality in their manners and

opinions. We in the Atlantic states, by position, have been commercial, and have, as I said, imbibed easily an

European culture. Luckily for us, now that steam has narrowed the Atlantic to a strait, the nervous, rocky

West is intruding a new and continental element into the national mind, and we shall yet have an American

genius. How much better when the whole land is a garden, and the people have grown up in the bowers of a

paradise. Without looking, then, to those extraordinary social influences which are now acting in precisely

this direction, but only at what is inevitably doing around us, I think we must regard the _land_ as a

commanding and increasing power on the citizen, the sanative and Americanizing influence, which promises

2. In the second place, the uprise and culmination of the new and antifeudal power of Commerce, is the

We cannot look on the freedom of this country, in connexion with its youth, without a presentiment that here

shall laws and institutions exist on some scale of proportion to the majesty of nature. To men legislating for

the area betwixt the two oceans, betwixt the snows and the tropics, somewhat of the gravity of nature will

infuse itself into the code. A heterogeneous population crowding on all ships from all corners of the world to

the great gates of North America, namely, Boston, New York, and New Orleans, and thence proceeding

inward to the prairie and the mountains, and quickly contributing their private thought to the public opinion,

their toll to the treasury, and their vote to the election, it cannot be doubted that the legislation of this country

should become more catholic and cosmopolitan than that of any other. It seems so easy for America to inspire

and express the most expansive and humane spirit; newborn, free, healthful, strong, the land of the laborer,

of the democrat, of the philanthropist, of the believer, of the saint, she should speak for the human race. It is

the country of the Future. From Washington, proverbially `the city of magnificent distances,' through all its

cities, states, and territories, it is a country of beginnings, of projects, of designs, and expectations.

Gentlemen, there is a sublime and friendly Destiny by which the human race is guided, the race never

dying, the individual never spared, to results affecting masses and ages. Men are narrow and selfish, but

the Genius or Destiny is not narrow, but beneficent. It is not discovered in their calculated and voluntary

activity, but in what befalls, with or without their design. Only what is inevitable interests us, and it turns out

that love and good are inevitable, and in the course of things. That Genius has infused itself into nature. It

indicates itself by a small excess of good, a small balance in brute facts always favorable to the side of

reason. All the facts in any part of nature shall be tabulated, and the results shall indicate the same security

and benefit; so slight as to be hardly observable, and yet it is there. The sphere is flattened at the poles, and

swelled at the equator; a form flowing necessarily from the fluid state, yet _the_ form, the mathematician

assures us, required to prevent the protuberances of the continent, or even of lesser mountains cast up at any

time by earthquakes, from continually deranging the axis of the earth. The census of the population is found

to keep an invariable equality in the sexes, with a trifling predominance in favor of the male, as if to

counterbalance the necessarily increased exposure of male life in war, navigation, and other accidents.

Remark the unceasing effort throughout nature at somewhat better than the actual creatures: _amelioration in

nature_, which alone permits and authorizes amelioration in mankind. The population of the world is a

conditional population; these are not the best, but the best that could live in the existing state of soils, gases,

animals, and morals: the best that could _yet_ live; there shall be a better, please God. This Genius, or

Destiny, is of the sternest administration, though rumors exist of its secret tenderness. It may be styled a cruel

kindness, serving the whole even to the ruin of the member; a terrible communist, reserving all profits to the

community, without dividend to individuals. Its law is, you shall have everything as a member, nothing to

yourself. For Nature is the noblest engineer, yet uses a grinding economy, working up all that is wasted

today into tomorrow's creation; not a superfluous grain of sand, for all the ostentation she makes of

expense and public works. It is because Nature thus saves and uses, laboring for the general, that we poor

particulars are so crushed and straitened, and find it so hard to live. She flung us out in her plenty, but we

cannot shed a hair, or a paring of a nail, but instantly she snatches at the shred, and appropriates it to the

general stock. Our condition is like that of the poor wolves: if one of the flock wound himself, or so much as

That serene Power interposes the check upon the caprices and officiousness of our wills. Its charity is not our

charity. One of its agents is our will, but that which expresses itself in our will, is stronger than our will. We

are very forward to help it, but it will not be accelerated. It resists our meddling, eleemosynary contrivances.

