MAN THE REFORMER

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A Lecture read before the Mechanics' Apprentices' Library Association, Boston, January 25, 1841

Mr. President, and Gentlemen,

I wish to offer to your consideration some thoughts on the particular and general relations of man as a reformer. I shall
assume that the aim of each young man in this association is the very highest that belongs to a rational mind. Let it be
granted, that our life, as we lead it, is common and mean; that some of those offices and functions for which we were
mainly created are grown so rare in society, that the memory of them is only kept alive in old books and in dim traditions;
that prophets and poets, that beautiful and perfect men, we are not now, no, nor have even seen such; that some sources of
human instruction are almost unnamed and unknown among us; that the community in which we live will hardly bear to
be told that every man should be open to ecstasy or a divine illumination, and his daily walk elevated by intercourse with
the spiritual world. Grant all this, as we must, yet I suppose none of my auditors will deny that we ought to seek to
establish ourselves in such disciplines and courses as will deserve that guidance and clearer communication with the
spiritual nature. And further, I will not dissemble my hope, that each person whom I address has felt his own call to cast
aside all evil customs, timidities, and limitations, and to be in his place a free and helpful man, a reformer, a benefactor,
not content to slip along through the world like a footman or a spy, escaping by his nimbleness and apologies as many
knocks as he can, but a brave and upright man, who must find or cut a straight road to everything excellent in the earth,
and not only go honorably himself, but make it easier for all who follow him, to go in honor and with benefit.

In the history of the world the doctrine of Reform had never such scope as at the present hour. Lutherans, Hernhutters,
Jesuits, Monks, Quakers, Knox, Wesley, Swedenborg, Bentham, in their accusations of society, all respected something, –
church or state, literature or history, domestic usages, the market town, the dinner table, coined money. But now all these
and all things else hear the trumpet, and must rush to judgment, – Christianity, the laws, commerce, schools, the farm, the
laboratory; and not a kingdom, town, statute, rite, calling, man, or woman, but is threatened by the new spirit.

What if some of the objections whereby our institutions are assailed are extreme and speculative, and the reformers tend to
idealism; that only shows the extravagance of the abuses which have driven the mind into the opposite extreme. It is when
your facts and persons grow unreal and fantastic by too much falsehood, that the scholar flies for refuge to the world of
ideas, and aims to recruit and replenish nature from that source. Let ideas establish their legitimate sway again in society,
let life be fair and poetic, and the scholars will gladly be lovers, citizens, and philanthropists.

It will afford no security from the new ideas, that the old nations, the laws of centuries, the property and institutions of a
hundred cities, are built on other foundations. The demon of reform has a secret door into the heart of every lawmaker, of
every inhabitant of every city. The fact, that a new thought and hope have dawned in your breast, should apprize you that
in the same hour a new light broke in upon a thousand private hearts. That secret which you would fain keep, – as soon as
you go abroad, lo! there is one standing on the doorstep, to tell you the same. There is not the most bronzed and
sharpened money-catcher, who does not, to your consternation, almost, quail and shake the moment he hears a question
prompted by the new ideas. We thought he had some semblance of ground to stand upon, that such as he at least would
die hard; but he trembles and flees. Then the scholar says, `Cities and coaches shall never impose on me again; for, behold
every solitary dream of mine is rushing to fulfilment. That fancy I had, and hesitated to utter because you would laugh, –
the broker, the attorney, the market-man are saying the same thing. Had I waited a day longer to speak, I had been too
late. Behold, State Street thinks, and Wall Street doubts, and begins to prophesy!'

