led
by their name, but will be his own man, and in his turn the founder of a
sect. The arts and inventions of each period are only its costume and
do not invigorate men. The harm of the improved machinery may compensate
its good. Hudson and Behring accomplished so much in their fishing-boats
as to astonish Parry and Franklin, whose equipment exhausted the
resources of science and art. Galileo, with an opera-glass, discovered a
more splendid series of celestial phenomena than any one since. Columbus
found the New World in an undecked boat. It is curious to see the
periodical disuse and perishing of means and machinery which were
introduced with loud laudation a few years or centuries before. The
great genius returns to essential man. We reckoned the improvements of
the art of war among the triumphs of science, and yet Napoleon conquered
Europe by the bivouac, which consisted of falling back on naked valor
and disencumbering it of all aids. The Emperor held it impossible to
make a perfect army, says Las Cases, "without abolishing our arms,
magazines, commissaries and carriages, until, in imitation of the Roman
custom, the soldier should receive his supply of corn, grind it in his
hand-mill, and bake his bread himself."

Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is
composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley
to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a
nation to-day, next year die, and their experience with them.

And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments
which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. Men have looked away
from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the
religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and
they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults
on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has,
and not by what each is. But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his
property, out of new respect for his nature. Especially he hates what
he has if he see that it is accidental,--came to him by inheritance, or
gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not having; it does not belong
to him, has no root in him and merely lies there because no revolution
or no robber takes it away. But that which a man is, does always by
necessity acquire, and what the man acquires is living property, which
does not wait the beck of rulers, or