 
        THE CONSERVATIVE
 
        _A Lecture delivered at the Masonic Temple,
        Boston, December 9, 1841_

        The two parties which divide the state, the party of
Conservatism and that od have disputed the possession of the world
ever since it was made.  This quarrel is the subject of civil
history.  The conservative party established the reverend hierarchies
and monarchies of the most ancient world.  The battle of patrician
and plebeian, of parent state and colony, of old usage and
accommodation to new facts, of the rich and the poor, reappears in
all countries and times.  The war rages not only in battle-fields, in
national councils, and ecclesiastical synods, but agitates every
man's bosom with opposing advantages every hour.  On rolls the old
world meantime, and now one, now the other gets the day, and still
the fight renews itself as if for the first time, under new names and
hot personalities.

        Such an irreconcilable antagonism, of course, must have a
correspondent depth of seat in the human constitution.  It is the
opposition of Past and Future, of Memory and Hope, of the
Understanding and the Reason.  It is the primal antagonism, the
appearance in trifles of the two poles of nature.

        There is a fragment of old fable which seems somehow to have
been dropped from the current mythologies, which may deserve
attention, as it appears to relate to this subject.

        Saturn grew weary of sitting alone, or with none but the great
Uranus or Heaven beholding him, and he created an oyster.  Then he
would act again, but he made nothing more, but went on creating the
race of oysters.  Then Uranus cried, `a new work, O Saturn! the old
is not good again.'

        Saturn replied.  `I fear.  There is not only the alternative of
making and not making, but also of unmaking.  Seest thou the great
sea, how it ebbs and flows? so is it with me; my power ebbs; and if I
put forth my hands, I shall not do, but undo.  Therefore I do what I
have done; I hold what I have got; and so I resist Night and Chaos.'

        `O Saturn,' replied Uranus, `thou canst not hold thine own, but
by making more.  Thy oysters are barnacles and cockles, and with the
next flowing of the tide, they will be pebbles and sea-foam.'

        `I see,' rejoins Saturn, `thou art in league with Night, thou
art become an evil eye; thou spakest from love; now thy words smite
me with hatred.  I appeal to Fate, must there not be rest?' -- `I
appeal to Fate also,' said Uranus, `must there not be motion?' -- But
Saturn was silent, and went on making oysters for a thousand years.

        After that, the word of Uranus came into his mind like a ray of
the sun, and he made Jupiter; and then he feared again; and nature
froze, the things that were made went backward, and, to save the
world, Jupiter slew his father Saturn.

        This may stand for the earliest account of a conversation on
politics between a Conservative and a Radical, which has come down to
us.  It is ever thus.  It is the counteraction of the centripetal and
the centrifugal forces.  Innovation is the salient energy;
Conservatism the pause on the last movement.  `That which is was made
by God,' saith Conservatism.  `He is leaving that, he is entering
this other;' rejoins Innovation.

        There is always a certain meanness in the argument of
conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact.  It
affirms because it holds.  Its fingers clutch the fact, and it will
not open its eyes to see a better fact.  The castle, which
conservatism is set to defend, is the actual state of things, good
and bad.  The project of innovation is the best possible state of
things.  Of course, conservatism always has the worst of the
argument, is always apologizing, pleading a necessity, pleading that
to change would be to deteriorate; it must saddle itself with the
mountainous load of the violence and vice of society, must deny the
possibility of good, deny ideas, and suspect and stone the prophet;
whilst innovation is always in the right, triumphant, attacking, and
sure of final success.  Conservatism stands on man's confessed
limitations; reform on his indisputable infinitude; conservatism on
circumstance; liberalism on power; one goes to make an adroit member
of the social frame; the other to postpone all things to the man
himself; conservatism is debonnair and social; reform is individual
and imperious.  We are reformers in spring and summer; in autumn and
winter, we stand by the old; reformers in the morning, conservers at
night.  Reform is affirmative, conservatism negative; conservatism
goes for comfort, reform for truth.  Conservatism is more candid to
behold another's worth; reform more disposed to maintain and increase
its own.  Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no
invention; it is all memory.  Reform has no gratitude, no prudence,
no husbandry.  It makes a great difference to your figure and to your
thought, whether your foot is advancing or receding.  Conservatism
never puts the foot forward; in the hour when it does that, it is not
establishment, but reform.  Conservatism tends to universal seeming
and treachery, believes in a negative fate; believes that men's
temper governs them; that for me, it avails not to trust in
principles; they will fail me; I must bend a little; it distrusts
nature; it thinks there is a general law without a particular
application, -- law for all that does not include any one.  Reform in
its antagonism inclines to asinine resistance, to kick with hoofs; it
runs to egotism and bloated self-conceit; it runs to a bodiless
pretension, to unnatural refining and elevation, which ends in
hypocrisy and sensual reaction.

