Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
to secure government by contrivance.” But he does not push his “wise
man” theory to the patriarchal absolutism of Carlyle; with Channing he
postulates an ethical sovereignty above the instrument. “Absolute right
is the first governor; or, every government is an impure theocracy.”
The doctrine of good-will establishes government in “moral identity”;
it “separates the individual from all party, and unites him at the
same time to the race”; and in so doing it accepts the sovereignty of
the ethical absolute. This major conception of Channing’s Emerson took
over and made his own. He is explicit in his assertion of the need of a
moral interpretation of the doctrine of natural rights. The doctrine of
an ethical sovereignty, he asserts,
... promises a recognition of higher rights than those of personal
freedom, or the security of property. A man has a right to be
employed, to be trusted, to be loved, to be revered. The power of
love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried.... There will
always be a government of force where men are selfish; and when
they are pure enough to abjure the code of force they will be wise
enough to see how these public ends of the post-office, of the
highway, of commerce and the exchange of property, of museums and
libraries, of institutions of art and science can be answered.
Every man’s nature is a sufficient advertisement to him of the
character of his fellows. My right and my wrong is their right
and their wrong. Whilst I do what is fit for men, and abstain
from what is unfit, my neighbor and I shall often agree in our
means, and work together for a time to one end. But whenever I
find my dominion over myself not sufficient for me, and undertake
the direction of him also, I overstep the truth, and come into
false relations to him. I may have so much more skill or strength
than he that he cannot express adequately his sense of wrong,
but it is a lie, and hurts like a lie both him and me. Love and
nature cannot maintain the assumption; it must be executed by a
practical lie, namely by force. This undertaking for another is the
blunder which stands in colossal ugliness in the governments of
the world.... For any laws but those which men make for themselves
are laughable.... This is the history of government,--one man does
something which is to bind another.... Hence the less government
we have the better,--the fewer laws, and the less confided power.
The antidote to this abuse of formal government is the influence of
private character, the growth of the individual ... the appearance
of the wise man; of whom the existing government, is, it must be
owned, but a shabby imitation.... To educate the wise man the State
exists, and with the appearance of the wise man the State expires.
The appearance of character makes the State unnecessary. The wise
man is the State. (_Essay on Politics._)
Thus in transcendental fashion does Emerson range himself on the side
of Jefferson, in opposition to a coercive sovereignty. A strong and
energetic government he feared as an efficient instrument of tyranny;
and of the several contrivancies by which it enforced its will, he
considered the police power the stupidest. As a sensible man he bore
with the state; he would pay his taxes; he would not strain at gnats;
but as a free man he would not suffer the state to coerce him; he would
destroy it first. There is a passage in his journal, written at the
time of the declaration of war against Mexico--when Alcott and Thoreau
refused to pay their taxes--that states his position with whimsical
directness:
The State is a poor, good beast who means the best: it means
friendly. A poor cow who does well by you,--do not grudge it its
hay. It cannot eat bread, as you can; let it have without grudge
a little grass for its four stomachs. It will not stint to yield
you milk from its teat. You, who are a man walking cleanly on two
feet, will not pick a quarrel with a poor cow. Take this handful
of clover and welcome. But if you go to hook me when I walk in the
fields, then, poor cow, I will cut your throat. (_Journals_, Vol.
VII, p. 220.)