We devise sumptuary and relief laws, but the principle of population is always reducing wages to the lowest

pittance on which human life can be sustained. We legislate against forestalling and monopoly; we would

have a common granary for the poor; but the selfishness which hoards the corn for high prices, is the

preventive of famine; and the law of selfpreservation is surer policy than any legislation can be. We concoct

eleemosynary systems, and it turns out that our charity increases pauperism. We inflate our paper currency,

we repair commerce with unlimited credit, and are presently visited with unlimited bankruptcy.

It is easy to see that the existing generation are conspiring with a beneficence, which, in its working for

coming generations, sacrifices the passing one, which infatuates the most selfish men to act against their

private interest for the public welfare. We build railroads, we know not for what or for whom; but one thing

is certain, that we who build will receive the very smallest share of benefit. Benefit will accrue; they are

essential to the country, but that will be felt not until we are no longer countrymen. We do the like in all

We plant trees, we build stone houses, we redeem the waste, we make prospective laws, we found colleges

and hospitals, for remote generations. We should be mortified to learn that the little benefit we chanced in our

The history of commerce, is the record of this beneficent tendency. The patriarchal form of government

readily becomes despotic, as each person may see in his own family. Fathers wish to be the fathers of the

minds of their children, and behold with impatience a new character and way of thinking presuming to show

itself in their own son or daughter. This feeling, which all their love and pride in the powers of their children

cannot subdue, becomes petulance and tyranny when the head of the clan, the emperor of an empire, deals

with the same difference of opinion in his subjects. Difference of opinion is the one crime which kings never

forgive. An empire is an immense egotism. "I am the State," said the French Louis. When a French

ambassador mentioned to Paul of Russia, that a man of consequence in St. Petersburg was interesting himself

in some matter, the Czar interrupted him, "There is no man of consequence in this empire, but he with

whom I am actually speaking; and so long only as I am speaking to him, is he of any consequence." And

Nicholas, the present emperor, is reported to have said to his council, "The age is embarrassed with new

opinions; rely on me, gentlemen, I shall oppose an iron will to the progress of liberal opinions."

It is easy to see that this patriarchal or family management gets to be rather troublesome to all but the papa;

the sceptre comes to be a crowbar. And this unpleasant egotism, Feudalism opposes, and finally destroys. The

king is compelled to call in the aid of his brothers and cousins, and remote relations, to help him keep his

overgrown house in order; and this club of noblemen always come at last to have a will of their own; they

combine to brave the sovereign, and call in the aid of the people. Each chief attaches as many followers as he

can, by kindness, maintenance, and gifts; and as long as war lasts, the nobles, who must be soldiers, rule very

well. But when peace comes, the nobles prove very whimsical and uncomfortable masters; their frolics turn

out to be insulting and degrading to the commoner. Feudalism grew to be a bandit and brigand.

Meantime Trade had begun to appear: Trade, a plant which grows wherever there is peace, as soon as there is

peace, and as long as there is peace. The luxury and necessity of the noble fostered it. And as quickly as men

go to foreign parts, in ships or caravans, a new order of things springs up; new command takes place, new

servants and new masters. Their information, their wealth, their correspondence, have made them quite other

men than left their native shore. _They_ are nobles now, and by another patent than the king's. Feudalism had

been good, had broken the power of the kings, and had some good traits of its own; but it had grown

mischievous, it was time for it to die, and, as they say of dying people, all its faults came out. Trade was the

strong man that broke it down, and raised a new and unknown power in its place. It is a new agent in the

world, and one of great function; it is a very intellectual force. This displaces physical strength, and instals

computation, combination, information, science, in its room. It calls out all force of a certain kind that

slumbered in the former dynasties. It is now in the midst of its career. Feudalism is not ended yet. Our

governments still partake largely of that element. Trade goes to make the governments insignificant, and to

bring every kind of faculty of every individual that can in any manner serve any person, _on sale_. Instead of

a huge Army and Navy, and Executive Departments, it converts Government into an IntelligenceOffice,

where every man may find what he wishes to buy, and expose what he has to sell, not only produce and

manufactures, but art, skill, and intellectual and moral values. This is the good and this the evil of trade, that