        And so whilst we do not go beyond general statements, it may be
safely affirmed of these two metaphysical antagonists, that each is a
good half, but an impossible whole.  Each exposes the abuses of the
other, but in a true society, in a true man, both must combine.
Nature does not give the crown of its approbation, namely, beauty, to
any action or emblem or actor, but to one which combines both these
elements; not to the rock which resists the waves from age to age,
nor to the wave which lashes incessantly the rock, but the superior
beauty is with the oak which stands with its hundred arms against the
storms of a century, and grows every year like a sapling; or the
river which ever flowing, yet is found in the same bed from age to
age; or, greatest of all, the man who has subsisted for years amid
the changes of nature, yet has distanced himself, so that when you
remember what he was, and see what he is, you say, what strides! what
a disparity is here!

        Throughout nature the past combines in every creature with the
present.  Each of the convolutions of the sea-shell, each node and
spine marks one year of the fish's life, what was the mouth of the
shell for one season, with the addition of new matter by the growth
of the animal, becoming an ornamental node.  The leaves and a shell
of soft wood are all that the vegetation of this summer has made, but
the solid columnar stem, which lifts that bank of foliage into the
air to draw the eye and to cool us with its shade, is the gift and
legacy of dead and buried years.

        In nature, each of these elements being always present, each
theory has a natural support.  As we take our stand on Necessity, or
on Ethics, shall we go for the conservative, or for the reformer.  If
we read the world historically, we shall say, Of all the ages, the
present hour and circumstance is the cumulative result; this is the
best throw of the dice of nature that has yet been, or that is yet
possible.  If we see it from the side of Will, or the Moral
Sentiment, we shall accuse the Past and the Present, and require the
impossible of the Future.

        But although this bifold fact lies thus united in real nature,
and so united that no man can continue to exist in whom both these
elements do not work, yet men are not philosophers, but are rather
very foolish children, who, by reason of their partiality, see
everything in the most absurd manner, and are the victims at all
times of the nearest object.  There is even no philosopher who is a
philosopher at all times.  Our experience, our perception is
conditioned by the need to acquire in parts and in succession, that
is, with every truth a certain falsehood.  As this is the invariable
method of our training, we must give it allowance, and suffer men to
learn as they have done for six millenniums, a word at a time, to
pair off into insane parties, and learn the amount of truth each
knows, by the denial of an equal amount of truth.  For the present,
then, to come at what sum is attainable to us, we must even hear the
parties plead as parties.

