THE YOUNG AMERICAN
 
        _A Lecture read before the Mercantile Library Association,
        Boston, February 7, 1844_


        GENTLEMEN:
        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 goods in the United States?

        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 yard-stick, and surveyor's line.  The
bountiful continent is ours, state on state, and territory on
territory, to the waves of the Pacific sea;

        "Our garden is the immeasurable earth,
        The heaven's blue pillars are Medea's house."

        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 sea-coast.  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 timber-lands is enhanced.

        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, could suggest.

        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 well-laid 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 poverty-stricken,
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 native but
hidden graces of the landscape.

        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 to
disclose new virtues for ages to come.

        2. In the second place, the uprise and culmination of the new
and anti-feudal power of Commerce, is the political fact of most
significance to the American at this hour.

        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; new-born, 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 to-day into to-morrow'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 limp, the rest eat him up
incontinently.

        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 self-preservation 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 matters: --

        "Man's heart the Almighty to the Future set By secret and
inviolable springs."

        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 own persons to receive was the utmost they would
yield.

        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 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 the evil of
trade, that it would 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.  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, whose signs are already dawning in
the sky.

        3. I pass to speak of the signs of that which is the sequel of
trade.

        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 found to bring
these two together!

        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, were to
be assumed.

        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
self-defence; as the great commercial and manufacturing companies had
already done.  The Community is only the continuation of the same
movement which made the joint-stock 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 bread by companies.

        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 land-title 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, &c., setting a higher
value on the private family with poverty, than on an association with
wealth, will not prove insuperable, remains to be determined.

        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 hill-side 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 transportation-shop 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 county-town, or in Court-street, put up his sign-board, Mr.
Smith, _Governor_, Mr. Johnson, _Working king_.

        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 faculty they want, does not
hear his call to go and be their king?

        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, self-devotion, and
the remembrance of the humble old friend, by making his life secretly
beautiful.

        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 air-tight 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,

        "Man alone
        Can perform the impossible?"

        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.  Good-nature 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 good-will 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
stumbling-blocks 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 individual are
alike ephemeral.

        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 other region.

        It is true, the public mind wants self-respect.  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 horse-guards, and licensed press,
and grief when a child is born, and threatening, starved weavers, and
a pauperism now constituting one-thirteenth 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 our own, into a new and
more excellent social state than history has recorded.