It cannot be wondered at, that this general inquest into abuses should arise in the bosom of society, when one considers the
practical impediments that stand in the way of virtuous young men. The young man, on entering life, finds the way to
lucrative employments blocked with abuses. The ways of trade are grown selfish to the borders of theft, and supple to the
borders (if not beyond the borders) of fraud. The employments of commerce are not intrinsically unfit for a man, or less
genial to his faculties, but these are now in their general course so vitiated by derelictions and abuses at which all connive,
that it requires more vigor and resources than can be expected of every young man, to right himself in them; he is lost in
them; he cannot move hand or foot in them. Has he genius and virtue? the less does he find them fit for him to grow in,
and if he would thrive in them, he must sacrifice all the brilliant dreams of boyhood and youth as dreams; he must forget
the prayers of his childhood; and must take on him the harness of routine and obsequiousness. If not so minded, nothing
is left him but to begin the world anew, as he does who puts the spade into the ground for food. We are all implicated, of
course, in this charge; it is only necessary to ask a few questions as to the progress of the articles of commerce from the
fields where they grew, to our houses, to become aware that we eat and drink and wear perjury and fraud in a hundred
commodities. How many articles of daily consumption are furnished us from the West Indies; yet it is said, that, in the
Spanish islands, the venality of the officers of the government has passed into usage, and that no article passes into our
ships which has not been fraudulently cheapened. In the Spanish islands, every agent or factor of the Americans, unless
he be a consul, has taken oath that he is a Catholic, or has caused a priest to make that declaration for him. The
abolitionist has shown us our dreadful debt to the southern negro. In the island of Cuba, in addition to the ordinary
abominations of slavery, it appears, only men are bought for the plantations, and one dies in ten every year, of these
miserable bachelors, to yield us sugar. I leave for those who have the knowledge the part of sifting the oaths of our
custom-houses; I will not inquire into the oppression of the sailors; I will not pry into the usages of our retail trade. I
content myself with the fact, that the general system of our trade, (apart from the blacker traits, which, I hope, are
exceptions denounced and unshared by all reputable men,) is a system of selfishness; is not dictated by the high sentiments
of human nature; is not measured by the exact law of reciprocity; much less by the sentiments of love and heroism, but is a
system of distrust, of concealment, of superior keenness, not of giving but of taking advantage. It is not that which a man
delights to unlock to a noble friend; which he meditates on with joy and self-approval in his hour of love and aspiration;
but rather what he then puts out of sight, only showing the brilliant result, and atoning for the manner of acquiring, by the
manner of expending it. I do not charge the merchant or the manufacturer. The sins of our trade belong to no class, to no
individual. One plucks, one distributes, one eats. Every body partakes, every body confesses, – with cap and knee
volunteers his confession, yet none feels himself accountable. He did not create the abuse; he cannot alter it. What is he?
an obscure private person who must get his bread. That is the vice, – that no one feels himself called to act for man, but
only as a fraction of man. It happens therefore that all such ingenuous souls as feel within themselves the irrepressible
strivings of a noble aim, who by the law of their nature must act simply, find these ways of trade unfit for them, and they
come forth from it. Such cases are becoming more numerous every year.

But by coming out of trade you have not cleared yourself. The trail of the serpent reaches into all the lucrative professions
and practices of man. Each has its own wrongs. Each finds a tender and very intelligent conscience a disqualification for
success. Each requires of the practitioner a certain shutting of the eyes, a certain dapperness and compliance, an
acceptance of customs, a sequestration from the sentiments of generosity and love, a compromise of private opinion and
lofty integrity. Nay, the evil custom reaches into the whole institution of property, until our laws which establish and
protect it, seem not to be the issue of love and reason, but of selfishness. Suppose a man is so unhappy as to be born a
saint, with keen perceptions, but with the conscience and love of an angel, and he is to get his living in the world; he finds
himself excluded from all lucrative works; he has no farm, and he cannot get one; for, to earn money enough to buy one,
requires a sort of concentration toward money, which is the selling himself for a number of years, and to him the present
hour is as sacred and inviolable as any future hour. Of course, whilst another man has no land, my title to mine, your title
to yours, is at once vitiated. Inextricable seem to be the twinings and tendrils of this evil, and we all involve ourselves in it
the deeper by forming connections, by wives and children, by benefits and debts.

Considerations of this kind have turned the attention of many philanthropic and intelligent persons to the claims of
manual labor, as a part of the education of every young man. If the accumulated wealth of the past generations is thus
tainted, – no matter how much of it is offered to us, – we must begin to consider if it were not the nobler part to renounce
it, and to put ourselves into primary relations with the soil and nature, and abstaining from whatever is dishonest and
unclean, to take each of us bravely his part, with his own hands, in the manual labor of the world.