        That which is best about conservatism, that which, though it
cannot be expressed in detail, inspires reverence in all, is the
Inevitable.  There is the question not only, what the conservative
says for himself? but, why must he say it?  What insurmountable fact
binds him to that side?  Here is the fact which men call Fate, and
fate in dread degrees, fate behind fate, not to be disposed of by the
consideration that the Conscience commands this or that, but
necessitating the question, whether the faculties of man will play
him true in resisting the facts of universal experience?  For
although the commands of the Conscience are _essentially_ absolute,
they are _historically_ limitary.  Wisdom does not seek a literal
rectitude, but an useful, that is, a conditioned one, such a one as
the faculties of man and the constitution of things will warrant.
The reformer, the partisan loses himself in driving to the utmost
some specialty of right conduct, until his own nature and all nature
resist him; but Wisdom attempts nothing enormous and disproportioned
to its powers, nothing which it cannot perform or nearly perform.  We
have all a certain intellection or presentiment of reform existing in
the mind, which does not yet descend into the character, and those
who throw themselves blindly on this lose themselves.  Whatever they
attempt in that direction, fails, and reacts suicidally on the actor
himself.  This is the penalty of having transcended nature.  For the
existing world is not a dream, and cannot with impunity be treated as
a dream; neither is it a disease; but it is the ground on which you
stand, it is the mother of whom you were born.  Reform converses with
possibilities, perchance with impossibilities; but here is sacred
fact.  This also was true, or it could not be: it had life in it, or
it could not have existed; it has life in it, or it could not
continue.  Your schemes may be feasible, or may not be, but this has
the endorsement of nature and a long friendship and cohabitation with
the powers of nature.  This will stand until a better cast of the
dice is made.  The contest between the Future and the Past is one
between Divinity entering, and Divinity departing.  You are welcome
to try your experiments, and, if you can, to displace the actual
order by that ideal republic you announce, for nothing but God will
expel God.  But plainly the burden of proof must lie with the
projector.  We hold to this, until you can demonstrate something
better.

        The system of property and law goes back for its origin to
barbarous and sacred times; it is the fruit of the same mysterious
cause as the mineral or animal world.  There is a natural sentiment
and prepossession in favor of age, of ancestors, of barbarous and
aboriginal usages, which is a homage to the element of necessity and
divinity which is in them.  The respect for the old names of places,
of mountains, and streams, is universal.  The Indian and barbarous
name can never be supplanted without loss.  The ancients tell us that
the gods loved the Ethiopians for their stable customs; and the
Egyptians and Chaldeans, whose origin could not be explored, passed
among the junior tribes of Greece and Italy for sacred nations.

        Moreover, so deep is the foundation of the existing social
system, that it leaves no one out of it.  We may be partial, but Fate
is not.  All men have their root in it.  You who quarrel with the
arrangements of society, and are willing to embroil all, and risk the
indisputable good that exists, for the chance of better, live, move,
and have your being in this, and your deeds contradict your words
every day.  For as you cannot jump from the ground without using the
resistance of the ground, nor put out the boat to sea, without
shoving from the shore, nor attain liberty without rejecting
obligation, so you are under the necessity of using the Actual order
of things, in order to disuse it; to live by it, whilst you wish to
take away its life.  The past has baked your loaf, and in the
strength of its bread you would break up the oven.  But you are
betrayed by your own nature.  You also are conservatives.  However
men please to style themselves, I see no other than a conservative
party.  You are not only identical with us in your needs, but also in
your methods and aims.  You quarrel with my conservatism, but it is
to build up one of your own; it will have a new beginning, but the
same course and end, the same trials, the same passions; among the
lovers of the new I observe that there is a jealousy of the newest,
and that the seceder from the seceder is as damnable as the pope
himself.

        On these and the like grounds of general statement,
conservatism plants itself without danger of being displaced.
Especially before this _personal_ appeal, the innovator must confess
his weakness, must confess that no man is to be found good enough to
be entitled to stand champion for the principle.  But when this great
tendency comes to practical encounters, and is challenged by young
men, to whom it is no abstraction, but a fact of hunger, distress,
and exclusion from opportunities, it must needs seem injurious.  The
youth, of course, is an innovator by the fact of his birth.  There he
stands, newly born on the planet, a universal beggar, with all the
reason of things, one would say, on his side.  In his first
consideration how to feed, clothe, and warm himself, he is met by
warnings on every hand, that this thing and that thing have owners,
and he must go elsewhere.  Then he says; If I am born into the earth,
where is my part? have the goodness, gentlemen of this world, to show
me my wood-lot, where I may fell my wood, my field where to plant my
corn, my pleasant ground where to build my cabin.

        `Touch any wood, or field, or house-lot, on your peril,' cry
all the gentlemen of this world; `but you may come and work in ours,
for us, and we will give you a piece of bread.'

