H105, American History I

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Man the Reformer,” speech before the Mechanics’ Apprentices’ Library Association, Boston (January 25, 1841).

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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 ways 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 .... 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 form 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 mediates on with joy and self-approval in his hour of love and aspiration; but rather that which he then puts out of sight, showing only the brilliant result, and atoning for the manner of acquiring it 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 for man, find these ways of trade unfit for them, and they come forth from it.  Such cases are becoming more numerous every year....

It is considerations of this kind which 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.

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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 now 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 now 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?....

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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.  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 Re-maker of what man has made; a renouncer of life; 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 of new life?....

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Young American,” speech before the Mercantile Library Association, Boston (February 7, 1844).

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Meantime Trade (or the merchant and manufacturer) had begun to appear:  Trade, a plant which always 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 ideas awake in their minds.  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 very good traits of its own; but it had gown 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 instal[l]s 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 tends to convert Government into a bureau of intelligence, an Intelligence-Office, where every man may find what he wishes to buy, and expose what he has to sell, not only produce and manufactures, but art, skill, and intellectual and moral values.  This is the good and this is the evil of trade, that it goes to put everything into market, talent, beauty, virtue, and man himself.

By this means, however, it has done its work.  It has its faults, and will come to an end, as the others do.  We rail at Trade, and the philosopher and lover of man have much harm to say of it; but the historian of the world 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 grievous oppression of the poor, and of its building up a new aristocracy on the ruins of the aristocracy it destroyed.  But there is this immense difference, that 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 was one instrument, but Trade is also but for a time, and must give way to somewhat broader and better, whose signs are already dawning in the sky.

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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 form the want of religion and honor in its public mind.  In America, out of doors all seems a market; in doors, an air-tight stove of conventionalism.  Every body who comes into our house savors of these precious 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 only 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 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 between the ins and the outs; between those who have money, and those who wish to have money.  But who announces to us in journal, or in pulpit, or in the street, the secret of heroism....