But it is said, `What! will you give up the immense advantages reaped from the division of labor, and set every man to
make his own shoes, bureau, knife, wagon, sails, and needle? This would be to put men back into barbarism by their own
act.' I see no instant prospect of a virtuous revolution; yet I confess, I should not be pained at a change which threatened a
loss of some of the luxuries or conveniences of society, if it proceeded from a preference of the agricultural life out of the
belief, that our primary duties as men could be better discharged in that calling. Who could regret to see a high conscience
and a purer taste exercising a sensible effect on young men in their choice of occupation, and thinning the ranks of
competition in the labors of commerce, of law, and of state? It is easy to see that the inconvenience would last but a short
time. This would be great action, which always opens the eyes of men. When many persons shall have done this, when
the majority shall admit the necessity of reform in all these institutions, their abuses will be redressed, and the way will be
open again to the advantages which arise from the division of labor, and a man may select the fittest employment for his
peculiar talent again, without compromise.

But quite apart from the emphasis which the times give to the doctrine, that the manual labor of society ought to be shared
among all the members, there are reasons proper to every individual, why he should not be deprived of it. The use of
manual labor is one which never grows obsolete, and which is inapplicable to no person. A man should have a farm or a
mechanical craft for his culture. We must have a basis for our higher accomplishments, our delicate entertainments of
poetry and philosophy, in the work of our hands. We must have an antagonism in the tough world for all the variety of our
spiritual faculties, or they will not be born. Manual labor is the study of the external world. The advantage of riches
remains with him who procured them, not with the heir. When I go into my garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel
such an exhilaration and health, that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me
what I should have done with my own hands. But not only health, but education is in the work. Is it possible that I who
get indefinite quantities of sugar, hominy, cotton, buckets, crockery ware, and letter paper, by simply signing my name
once in three months to a cheque in favor of John Smith and Co. traders, get the fair share of exercise to my faculties by
that act, which nature intended for me in making all these far-fetched matters important to my comfort? It is Smith
himself, and his carriers, and dealers, and manufacturers, it is the sailor, the hidedrogher, the butcher, the negro, the
hunter, and the planter, who have intercepted the sugar of the sugar, and the cotton of the cotton. They have got the
education, I only the commodity. This were all very well if I were necessarily absent, being detained by work of my own,
like theirs, work of the same faculties; then should I be sure of my hands and feet, but now I feel some shame before my
wood-chopper, my ploughman, and my cook, for they have some sort of self-sufficiency, they can contrive without my aid
to bring the day and year round, but I depend on them, and have not earned by use a right to my arms and feet.

Consider further the difference between the first and second owner of property. Every species of property is preyed on by
its own enemies, as iron by rust; timber by rot; cloth by moths; provisions by mould, putridity, or vermin; money by
thieves; an orchard by insects; a planted field by weeds and the inroad of cattle; a stock of cattle by hunger; a road by rain
and frost; a bridge by freshets. And whoever takes any of these things into his possession, takes the charge of defending
them from this troop of enemies, or of keeping them in repair. A man who supplies his own want, who builds a raft or a
boat to go a fishing, finds it easy to caulk it, or put in a thole-pin, or mend the rudder. What he gets only as fast as he
wants for his own ends, does not embarrass him, or take away his sleep with looking after. But when he comes to give all
the goods he has year after year collected, in one estate to his son, house, orchard, ploughed land, cattle, bridges,
hardware, wooden-ware, carpets, cloths, provisions, books, money, and cannot give him the skill and experience which
made or collected these, and the method and place they have in his own life, the son finds his hands full, – not to use these
things, – but to look after them and defend them from their natural enemies. To him they are not means, but masters.
Their enemies will not remit; rust, mould, vermin, rain, sun, freshet, fire, all seize their own, fill him with vexation, and
he is converted from the owner into a watchman or a watch-dog to this magazine of old and new chattels. What a change!
Instead of the masterly good humor, and sense of power, and fertility of resource in himself; instead of those strong and
learned hands, those piercing and learned eyes, that supple body, and that mighty and prevailing heart, which the father
had, whom nature loved and feared, whom snow and rain, water and land, beast and fish seemed all to know and to serve,
we have now a puny, protected person, guarded by walls and curtains, stoves and down beds, coaches, and men-servants
and women-servants from the earth and the sky, and who, bred to depend on all these, is made anxious by all that
endangers those possessions, and is forced to spend so much time in guarding them, that he has quite lost sight of their
original use, namely, to help him to his ends, – to the prosecution of his love; to the helping of his friend, to the worship of
his God, to the enlargement of his knowledge, to the serving of his country, to the indulgence of his sentiment, and he is
now what is called a rich man, – the menial and runner of his riches.