        And what is that peril?

        Knives and muskets, if we meet you in the act; imprisonment, if
we find you afterward.

        And by what authority, kind gentlemen?

        By our law.

        And your law, -- is it just?

        As just for you as it was for us.  We wrought for others under
this law, and got our lands so.

        I repeat the question, Is your law just?

        Not quite just, but necessary.  Moreover, it is juster now than
it was when we were born; we have made it milder and more equal.

        I will none of your law, returns the youth; it encumbers me.  I
cannot understand, or so much as spare time to read that needless
library of your laws.  Nature has sufficiently provided me with
rewards and sharp penalties, to bind me not to transgress.  Like the
Persian noble of old, I ask "that I may neither command nor obey." I
do not wish to enter into your complex social system.  I shall serve
those whom I can, and they who can will serve me.  I shall seek those
whom I love, and shun those whom I love not, and what more can all
your laws render me?

        With equal earnestness and good faith, replies to this
plaintiff an upholder of the establishment, a man of many virtues:

        Your opposition is feather-brained and overfine.  Young man, I
have no skill to talk with you, but look at me; I have risen early
and sat late, and toiled honestly, and painfully for very many years.
I never dreamed about methods; I laid my bones to, and drudged for
the good I possess; it was not got by fraud, nor by luck, but by
work, and you must show me a warrant like these stubborn facts in
your own fidelity and labor, before I suffer you, on the faith of a
few fine words, to ride into my estate, and claim to scatter it as
your own.

        Now you touch the heart of the matter, replies the reformer.
To that fidelity and labor, I pay homage.  I am unworthy to arraign
your manner of living, until I too have been tried.  But I should be
more unworthy, if I did not tell you why I cannot walk in your steps.
I find this vast network, which you call property, extended over the
whole planet.  I cannot occupy the bleakest crag of the White Hills
or the Alleghany Range, but some man or corporation steps up to me to
show me that it is his.  Now, though I am very peaceable, and on my
private account could well enough die, since it appears there was
some mistake in my creation, and that I have been _mis_sent to this
earth, where all the seats were already taken, -- yet I feel called
upon in behalf of rational nature, which I represent, to declare to
you my opinion, that, if the Earth is yours, so also is it mine.  All
your aggregate existences are less to me a fact than is my own; as I
am born to the earth, so the Earth is given to me, what I want of it
to till and to plant; nor could I, without pusillanimity, omit to
claim so much.  I must not only have a name to live, I must live.  My
genius leads me to build a different manner of life from any of
yours.  I cannot then spare you the whole world.  I love you better.
I must tell you the truth practically; and take that which you call
yours.  It is God's world and mine; yours as much as you want, mine
as much as I want.  Besides, I know your ways; I know the symptoms of
the disease.  To the end of your power, you will serve this lie which
cheats you.  Your want is a gulf which the possession of the broad
earth would not fill.  Yonder sun in heaven you would pluck down from
shining on the universe, and make him a property and privacy, if you
could; and the moon and the north star you would quickly have
occasion for in your closet and bed-chamber.  What you do not want
for use, you crave for ornament, and what your convenience could
spare, your pride cannot.

        On the other hand, precisely the defence which was set up for
the British Constitution, namely, that with all its admitted defects,
rotten boroughs and monopolies, it worked well, and substantial
justice was somehow done; the wisdom and the worth did get into
parliament, and every interest did by right, or might, or sleight,
get represented; -- the same defence is set up for the existing
institutions.  They are not the best; they are not just; and in
respect to you, personally, O brave young man! they cannot be
justified.  They have, it is most true, left you no acre for your
own, and no law but our law, to the ordaining of which, you were no
party.  But they do answer the end, they are really friendly to the
good; unfriendly to the bad; they second the industrious, and the
kind; they foster genius.  They really have so much flexibility as to
afford your talent and character, on the whole, the same chance of
demonstration and success which they might have, if there was no law
and no property.