By this means, however, it has done its work. It has its faults, and will come to an end, as the others do. The

philosopher and lover of man have much harm to say of trade; but the historian will see that trade was the

principle of Liberty; that trade planted America and destroyed Feudalism; that it makes peace and keeps

peace, and it will abolish slavery. We complain of its oppression of the poor, and of its building up a new

aristocracy on the ruins of the aristocracy it destroyed. But the aristocracy of trade has no permanence, is not

entailed, was the result of toil and talent, the result of merit of some kind, and is continually falling, like the

waves of the sea, before new claims of the same sort. Trade is an instrument in the hands of that friendly

Power which works for us in our own despite. We design it thus and thus; it turns out otherwise and far

better. This beneficent tendency, omnipotent without violence, exists and works. Every line of history

inspires a confidence that we shall not go far wrong; that things mend. That is the moral of all we learn, that it

warrants Hope, the prolific mother of reforms. Our part is plainly not to throw ourselves across the track, to

block improvement, and sit till we are stone, but to watch the uprise of successive mornings, and to conspire

with the new works of new days. Government has been a fossil; it should be a plant. I conceive that the office

of statute law should be to express, and not to impede the mind of mankind. New thoughts, new things. Trade

was one instrument, but Trade is also but for a time, and must give way to somewhat broader and better,

In consequence of the revolution in the state of society wrought by trade, Government in our times is

beginning to wear a clumsy and cumbrous appearance. We have already seen our way to shorter methods.

The time is full of good signs. Some of them shall ripen to fruit. All this beneficent socialism is a friendly

omen, and the swelling cry of voices for the education of the people, indicates that Government has other

offices than those of banker and executioner. Witness the new movements in the civilized world, the

Communism of France, Germany, and Switzerland; the Trades' Unions; the English League against the Corn

Laws; and the whole _Industrial Statistics_, so called. In Paris, the blouse, the badge of the operative, has

begun to make its appearance in the saloons. Witness, too, the spectacle of three Communities which have

within a very short time sprung up within this Commonwealth, besides several others undertaken by citizens

of Massachusetts within the territory of other States. These proceeded from a variety of motives, from an

impatience of many usages in common life, from a wish for greater freedom than the manners and opinions

of society permitted, but in great part from a feeling that the true offices of the State, the State had let fall to

the ground; that in the scramble of parties for the public purse, the main duties of government were omitted,

the duty to instruct the ignorant, to supply the poor with work and with good guidance. These communists

preferred the agricultural life as the most favorable condition for human culture; but they thought that the

farm, as we manage it, did not satisfy the right ambition of man. The farmer after sacrificing pleasure, taste,

freedom, thought, love, to his work, turns out often a bankrupt, like the merchant. This result might well seem

astounding. All this drudgery, from cockcrowing to starlight, for all these years, to end in mortgages and the

auctioneer's flag, and removing from bad to worse. It is time to have the thing looked into, and with a sifting

criticism ascertained who is the fool. It seemed a great deal worse, because the farmer is living in the same

town with men who pretend to know exactly what he wants. On one side, is agricultural chemistry, coolly

exposing the nonsense of our spendthrift agriculture and ruinous expense of manures, and offering, by means

of a teaspoonful of artificial guano, to turn a sandbank into corn; and, on the other, the farmer, not only eager

for the information, but with bad crops and in debt and bankruptcy, for want of it. Here are Etzlers and

mechanical projectors, who, with the Fourierists, undoubtingly affirm that the smallest union would make

every man rich; and, on the other side, a multitude of poor men and women seeking work, and who cannot

find enough to pay their board. The science is confident, and surely the poverty is real. If any means could be

This was one design of the projectors of the Associations which are now making their first feeble

experiments. They were founded in love, and in labor. They proposed, as you know, that all men should take

a part in the manual toil, and proposed to amend the condition of men, by substituting harmonious for hostile

industry. It was a noble thought of Fourier, which gives a favorable idea of his system, to distinguish in his