Hence it happens that the whole interest of history lies in the fortunes of the poor. Knowledge, Virtue, Power are the
victories of man over his necessities, his march to the dominion of the world. Every man ought to have this opportunity to
conquer the world for himself. Only such persons interest us, Spartans, Romans, Saracens, English, Americans, who have
stood in the jaws of need, and have by their own wit and might extricated themselves, and made man victorious.

I do not wish to overstate this doctrine of labor, or insist that every man should be a farmer, any more than that every man
should be a lexicographer. In general, one may say, that the husbandman's is the oldest, and most universal profession,
and that where a man does not yet discover in himself any fitness for one work more than another, this may be preferred.
But the doctrine of the Farm is merely this, that every man ought to stand in primary relations with the work of the world,
ought to do it himself, and not to suffer the accident of his having a purse in his pocket, or his having been bred to some
dishonorable and injurious craft, to sever him from those duties; and for this reason, that labor is God's education; that he
only is a sincere learner, he only can become a master, who learns the secrets of labor, and who by real cunning extorts
from nature its sceptre.

Neither would I shut my ears to the plea of the learned professions, of the poet, the priest, the lawgiver, and men of study
generally; namely, that in the experience of all men of that class, the amount of manual labor which is necessary to the
maintenance of a family, indisposes and disqualifies for intellectual exertion. I know, it often, perhaps usually, happens,
that where there is a fine organization apt for poetry and philosophy, that individual finds himself compelled to wait on his
thoughts, to waste several days that he may enhance and glorify one; and is better taught by a moderate and dainty
exercise, such as rambling in the fields, rowing, skating, hunting, than by the downright drudgery of the farmer and the
smith. I would not quite forget the venerable counsel of the Egyptian mysteries, which declared that "there were two pairs
of eyes in man, and it is requisite that the pair which are beneath should be closed, when the pair that are above them
perceive, and that when the pair above are closed, those which are beneath should be opened." Yet I will suggest that no
separation from labor can be without some loss of power and of truth to the seer himself; that, I doubt not, the faults and
vices of our literature and philosophy, their too great fineness, effeminacy, and melancholy, are attributable to the enervated
and sickly habits of the literary class. Better that the book should not be quite so good, and the bookmaker abler and
better, and not himself often a ludicrous contrast to all that he has written.
But granting that for ends so sacred and dear, some relaxation must be had, I think, that if a man find in himself any
strong bias to poetry, to art, to the contemplative life, drawing him to these things with a devotion incompatible with good
husbandry, that man ought to reckon early with himself, and, respecting the compensations of the Universe, ought to
ransom himself from the duties of economy, by a certain rigor and privation in his habits. For privileges so rare and
grand, let him not stint to pay a great tax. Let him be a caenobite, a pauper, and if need be, celibate also. Let him learn to
eat his meals standing, and to relish the taste of fair water and black bread. He may leave to others the costly
conveniences of housekeeping, and large hospitality, and the possession of works of art. Let him feel that genius is a
hospitality, and that he who can create works of art needs not collect them. He must live in a chamber, and postpone his
self-indulgence, forewarned and forearmed against that frequent misfortune of men of genius, – the taste for luxury. This
is the tragedy of genius, – attempting to drive along the ecliptic with one horse of the heavens and one horse of the earth,
there is only discord and ruin and downfall to chariot and charioteer.

