POLITICS This essay was based on a lecture in the Boston course of 1839-40 on "The Present Age." The lecture on "Politics" followed "Literature" and preceded "Reforms" and "Religion." Much new matter was added in the essay. Some passages that were omitted it seemed well to give in these notes. In this essay one sees Emerson fearlessly apply his doctrine of the Universal Mind, or the common sense of man, to politics, and find therein good hope for democracy. And his faith in evolution encourages a fearless optimism when at last in the nineteenth Christian century he has found one man it does not appear whether himself or another whom no weight of adverse experience will make it for a moment impossible that thousands of human beings might exercise towards each other the grandest and simplest sentiments, as well as a knot of friends, or a pair of lovers." "to The motto is an example of the earlier poems of Emerson's second period, when, perhaps influenced by the Bardic fragments, he felt that the strength of the thought would be lost in too much attention to melodious expression. His " Merlin " says of the bard: He shall not his brain encumber With the coil of rhythm and number, For his rhyme. With severe condensation, in the twenty-six short lines, none too melodious, of the motto, we have Merlin from old Cymrian forests bearing witness, and the Man of Destiny of the early nineteenth century proving by his overthrow, that like begets only like. The precedent of the mystic building of Thebes to the god-inspired harping of Amphion is cited to show that the divine must enter into all that shall have strength. Then the Muses from Helicon and the personified virtues from Europe of the Renaissance cross the Atlantic to find, in a country where a Lincoln may follow the example of Cincinnatus, a promise of a better republic than that of Plato. Page 199, note 1. In those days of eager plans for social reforms, and gallant forlorn-hope attacks on slavery, Mr. Emerson had steadily to keep before his eyes, and present to others, that the larger included the less, and that one must not spend all one's energy on the transient. Page 200, note 1. This simile of ropes to be twisted out of sand came from the old treatises on the black arts. Such an attempt is described in Scott's ballad "Lord Soulis.” Page 200, note 2. The late Professor James B. Thayer, of the Harvard Law School, wrote in 1876 to Mr. Emerson's daughter: "I was almost startled yesterday in our Law Library on opening an English treatise on The Law of Carriers,' by J. H. Balfour Browne (1873), to see this on the title-page, and Mr. Emerson's name under it: Our statute is a currency,' etc., giving the whole passage. In the original lecture this passage occurs: "Out of a thousand errors, oppositions, compromises, springs ever the actual statute-book which regulates to-day the economy of the Commonwealth." Page 201, note 1. He lived to see the apparent fulfilment of these words in the issue of the War of the Rebellion. Page 205, note 1. He quotes often the Latin proverb of which I cannot learn the source, Res nolunt diu male administrari. Page 205, note 2. This paragraph from the lecture was omitted here : "The philosopher, who is never to stop at the outside or appearance of things, will find more to justify his faith in the harmony of politics with the constitution of man, than the mere statute-book can furnish him. There is more history to a nation than can be gathered from its code. Its code is only the high-water mark showing how high the last tide rose, but at this moment perhaps the waters rise higher still, only they have not yet notched their place by a line of pebbles, shells and seaweed. Observe that the law is always the last and never the first step. One person, a few persons, an increasing minority do the thing; defend it; irresistibly urge it; until finally, against all reluctance, roaring opposition, it becomes the law of the land. The thing goes before, the form comes after. The elements of power, namely, persons and property, must and will have their just sway." - ... Page 206, note 1. "Away with this hurrah of masses. In old Egypt it was established law that the vote of a prophet be reckoned equal to a hundred hands. . . . Pairing off! As if one man who votes wrong, going away, could excuse you, who mean to vote right, for going away; or as if your presence did not tell in more ways than in your vote. Suppose the three hundred heroes at Thermopyla had paired off with three hundred Persians. Would it have been all the same to Greece and to history?” "Considerations by the Way," Conduct of Life. Page 207, note 1. From this point the lecture ended differently, as given below. "It seems to follow from these doctrines that nothing is less important than the laws or forms of government. Power belongs to persons and to property. Property is merely the obedience of nature to human labor and follows of course the moral quality of the persons who create and hold it. With the progress of any society, with the cultivation of individuals, the existing forms become every day of less consequence., Every addition of good sense that a citizen acquires destroys so much of his opposition to the laws of nature and the wellbeing of society, and of course brings the power of his property on the side of justice. Knowledge transfers the censorship from the State House to the reason of every citizen, and compels every man to mount guard over himself, and puts shame and remorse for sergeants and maces. And we find in all times and countries every great man does, in all his nature, point at and imply the existence and well-being of all the orders and institutions of a state. He is full of reverence. He is by inclination (how far soever in position) the defender of the grammar-school, the almshouse, the holy day, the church, the priest, the judge, the legislator, the executive arm. Throughout his being is he loyal, even when by circumstance arrayed in opposition to the actual order of things. Such was Socrates, St. Paul, Luther, Milton, Burke. "The education of every man is bringing him ever to post-\ pone his private to the universal good, to comport himself, that is, in his proper person, as a state, and of course whilst the whole community around him are doing the like, the persons who hold public offices become mere clerks of business, in no sense the sovereigns of the people. "It were very much to be wished that these laws drawn from the nature of things could become a part of the popular philosophy, that at least all endeavors for the reform of education or the reform of political opinion might be made where only they can have any avail, in the speculative views of the individual, for it was justly said by Bacon that the spec ш ulative opinions of men in general between the age of thirty and forty were the only sure source of political prophecy. The philosophy of property, if explored in its foundations, would open new mines of practical wisdom, which would in the event change the face of the world; would destroy the whole magazine of dissimulation, for so many ages reckoned the Capital art of Government. It would purge that rottenness which has defamed the whole Science until politic has come to mean cunning; would show the pretenders in that science that they were their own dupes; would show that the cunningest man cannot cheat nature or do any wrong without suffering the same. It would go deep into ethics and touch all the relations of man. It would teach the subtle an and inextricable compensation that attaches to property. Everything God hath made hath two faces. Every cent in a dollar covers its worth, and also covers its evil. The man who covets the wealth of London should know that whilst each pound and penny represents so much commodity, so much corn and wine and cloth, of necessity it also represents so much mould or sourness and moth as belongs to these commodities: if so much property, then so much risk; if so much power, then so much danger; if so much revenue, then so much tax. When his honest labor and enterprise attract to him a great estate, then his exertions stand over against his gains to make him whole. But could his wish without his honest labor transfer out of another's vaults a million pounds sterling into his own chest, so would also, against his wish, just so massive an ill will and fear concentrate its black rays on him in darkness that might be felt. All property must and will pay its tax. If it come not by fair means, then it comes by foul. The wise man who sees the unerring compensations which worked themselves out in the world, will pay the state its full dividend on his estate, if not for love of right, then for fear of harm. |