Phalanx a class as the Sacred Band, by whom whatever duties were disagreeable, and likely to be omitted,

At least, an economical success seemed certain for the enterprise, and that agricultural association must,

sooner or later, fix the price of bread, and drive single farmers into association, in selfdefence; as the great

commercial and manufacturing companies had already done. The Community is only the continuation of the

same movement which made the jointstock companies for manufactures, mining, insurance, banking, and so

forth. It has turned out cheaper to make calico by companies; and it is proposed to plant corn, and to bake

Undoubtedly, abundant mistakes will be made by these first adventurers, which will draw ridicule on their

schemes. I think, for example, that they exaggerate the importance of a favorite project of theirs, that of

paying talent and labor at one rate, paying all sorts of service at one rate, say ten cents the hour. They have

paid it so; but not an instant would a dime remain a dime. In one hand it became an eagle as it fell, and in

another hand a copper cent. For the whole value of the dime is in knowing what to do with it. One man buys

with it a landtitle of an Indian, and makes his posterity princes; or buys corn enough to feed the world; or

pen, ink, and paper, or a painter's brush, by which he can communicate himself to the human race as if he

were fire; and the other buys barley candy. Money is of no value; it cannot spend itself. All depends on the

skill of the spender. Whether, too, the objection almost universally felt by such women in the community as

were mothers, to an associate life, to a common table, and a common nursery, setting a higher value on the

private family with poverty, than on an association with wealth, will not prove insuperable, remains to be

But the Communities aimed at a higher success in securing to all their members an equal and thorough

education. And on the whole, one may say, that aims so generous, and so forced on them by the times, will

not be relinquished, even if these attempts fail, but will be prosecuted until they succeed.

This is the value of the Communities; not what they have done, but the revolution which they indicate as on

the way. Yes, Government must educate the poor man. Look across the country from any hillside around us,

and the landscape seems to crave Government. The actual differences of men must be acknowledged, and

met with love and wisdom. These rising grounds which command the champaign below, seem to ask for

lords, true lords, _land_lords, who understand the land and its uses, and the applicabilities of men, and

whose government would be what it should, namely, mediation between want and supply. How gladly would

each citizen pay a commission for the support and continuation of good guidance. None should be a governor

who has not a talent for governing. Now many people have a native skill for carving out business for many

hands; a genius for the disposition of affairs; and are never happier than when difficult practical questions,

which embarrass other men, are to be solved. All lies in light before them; they are in their element. Could

any means be contrived to appoint only these! There really seems a progress towards such a state of things, in

which this work shall be done by these natural workmen; and this, not certainly through any increased

discretion shown by the citizens at elections, but by the gradual contempt into which official government

falls, and the increasing disposition of private adventurers to assume its fallen functions. Thus the costly Post

Office is likely to go into disuse before the private transportationshop of Harnden and his competitors. The

currency threatens to fall entirely into private hands. Justice is continually administered more and more by

private reference, and not by litigation. We have feudal governments in a commercial age. It would be but an

easy extension of our commercial system, to pay a private emperor a fee for services, as we pay an architect,

an engineer, or a lawyer. If any man has a talent for righting wrong, for administering difficult affairs, for

counselling poor farmers how to turn their estates to good husbandry, for combining a hundred private

enterprises to a general benefit, let him in the countytown, or in Courtstreet, put up his signboard, Mr.

How can our young men complain of the poverty of things in New England, and not feel that poverty as a

demand on their charity to make New England rich? Where is he who seeing a thousand men useless and

unhappy, and making the whole region forlorn by their inaction, and conscious himself of possessing the

We must have kings, and we must have nobles. Nature provides such in every society, only let us have the

real instead of the titular. Let us have our leading and our inspiration from the best. In every society some

men are born to rule, and some to advise. Let the powers be well directed, directed by love, and they would

everywhere be greeted with joy and honor. The chief is the chief all the world over, only not his cap and his

plume. It is only their dislike of the pretender, which makes men sometimes unjust to the accomplished man.