The duty that every man should assume his own vows, should call the institutions of society to account, and examine their
fitness to him, gains in emphasis, if we look at our modes of living. Is our housekeeping sacred and honorable? Does it
raise and inspire us, or does it cripple us instead? I ought to be armed by every part and function of my household, by all
my social function, by my economy, by my feasting, by my voting, by my traffic. Yet I am almost no party to any of these
things. Custom does it for me, gives me no power therefrom, and runs me in debt to boot. We spend our incomes for paint
and paper, for a hundred trifles, I know not what, and not for the things of a man. Our expense is almost all for
conformity. It is for cake that we run in debt; 't is not the intellect, not the heart, not beauty, not worship, that costs so
much. Why needs any man be rich? Why must he have horses, fine garments, handsome apartments, access to public
houses, and places of amusement? Only for want of thought. Give his mind a new image, and he flees into a solitary
garden or garret to enjoy it, and is richer with that dream, than the fee of a county could make him. But we are first
thoughtless, and then find that we are moneyless. We are first sensual, and then must be rich. We dare not trust our wit
for making our house pleasant to our friend, and so we buy ice-creams. He is accustomed to carpets, and we have not
sufficient character to put floor-cloths out of his mind whilst he stays in the house, and so we pile the floor with carpets.
Let the house rather be a temple of the Furies of Lacedaemon, formidable and holy to all, which none but a Spartan may
enter or so much as behold. As soon as there is faith, as soon as there is society, comfits and cushions will be left to slaves.
Expense will be inventive and heroic. We shall eat hard and lie hard, we shall dwell like the ancient Romans in narrow
tenements, whilst our public edifices, like theirs, will be worthy for their proportion of the landscape in which we set them,
for conversation, for art, for music, for worship. We shall be rich to great purposes; poor only for selfish ones.

Now what help for these evils? How can the man who has learned but one art, procure all the conveniences of life
honestly? Shall we say all we think? – Perhaps with his own hands. Suppose he collects or makes them ill; – yet he has
learned their lesson. If he cannot do that. – Then perhaps he can go without. Immense wisdom and riches are in that. It
is better to go without, than to have them at too great a cost. Let us learn the meaning of economy. Economy is a high,
humane office, a sacrament, when its aim is grand; when it is the prudence of simple tastes, when it is practised for
freedom, or love, or devotion. Much of the economy which we see in houses, is of a base origin, and is best kept out of
sight. Parched corn eaten to-day that I may have roast fowl to my dinner on Sunday, is a baseness; but parched corn and a
house with one apartment, that I may be free of all perturbations, that I may be serene and docile to what the mind shall
speak, and girt and road-ready for the lowest mission of knowledge or goodwill, is frugality for gods and heroes.

Can we not learn the lesson of self-help? Society is full of infirm people, who incessantly summon others to serve them.
They contrive everywhere to exhaust for their single comfort the entire means and appliances of that luxury to which our
invention has yet attained. Sofas, ottomans, stoves, wine, game-fowl, spices, perfumes, rides, the theatre, entertainments,
– all these they want, they need, and whatever can be suggested more than these, they crave also, as if it was the bread
which should keep them from starving; and if they miss any one, they represent themselves as the most wronged and most
wretched persons on earth. One must have been born and bred with them to know how to prepare a meal for their learned
stomach. Meantime, they never bestir themselves to serve another person; not they! they have a great deal more to do for
themselves than they can possibly perform, nor do they once perceive the cruel joke of their lives, but the more odious they
grow, the sharper is the tone of their complaining and craving. Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants and to
serve them one's self, so as to have somewhat left to give, instead of being always prompt to grab? It is more elegant to
answer one's own needs, than to be richly served; inelegant perhaps it may look to-day, and to a few, but it is an elegance
forever and to all.

I do not wish to be absurd and pedantic in reform. I do not wish to push my criticism on the state of things around me to
that extravagant mark, that shall compel me to suicide, or to an absolute isolation from the advantages of civil society. If
we suddenly plant our foot, and say, – I will neither eat nor drink nor wear nor touch any food or fabric which I do not
know to be innocent, or deal with any person whose whole manner of life is not clear and rational, we shall stand still.
Whose is so? Not mine; not thine; not his. But I think we must clear ourselves each one by the interrogation, whether we
have earned our bread to-day by the hearty contribution of our energies to the common benefit? and we must not cease to
tend to the correction of these flagrant wrongs, by laying one stone aright every day.

