Miscellanies : $b embracing Nature, addresses, and lecturesEmerson, Ralph Waldo
Philosophy
Miscellanies : $b embracing Nature, addresses, and lectures
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
American essays -- 19th century; Philosophy of nature; Transcendentalism (New England)
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?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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