        It is trivial and merely superstitious to say that nothing is
given you, no outfit, no exhibition; for in this institution of
_credit_, which is as universal as honesty and promise in the human
countenance, always some neighbor stands ready to be bread and land
and tools and stock to the young adventurer.  And if in any one
respect they have come short, see what ample retribution of good they
have made.  They have lost no time and spared no expense to collect
libraries, museums, galleries, colleges, palaces, hospitals,
observatories, cities.  The ages have not been idle, nor kings slack,
nor the rich niggardly.  Have we not atoned for this small offence
(which we could not help) of leaving you no right in the soil, by
this splendid indemnity of ancestral and national wealth?  Would you
have been born like a gipsy in a hedge, and preferred your freedom on
a heath, and the range of a planet which had no shed or boscage to
cover you from sun and wind, -- to this towered and citied world? to
this world of Rome, and Memphis, and Constantinople, and Vienna, and
Paris, and London, and New York?  For thee Naples, Florence, and
Venice, for thee the fair Mediterranean, the sunny Adriatic; for thee
both Indies smile; for thee the hospitable North opens its heated
palaces under the polar circle; for thee roads have been cut in every
direction across the land, and fleets of floating palaces with every
security for strength, and provision for luxury, swim by sail and by
steam through all the waters of this world.  Every island for thee
has a town; every town a hotel.  Though thou wast born landless, yet
to thy industry and thrift and small condescension to the established
usage, -- scores of servants are swarming in every strange place with
cap and knee to thy command, scores, nay hundreds and thousands, for
thy wardrobe, thy table, thy chamber, thy library, thy leisure; and
every whim is anticipated and served by the best ability of the whole
population of each country.  The king on the throne governs for thee,
and the judge judges; the barrister pleads, the farmer tills, the
joiner hammers, the postman rides.  Is it not exaggerating a trifle
to insist on a formal acknowledgment of your claims, when these
substantial advantages have been secured to you?  Now can your
children be educated, your labor turned to their advantage, and its
fruits secured to them after your death.  It is frivolous to say, you
have no acre, because you have not a mathematically measured piece of
land.  Providence takes care that you shall have a place, that you
are waited for, and come accredited; and, as soon as you put your
gift to use, you shall have acre or acre's worth according to your
exhibition of desert, -- acre, if you need land; -- acre's worth, if
you prefer to draw, or carve, or make shoes, or wheels, to the
tilling of the soil.

        Besides, it might temper your indignation at the supposed wrong
which society has done you, to keep the question before you, how
society got into this predicament?  Who put things on this false
basis?  No single man, but all men.  No man voluntarily and
knowingly; but it is the result of that degree of culture there is in
the planet.  The order of things is as good as the character of the
population permits.  Consider it as the work of a great and
beneficent and progressive necessity, which, from the first pulsation
of the first animal life, up to the present high culture of the best
nations, has advanced thus far.  Thank the rude fostermother though
she has taught you a better wisdom than her own, and has set hopes in
your heart which shall be history in the next ages.  You are yourself
the result of this manner of living, this foul compromise, this
vituperated Sodom.  It nourished you with care and love on its
breast, as it had nourished many a lover of the right, and many a
poet, and prophet, and teacher of men.  Is it so irremediably bad?
Then again, if the mitigations are considered, do not all the
mischiefs virtually vanish?  The form is bad, but see you not how
every personal character reacts on the form, and makes it new?  A
strong person makes the law and custom null before his own will.
Then the principle of love and truth reappears in the strictest
courts of fashion and property.  Under the richest robes, in the
darlings of the selectest circles of European or American
aristocracy, the strong heart will beat with love of mankind, with
impatience of accidental distinctions, with the desire to achieve its
own fate, and make every ornament it wears authentic and real.

        Moreover, as we have already shown that there is no pure
reformer, so it is to be considered that there is no pure
conservative, no man who from the beginning to the end of his life
maintains the defective institutions; but he who sets his face like a
flint against every novelty, when approached in the confidence of
conversation, in the presence of friendly and generous persons, has
also his gracious and relenting motions, and espouses for the time
the cause of man; and even if this be a shortlived emotion, yet the
remembrance of it in private hours mitigates his selfishness and
compliance with custom.