But the idea which now begins to agitate society has a wider scope than our daily employments, our households, and the
institutions of property. We are to revise the whole of our social structure, the state, the school, religion, marriage, trade,
science, and explore their foundations in our own nature; we are to see that the world not only fitted the former men, but
fits us, and to clear ourselves of every usage which has not its roots in our own mind. What is a man born for but to be a
Reformer, a Remaker of what man has made; a renouncer of lies; a restorer of truth and good, imitating that great Nature
which embosoms us all, and which sleeps no moment on an old past, but every hour repairs herself, yielding us every
morning a new day, and with every pulsation a new life? Let him renounce everything which is not true to him, and put
all his practices back on their first thoughts, and do nothing for which he has not the whole world for his reason. If there
are inconveniences, and what is called ruin in the way, because we have so enervated and maimed ourselves, yet it would
be like dying of perfumes to sink in the effort to reattach the deeds of every day to the holy and mysterious recesses of life.

The power, which is at once spring and regulator in all efforts of reform, is the conviction that there is an infinite
worthiness in man which will appear at the call of worth, and that all particular reforms are the removing of some
impediment. Is it not the highest duty that man should be honored in us? I ought not to allow any man, because he has
broad lands, to feel that he is rich in my presence. I ought to make him feel that I can do without his riches, that I cannot
be bought, – neither by comfort, neither by pride, – and though I be utterly penniless, and receiving bread from him, that
he is the poor man beside me. And if, at the same time, a woman or a child discovers a sentiment of piety, or a juster way
of thinking than mine, I ought to confess it by my respect and obedience, though it go to alter my whole way of life.

The Americans have many virtues, but they have not Faith and Hope. I know no two words whose meaning is more lost
sight of. We use these words as if they were as obsolete as Selah and Amen. And yet they have the broadest meaning, and
the most cogent application to Boston in 1841. The Americans have no faith. They rely on the power of a dollar; they are
deaf to a sentiment. They think you may talk the north wind down as easily as raise society; and no class more faithless
than the scholars or intellectual men. Now if I talk with a sincere wise man, and my friend, with a poet, with a
conscientious youth who is still under the dominion of his own wild thoughts, and not yet harnessed in the team of society
to drag with us all in the ruts of custom, I see at once how paltry is all this generation of unbelievers, and what a house of
cards their institutions are, and I see what one brave man, what one great thought executed might effect. I see that the
reason of the distrust of the practical man in all theory, is his inability to perceive the means whereby we work. Look, he
says, at the tools with which this world of yours is to be built. As we cannot make a planet, with atmosphere, rivers, and
forests, by means of the best carpenters' or engineers' tools, with chemist's laboratory and smith's forge to boot, – so neither
can we ever construct that heavenly society you prate of, out of foolish, sick, selfish men and women, such as we know
them to be. But the believer not only beholds his heaven to be possible, but already to begin to exist, – not by the men or
materials the statesman uses, but by men transfigured and raised above themselves by the power of principles. To
principles something else is possible that transcends all the power of expedients.

Every great and commanding moment in the annals of the world is the triumph of some enthusiasm. The victories of the
Arabs after Mahomet, who, in a few years, from a small and mean beginning, established a larger empire than that of
Rome, is an example. They did they knew not what. The naked Derar, horsed on an idea, was found an overmatch for a
troop of Roman cavalry. The women fought like men, and conquered the Roman men. They were miserably equipped,
miserably fed. They were Temperance troops. There was neither brandy nor flesh needed to feed them. They conquered
Asia, and Africa, and Spain, on barley. The Caliph Omar's walking stick struck more terror into those who saw it, than
another man's sword. His diet was barley bread; his sauce was salt; and oftentimes by way of abstinence he ate his bread
without salt. His drink was water. His palace was built of mud; and when he left Medina to go to the conquest of
Jerusalem, he rode on a red camel, with a wooden platter hanging at his saddle, with a bottle of water and two sacks, one
holding barley, and the other dried fruits.

