To adopt this line of objection to Emerson’s deliverances would, however, be unjust. In the first place, Emerson’s points are in themselves true, if understood in a certain high sense; they are true and fruitful. And the right work to be done, at the hour when he appeared, was to affirm them generally and absolutely. Only thus could he break through the hard and fast barrier of narrow, fixed ideas, which he found confronting him, and win an entrance for new ideas. Had he attempted developments which may now strike us as expedient, he would have excited fierce antagonism, and probably effected little or nothing. The time might come for doing other work later, but the work which Emerson did was the right work to be done then. In the second place, strong as was Emerson’s optimism, and unconquerable as was his belief in a good result to emerge from all which he saw going on around him, no misanthropical satirist ever saw shortcomings and absurdities more clearly than he did, or exposed them more courageously. When he sees ‘the meanness,’ as he calls it, ‘of American politics,’ he congratulates Washington on being ‘long already happily dead,’ on being ‘wrapt in his shroud and for ever safe.’ With how firm a touch he delineates the faults of your two great political parties of forty years ago! The Democrats, he says, ‘have not at heart the ends which give to the name of democracy what hope and virtue are in it. The spirit of our American radicalism is destructive and aimless; it is not loving; it has no ulterior and divine ends, but is destructive only out of hatred and selfishness. On the other side, the conservative party, composed of the most moderate, able, and cultivated part of the population, is timid, and merely defensive of property. It vindicates no right, it aspires to no real good, it brands no crime, it proposes no generous policy. From neither party, when in power, has the world any benefit to expect in science, art, or humanity, at all commensurate with the resources of the nation.’ Then with what subtle though kindly irony he follows the gradual withdrawal in New England, in the last half century, of tender consciences from the social organisations,—the bent for experiments such as that of Brook Farm and the like,—follows it in all its ‘dissidence of dissent and Protestantism of the Protestant religion!’ He even loves to rally the New Englander on his philanthropical activity, and to find his beneficence and its institutions a bore! ‘Your miscellaneous popular charities, the education at college of fools, the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many of these now stand, alms to sots, and the thousand-fold relief societies,—though I confess with shame that I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, yet it is a wicked dollar, which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.’ ‘Our Sunday schools and churches and pauper societies are yokes to the neck. We pain ourselves to please nobody. There are natural