        The Friar Bernard lamented in his cell on Mount Cenis the
crimes of mankind, and rising one morning before day from his bed of
moss and dry leaves, he gnawed his roots and berries, drank of the
spring, and set forth to go to Rome to reform the corruption of
mankind.  On his way he encountered many travellers who greeted him
courteously; and the cabins of the peasants and the castles of the
lords supplied his few wants.  When he came at last to Rome, his
piety and good will easily introduced him to many families of the
rich, and on the first day he saw and talked with gentle mothers with
their babes at their breasts, who told him how much love they bore
their children, and how they were perplexed in their daily walk lest
they should fail in their duty to them.  `What!' he said, `and this
on rich embroidered carpets, on marble floors, with cunning
sculpture, and carved wood, and rich pictures, and piles of books
about you?' -- `Look at our pictures and books,' they said, `and we
will tell you, good Father, how we spent the last evening.  These are
stories of godly children and holy families and romantic sacrifices
made in old or in recent times by great and not mean persons; and
last evening, our family was collected, and our husbands and brothers
discoursed sadly on what we could save and give in the hard times.'
Then came in the men, and they said, `What cheer, brother?  Does thy
convent want gifts?' Then the friar Bernard went home swiftly with
other thoughts than he brought, saying, `This way of life is wrong,
yet these Romans, whom I prayed God to destroy, are lovers, they are
lovers; what can I do?'

        The reformer concedes that these mitigations exist, and that,
if he proposed comfort, he should take sides with the establishment.
Your words are excellent, but they do not tell the whole.
Conservatism is affluent and openhanded, but there is a cunning
juggle in riches.  I observe that they take somewhat for everything
they give.  I look bigger, but am less; I have more clothes, but am
not so warm; more armor, but less courage; more books, but less wit.
What you say of your planted, builded and decorated world, is true
enough, and I gladly avail myself of its convenience; yet I have
remarked that what holds in particular, holds in general, that the
plant Man does not require for his most glorious flowering this pomp
of preparation and convenience, but the thoughts of some beggarly
Homer who strolled, God knows when, in the infancy and barbarism of
the old world; the gravity and sense of some slave Moses who leads
away his fellow slaves from their masters; the contemplation of some
Scythian Anacharsis; the erect, formidable valor of some Dorian
townsmen in the town of Sparta; the vigor of Clovis the Frank, and
Alfred the Saxon, and Alaric the Goth, and Mahomet, Ali, and Omar the
Arabians, Saladin the Curd, and Othman the Turk, sufficed to build
what you call society, on the spot and in the instant when the sound
mind in a sound body appeared.  Rich and fine is your dress, O
conservatism! your horses are of the best blood; your roads are well
cut and well paved; your pantry is full of meats and your cellar of
wines, and a very good state and condition are you for gentlemen and
ladies to live under; but every one of these goods steals away a drop
of my blood.  I want the necessity of supplying my own wants.  All
this costly culture of yours is not necessary.  Greatness does not
need it.  Yonder peasant, who sits neglected there in a corner,
carries a whole revolution of man and nature in his head, which shall
be a sacred history to some future ages.  For man is the end of
nature; nothing so easily organizes itself in every part of the
universe as he; no moss, no lichen is so easily born; and he takes
along with him and puts out from himself the whole apparatus of
society and condition _extempore_, as an army encamps in a desert,
and where all was just now blowing sand, creates a white city in an
hour, a government, a market, a place for feasting, for conversation,
and for love.

        These considerations, urged by those whose characters and whose
fortunes are yet to be formed, must needs command the sympathy of all
reasonable persons.  But beside that charity which should make all
adult persons interested for the youth, and engage them to see that
he has a free field and fair play on his entrance into life, we are
bound to see that the society, of which we compose a part, does not
permit the formation or continuance of views and practices injurious
to the honor and welfare of mankind.  The objection to conservatism,
when embodied in a party, is, that in its love of acts, it hates
principles; it lives in the senses, not in truth; it sacrifices to
despair; it goes for availableness in its candidate, not for worth;
and for expediency in its measures, and not for the right.  Under
pretence of allowing for friction, it makes so many additions and
supplements to the machine of society, that it will play smoothly and
softly, but will no longer grind any grist.