With equal emphasis he rejected the economic interpretation of
politics. As a child of the romantic revolution he understood quite
clearly how the waves of humanitarian aspiration broke on the reefs
of property rights, how economic forces were in league against the
ideal republic. There could be no true democracy till this matter of
economics was put in subordination to higher values. Both the political
parties, the respectable Whigs and the voluble Democrats, he was
convinced, were debauched by it; the one served property openly, the
other secretly. “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.” Emerson did not deny the fact of
the universal appeal of economics. He could not, of course, accept the
theory of economic determinism; but he was convinced that the whole
matter must be probed deeply:
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.... It would
go deep into ethics and touch all the relations of men. (_The
Present Age._)
Pending such exploration it was clear to Emerson that the
Federalist-Whig theory of a stake-in-society, or rulership by persons
of principle and property, was wholly vicious:
The theory of politics which has possessed the minds of men, and
which they have expressed the best they could in their laws and
in their revolutions, considers persons and property as the two
objects for whose protection government exists. Of persons, all
have equal rights, in virtue of being identical in nature. This
interest of course with its whole power demands a democracy. Whilst
the rights of all as persons are equal, in virtue of their access
to reason, their rights in property are very unequal.... Personal
rights, universally the same, demand a government framed on the
ratio of the census; property demands a government framed on the
ratio of owners and owning.... That principle no longer looks
so self-evident as it appeared in former times, partly because
doubts have arisen whether too much weight had not been allowed
in laws to property, and such a structure given to our usages as
allowed the rich to encroach upon the poor, and keep them poor;
but mainly because there is an instinctive sense, however obscure
and yet inarticulate, that the whole constitution of property, on
its present tenures, is injurious, and its influence on persons
deteriorating and degrading; that property will always follow
persons; that the highest end of government is the culture of men.
(_Essay on Politics._)
In such suggestions as he offered touching the form of the ideal
republic, where “every child that is born must have a just chance
for his bread,” Emerson reveals a pronounced bias in favor of
the Physiocratic theory of society. He was at one with Jefferson
in preferring an agrarian to an industrial order. Manchester
economics--the doctrine of the economic man, of the iron law of wages,
and other obscenities of the school--he quite frankly loathed. He did
not, he said, “look with sour aspect at the industrious manufacturing
village, or mart of commerce”; but he would not glorify the machine,
nor reduce man to a factory hand. He questioned the sufficiency or
finality of the division of labor. There is more than a suggestion of
William Morris in the doctrine elaborated in _Man the Reformer_; that
the industrial revolution with its factory system, must be judged in
the light of its effect upon the workingman, that the true function of
work must be explored and every man ply his tool to his own good. The
suggestion that “a man should have a farm or mechanical craft for his
culture,” was an implicit denial of industrialism in the days of its
first triumphs--a denial that Morris would have indorsed.
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 advantages of riches
remains with him who produces them, not with the heir.
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.... 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
secret of labor, and who by real cunning extorts from nature its
sceptre. (_Man the Reformer_.)
In all this--in the doctrine of the minimized state, of the sacred
rights of the individual, of the wholesomeness of an agricultural life;
in his concern for social justice and his tenderness for the poor and
exploited among men--Emerson proved himself a child of the romantic
eighteenth century, who by his own transcendental path had come upon
the Utopia that an earlier generation had dreamed of, and which he
sketched in the lovely poem prefacing the _Essay on Politics_. Much of
Emerson is compressed in these lines:
Fear, Craft, and Avarice,
Cannot rear a State.
Out of dust to build
What is more than dust....
When the Muses nine
With the Virtues meet,
Find to their design
An Atlantic seat,
By green orchard boughs
Fended from the heat,
Where the statesman ploughs
Furrow for the wheat;
When the Church is social worth,
When the state-house is the hearth,
Then the perfect State is come,
The republican at home.
The contrast between such Utopian conceptions and the realities of
America in the forties was calculated to edge the critical judgment
with a certain asperity. The older agrarian simplicity of New England
was being submerged by the industrial revolution, and in the midst
of the change Emerson quietly pronounced judgment upon the new idols
of his generation, upon State Street and Beacon Street, upon Webster
and Clay and Douglas, upon Everett and Choate, upon black slavery and
white, upon the Mexican War and the Fugitive Slave Bill, upon the
stolid poor and the callous rich. His judgment was severe but it was
never unjust. His later journals are a rich storehouse of critical
comment, keen, illuminating, disastrous in its analysis of all cant
and humbug. At times--in his comment on Webster, in his hatred of
State Street, in his criticism of the common materialism--he is almost
savage; at other times he is consumed with a vast sympathy for the
long-suffering, exploited mass of the people. “Alas, for the majority,”
he exclaimed, “that old, inevitable dupe and victim. What a dreary
Iliad of woes it goes wailing and mad withal. Some dog of a Cleon
or Robespierre or Douglas is always riding it to ruin” (_Journals_,