If society were transparent, the noble would everywhere be gladly received and accredited, and would not be

asked for his day's work, but would be felt as benefit, inasmuch as he was noble. That were his duty and stint,

to keep himself pure and purifying, the leaven of his nation. I think I see place and duties for a nobleman

in every society; but it is not to drink wine and ride in a fine coach, but to guide and adorn life for the

multitude by forethought, by elegant studies, by perseverance, selfdevotion, and the remembrance of the

I call upon you, young men, to obey your heart, and be the nobility of this land. In every age of the world,

there has been a leading nation, one of a more generous sentiment, whose eminent citizens were willing to

stand for the interests of general justice and humanity, at the risk of being called, by the men of the moment,

chimerical and fantastic. Which should be that nation but these States? Which should lead that movement, if

not New England? Who should lead the leaders, but the Young American? The people, and the world, is now

suffering from the want of religion and honor in its public mind. In America, out of doors all seems a market;

in doors, an airtight stove of conventionalism. Every body who comes into our houses savors of these

habits; the men, of the market; the women, of the custom. I find no expression in our state papers or

legislative debate, in our lyceums or churches, specially in our newspapers, of a high national feeling, no

lofty counsels that rightfully stir the blood. I speak of those organs which can be presumed to speak a popular

sense. They recommend conventional virtues, whatever will earn and preserve property; always the capitalist;

the college, the church, the hospital, the theatre, the hotel, the road, the ship, of the capitalist, whatever

goes to secure, adorn, enlarge these, is good; what jeopardizes any of these, is damnable. The `opposition'

papers, so called, are on the same side. They attack the great capitalist, but with the aim to make a capitalist

of the poor man. The opposition is against those who have money, from those who wish to have money. But

who announces to us in journal, or in pulpit, or in the street, the secret of heroism,

I shall not need to go into an enumeration of our national defects and vices which require this Order of

Censors in the state. I might not set down our most proclaimed offences as the worst. It is not often the worst

trait that occasions the loudest outcry. Men complain of their suffering, and not of the crime. I fear little from

the bad effect of Repudiation; I do not fear that it will spread. Stealing is a suicidal business; you cannot

repudiate but once. But the bold face and tardy repentance permitted to this local mischief, reveal a public

mind so preoccupied with the love of gain, that the common sentiment of indignation at fraud does not act

with its natural force. The more need of a withdrawal from the crowd, and a resort to the fountain of right, by

the brave. The timidity of our public opinion, is our disease, or, shall I say, the publicness of opinion, the

absence of private opinion. Goodnature is plentiful, but we want justice, with heart of steel, to fight down

the proud. The private mind has the access to the totality of goodness and truth, that it may be a balance to a

corrupt society; and to stand for the private verdict against popular clamor, is the office of the noble. If a

humane measure is propounded in behalf of the slave, or of the Irishman, or the Catholic, or for the succor of

the poor, that sentiment, that project, will have the homage of the hero. That is his nobility, his oath of

knighthood, to succor the helpless and oppressed; always to throw himself on the side of weakness, of youth,

of hope, on the liberal, on the expansive side, never on the defensive, the conserving, the timorous, the lock

and bolt system. More than our goodwill we may not be able to give. We have our own affairs, our own

genius, which chains us to our proper work. We cannot give our life to the cause of the debtor, of the slave, or

the pauper, as another is doing; but to one thing we are bound, not to blaspheme the sentiment and the work

of that man, not to throw stumblingblocks in the way of the abolitionist, the philanthropist, as the organs of

influence and opinion are swift to do. It is for us to confide in the beneficent Supreme Power, and not to rely

on our money, and on the state because it is the guard of money. At this moment, the terror of old people and

of vicious people, is lest the Union of these States be destroyed: as if the Union had any other real basis than

the good pleasure of a majority of the citizens to be united. But the wise and just man will always feel that he

stands on his own feet; that he imparts strength to the state, not receives security from it; and that if all went

down, he and such as he would quite easily combine in a new and better constitution. Every great and

memorable community has consisted of formidable individuals, who, like the Roman or the Spartan, lent his

own spirit to the state and made it great. Yet only by the supernatural is a man strong; nothing is so weak as

an egotist. Nothing is mightier than we, when we are vehicles of a truth before which the state and the