        The conservative party in the universe concedes that the
radical would talk sufficiently to the purpose, if we were still in
the garden of Eden; he legislates for man as he ought to be; his
theory is right, but he makes no allowance for friction; and this
omission makes his whole doctrine false.  The idealist retorts, that
the conservative falls into a far more noxious error in the other
extreme.  The conservative assumes sickness as a necessity, and his
social frame is a hospital, his total legislation is for the present
distress, a universe in slippers and flannels, with bib and papspoon,
swallowing pills and herb-tea.  Sickness gets organized as well as
health, the vice as well as the virtue.  Now that a vicious system of
trade has existed so long, it has stereotyped itself in the human
generation, and misers are born.  And now that sickness has got such
a foot-hold, leprosy has grown cunning, has got into the ballot-box;
the lepers outvote the clean; society has resolved itself into a
Hospital Committee, and all its laws are quarantine.  If any man
resist, and set up a foolish hope he has entertained as good against
the general despair, society frowns on him, shuts him out of her
opportunities, her granaries, her refectories, her water and bread,
and will serve him a sexton's turn.  Conservatism takes as low a view
of every part of human action and passion.  Its religion is just as
bad; a lozenge for the sick; a dolorous tune to beguile the
distemper; mitigations of pain by pillows and anodynes; always
mitigations, never remedies; pardons for sin, funeral honors, --
never self-help, renovation, and virtue.  Its social and political
action has no better aim; to keep out wind and weather, to bring the
day and year about, and make the world last our day; not to sit on
the world and steer it; not to sink the memory of the past in the
glory of a new and more excellent creation; a timid cobbler and
patcher, it degrades whatever it touches.  The cause of education is
urged in this country with the utmost earnestness, -- on what ground?
why on this, that the people have the power, and if they are not
instructed to sympathize with the intelligent, reading, trading, and
governing class, inspired with a taste for the same competitions and
prizes, they will upset the fair pageant of Judicature, and perhaps
lay a hand on the sacred muniments of wealth itself, and new
distribute the land.  Religion is taught in the same spirit.  The
contractors who were building a road out of Baltimore, some years
ago, found the Irish laborers quarrelsome and refractory, to a degree
that embarrassed the agents, and seriously interrupted the progress
of the work.  The corporation were advised to call off the police,
and build a Catholic chapel; which they did; the priest presently
restored order, and the work went on prosperously.  Such hints, be
sure, are too valuable to be lost.  If you do not value the Sabbath,
or other religious institutions, give yourself no concern about
maintaining them.  They have already acquired a market value as
conservators of property; and if priest and church-member should
fail, the chambers of commerce and the presidents of the Banks, the
very innholders and landlords of the county would muster with fury to
their support.

 
        Of course, religion in such hands loses its essence.  Instead
of that reliance, which the soul suggests on the eternity of truth
and duty, men are misled into a reliance on institutions, which, the
moment they cease to be the instantaneous creations of the devout
sentiment, are worthless.  Religion among the low becomes low.  As it
loses its truth, it loses credit with the sagacious.  They detect the
falsehood of the preaching, but when they say so, all good citizens
cry, Hush; do not weaken the state, do not take off the strait jacket
from dangerous persons.  Every honest fellow must keep up the hoax
the best he can; must patronize providence and piety, and wherever he
sees anything that will keep men amused, schools or churches or
poetry, or picture-galleries or music, or what not, he must cry
"Hist-a-boy," and urge the game on.  What a compliment we pay to the
good SPIRIT with our superserviceable zeal!

