... Others assailed particular
vocations.... Others attacked the institution of marriage as the
fountain of social evils.... Who gave me the money with which I bought
my coat? Why should professional labour and that of the counting-house
be paid so disproportionately to the labour of the porter and the
woodsawer? Am I not too protected a person? Is there not a wide
disparity between the lot of me and the lot of thee, my poor brother, my
poor sister?'
One of Emerson's glories is, that while wise enough to discern the peril
and folly of these excesses, he was under no temptation to fall back. It
was giddy work, but he kept his eye on the fixed stars. Certainly
Emerson was not assailed by the stress of mighty and violent events, as
Burke and Wordsworth were in some sense turned into reactionaries by the
calamities of revolution in France. The 'distemper of enthusiasm,' as
Shaftesbury would have called it, took a mild and harmless form in New
England: there the work in hand was not the break-up of a social system,
but only the mental evolution of new ideals, the struggle of an ethical
revival, and the satisfaction of a livelier spirit of scruple. In face
of all delirations, Emerson kept on his way of radiant sanity and
perfect poise. Do not, he warned his enthusiasts, expend all energy on
some accidental evil, and so lose sanity and power of benefit. '_It is
of little moment that one or two or twenty errors of our social system
be corrected, but of much that the man be in his senses.
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