Gentlemen, the development of our American internal resources, the extension to the utmost of the

commercial system, and the appearance of new moral causes which are to modify the state, are giving an

aspect of greatness to the Future, which the imagination fears to open. One thing is plain for all men of

common sense and common conscience, that here, here in America, is the home of man. After all the

deductions which are to be made for our pitiful politics, which stake every gravest national question on the

silly die, whether James or whether Jonathan shall sit in the chair and hold the purse; after all the deduction is

made for our frivolities and insanities, there still remains an organic simplicity and liberty, which, when it

loses its balance, redresses itself presently, which offers opportunity to the human mind not known in any

It is true, the public mind wants selfrespect. We are full of vanity, of which the most signal proof is our

sensitiveness to foreign and especially English censure. One cause of this is our immense reading, and that

reading chiefly confined to the productions of the English press. It is also true, that, to imaginative persons in

this country, there is somewhat bare and bald in our short history, and unsettled wilderness. They ask, who

would live in a new country, that can live in an old? and it is not strange that our youths and maidens should

burn to see the picturesque extremes of an antiquated country. But it is one thing to visit the pyramids, and

another to wish to live there. Would they like tithes to the clergy, and sevenths to the government, and

horseguards, and licensed press, and grief when a child is born, and threatening, starved weavers, and a

pauperism now constituting onethirteenth of the population? Instead of the open future expanding here

before the eye of every boy to vastness, would they like the closing in of the future to a narrow slit of sky,

and that fast contracting to be no future? One thing, for instance, the beauties of aristocracy, we commend to

the study of the travelling American. The English, the most conservative people this side of India, are not

sensible of the restraint, but an American would seriously resent it. The aristocracy, incorporated by law and

education, degrades life for the unprivileged classes. It is a questionable compensation to the embittered

feeling of a proud commoner, the reflection that a fop, who, by the magic of title, paralyzes his arm, and

plucks from him half the graces and rights of a man, is himself also an aspirant excluded with the same

ruthlessness from higher circles, since there is no end to the wheels within wheels of this spiral heaven.

Something may be pardoned to the spirit of loyalty when it becomes fantastic; and something to the

imagination, for the baldest life is symbolic. Philip II. of Spain rated his ambassador for neglecting serious

affairs in Italy, whilst he debated some point of honor with the French ambassador; "You have left a business

of importance for a ceremony." The ambassador replied, "Your majesty's self is but a ceremony." In the East,

where the religious sentiment comes in to the support of the aristocracy, and in the Romish church also, there

is a grain of sweetness in the tyranny; but in England, the fact seems to me intolerable, what is commonly

affirmed, that such is the transcendent honor accorded to wealth and birth, that no man of letters, be his

eminence what it may, is received into the best society, except as a lion and a show. The English have many

virtues, many advantages, and the proudest history of the world; but they need all, and more than all the

resources of the past to indemnify a heroic gentleman in that country for the mortifications prepared for him

by the system of society, and which seem to impose the alternative to resist or to avoid it. That there are

mitigations and practical alleviations to this rigor, is not an excuse for the rule. Commanding worth, and

personal power, must sit crowned in all companies, nor will extraordinary persons be slighted or affronted in

any company of civilized men. But the system is an invasion of the sentiment of justice and the native rights

of men, which, however decorated, must lessen the value of English citizenship. It is for Englishmen to

consider, not for us; we only say, let us live in America, too thankful for our want of feudal institutions. Our

houses and towns are like mosses and lichens, so slight and new; but youth is a fault of which we shall daily

mend. This land, too, is as old as the Flood, and wants no ornament or privilege which nature could bestow.

Here stars, here woods, here hills, here animals, here men abound, and the vast tendencies concur of a new

order. If only the men are employed in conspiring with the designs of the Spirit who led us hither, and is

leading us still, we shall quickly enough advance out of all hearing of other's censures, out of all regrets of