But there will dawn ere long on our politics, on our modes of living, a nobler morning than that Arabian faith, in the
sentiment of love. This is the one remedy for all ills, the panacea of nature. We must be lovers, and at once the impossible
becomes possible. Our age and history, for these thousand years, has not been the history of kindness, but of selfishness.
Our distrust is very expensive. The money we spend for courts and prisons is very ill laid out. We make, by distrust, the
thief, and burglar, and incendiary, and by our court and jail we keep him so. An acceptance of the sentiment of love
throughout Christendom for a season, would bring the felon and the outcast to our side in tears, with the devotion of his
faculties to our service. See this wide society of laboring men and women. We allow ourselves to be served by them, we
live apart from them, and meet them without a salute in the streets. We do not greet their talents, nor rejoice in their good
fortune, nor foster their hopes, nor in the assembly of the people vote for what is dear to them. Thus we enact the part of
the selfish noble and king from the foundation of the world. See, this tree always bears one fruit. In every household, the
peace of a pair is poisoned by the malice, slyness, indolence, and alienation of domestics. Let any two matrons meet, and
observe how soon their conversation turns on the troubles from their "help," as our phrase is. In every knot of laborers, the
rich man does not feel himself among his friends, – and at the polls he finds them arrayed in a mass in distinct opposition
to him. We complain that the politics of masses of the people are controlled by designing men, and led in opposition to
manifest justice and the common weal, and to their own interest. But the people do not wish to be represented or ruled by
the ignorant and base. They only vote for these, because they were asked with the voice and semblance of kindness. They
will not vote for them long. They inevitably prefer wit and probity. To use an Egyptian metaphor, it is not their will for
any long time "to raise the nails of wild beasts, and to depress the heads of the sacred birds." Let our affection flow out to
our fellows; it would operate in a day the greatest of all revolutions. It is better to work on institutions by the sun than by
the wind. The state must consider the poor man, and all voices must speak for him. Every child that is born must have a
just chance for his bread. Let the amelioration in our laws of property proceed from the concession of the rich, not from
the grasping of the poor. Let us begin by habitual imparting. Let us understand that the equitable rule is, that no one
should take more than his share, let him be ever so rich. Let me feel that I am to be a lover. I am to see to it that the
world is the better for me, and to find my reward in the act. Love would put a new face on this weary old world in which
we dwell as pagans and enemies too long, and it would warm the heart to see how fast the vain diplomacy of statesmen,
the impotence of armies, and navies, and lines of defence, would be superseded by this unarmed child. Love will creep
where it cannot go, will accomplish that by imperceptible methods, – being its own lever, fulcrum, and power, – which
force could never achieve. Have you not seen in the woods, in a late autumn morning, a poor fungus or mushroom, – a
plant without any solidity, nay, that seemed nothing but a soft mush or jelly, – by its constant, total, and inconceivably
gentle pushing, manage to break its way up through the frosty ground, and actually to lift a hard crust on its head? It is
the symbol of the power of kindness. The virtue of this principle in human society in application to great interests is
obsolete and forgotten. Once or twice in history it has been tried in illustrious instances, with signal success. This great,
overgrown, dead Christendom of ours still keeps alive at least the name of a lover of mankind. But one day all men will be
lovers; and every calamity will be dissolved in the universal sunshine.

Will you suffer me to add one trait more to this portrait of man the reformer? The mediator between the spiritual and the
actual world should have a great prospective prudence. An Arabian poet describes his hero by saying,

"Sunshine was he
In the winter day;
And in the midsummer
Coolness and shade."

He who would help himself and others, should not be a subject of irregular and interrupted impulses of virtue, but a
continent, persisting, immovable person, – such as we have seen a few scattered up and down in time for the blessing of
the world; men who have in the gravity of their nature a quality which answers to the fly-wheel in a mill, which distributes
the motion equably over all the wheels, and hinders it from falling unequally and suddenly in destructive shocks. It is
better that joy should be spread over all the day in the form of strength, than that it should be concentrated into ecstasies,
full of danger and followed by reactions. There is a sublime prudence, which is the very highest that we know of man,
which, believing in a vast future, – sure of more to come than is yet seen, – postpones always the present hour to the whole
life; postpones talent to genius, and special results to character. As the merchant gladly takes money from his income to
add to his capital, so is the great man very willing to lose particular powers and talents, so that he gain in the elevation of
his life. The opening of the spiritual senses disposes men ever to greater sacrifices, to leave their signal talents, their best
means and skill of procuring a present success, their power and their fame, – to cast all things behind, in the insatiable
thirst for divine communications. A purer fame, a greater power rewards the sacrifice. It is the conversion of our harvest
into seed. As the farmer casts into the ground the finest ears of his grain, the time will come when we too shall hold
nothing back, but shall eagerly convert more than we now possess into means and powers, when we shall be willing to sow
the sun and the moon for seeds.