of scrutiny and dissent broke out in every direction. In
almost every relation men and women asked themselves by what right
Conformity levied its tax, and whether they were not false to their own
consciences in paying it. 'What a fertility of projects for the
salvation of the world! One apostle thought that all men should go to
farming; and another thought that no man should buy or sell--that use of
money was the cardinal evil; another thought the mischief was in our
diet--that we eat and drink damnation. These made unleavened bread, and
were foes to the death to fermentation. Others attacked the system of
agriculture, the use of animal manures in farming, and the tyranny of
man over brute instinct. These abuses polluted his food. The ox must be
taken from the plough, and the horse from the cart; the hundred acres of
the farm must be spaded, and the man must walk wherever boats and
locomotives will not carry him.... 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._ Society gains
nothing whilst