        But not to balance reasons for and against the establishment
any longer, and if it still be asked in this necessity of partial
organization, which party on the whole has the highest claims on our
sympathy?  I bring it home to the private heart, where all such
questions must have their final arbitrement.  How will every strong
and generous mind choose its ground, -- with the defenders of the
old? or with the seekers of the new?  Which is that state which
promises to edify a great, brave, and beneficent man; to throw him on
his resources, and tax the strength of his character?  On which part
will each of us find himself in the hour of health and of aspiration?

        I understand well the respect of mankind for war, because that
breaks up the Chinese stagnation of society, and demonstrates the
personal merits of all men.  A state of war or anarchy, in which law
has little force, is so far valuable, that it puts every man on
trial.  The man of principle is known as such, and even in the fury
of faction is respected.  In the civil wars of France, Montaigne
alone, among all the French gentry, kept his castle gates unbarred,
and made his personal integrity as good at least as a regiment.  The
man of courage and resources is shown, and the effeminate and base
person.  Those who rise above war, and those who fall below it, it
easily discriminates, as well as those, who, accepting its rude
conditions, keep their own head by their own sword.

 
        But in peace and a commercial state we depend, not as we ought,
on our knowledge and all men's knowledge that we are honest men, but
we cowardly lean on the virtue of others.  For it is always at last
the virtue of some men in the society, which keeps the law in any
reverence and power.  Is there not something shameful that I should
owe my peaceful occupancy of my house and field, not to the knowledge
of my countrymen that I am useful, but to their respect for sundry
other reputable persons, I know not whom, whose joint virtues still
keep the law in good odor?

        It will never make any difference to a hero what the laws are.
His greatness will shine and accomplish itself unto the end, whether
they second him or not.  If he have earned his bread by drudgery, and
in the narrow and crooked ways which were all an evil law had left
him, he will make it at least honorable by his expenditure.  Of the
past he will take no heed; for its wrongs he will not hold himself
responsible: he will say, all the meanness of my progenitors shall
not bereave me of the power to make this hour and company fair and
fortunate.  Whatsoever streams of power and commodity flow to me,
shall of me acquire healing virtue, and become fountains of safety.
Cannot I too descend a Redeemer into nature?  Whosoever hereafter
shall name my name, shall not record a malefactor, but a benefactor
in the earth.  If there be power in good intention, in fidelity, and
in toil, the north wind shall be purer, the stars in heaven shall
glow with a kindlier beam, that I have lived.  I am primarily engaged
to myself to be a public servant of all the gods, to demonstrate to
all men that there is intelligence and good will at the heart of
things, and ever higher and yet higher leadings.  These are my
engagements; how can your law further or hinder me in what I shall do
to men?  On the other hand, these dispositions establish their
relations to me.  Wherever there is worth, I shall be greeted.
Wherever there are men, are the objects of my study and love.  Sooner
or later all men will be my friends, and will testify in all methods
the energy of their regard.  I cannot thank your law for my
protection.  I protect it.  It is not in its power to protect me.  It
is my business to make myself revered.  I depend on my honor, my
labor, and my dispositions, for my place in the affections of
mankind, and not on any conventions or parchments of yours.

        But if I allow myself in derelictions, and become idle and
dissolute, I quickly come to love the protection of a strong law,
because I feel no title in myself to my advantages.  To the
intemperate and covetous person no love flows; to him mankind would
pay no rent, no dividend, if force were once relaxed; nay, if they
could give their verdict, they would say, that his self-indulgence
and his oppression deserved punishment from society, and not that
rich board and lodging he now enjoys.  The law acts then as a screen
of his unworthiness, and makes him worse the longer it protects him.

        In conclusion, to return from this alternation of partial
views, to the high platform of universal and necessary history, it is
a happiness for mankind that innovation has got on so far, and has so
free a field before it.  The boldness of the hope men entertain
transcends all former experience.  It calms and cheers them with the
picture of a simple and equal life of truth and piety.  And this hope
flowered on what tree?  It was not imported from the stock of some
celestial plant, but grew here on the wild crab of conservatism.  It
is much that this old and vituperated system of things has borne so
fair a child.  It predicts that amidst a planet peopled with
conservatives, one Reformer may yet be born.
.
