p of the tiger and other leapers and bloody jumpers, the
crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda,--these
are in the system, and our habits are like theirs. You have just
dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in
the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity,--expensive
races,--race living at the expense of race.--Let us not deny it up
and down. Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road to its
end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its huge, mixed
instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in a
clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student in divinity."

Emerson cautions his reader against the danger of the doctrines which he
believed in so fully:--

"They who talk much of destiny, their birth-star, etc., are in a
lower dangerous plane, and invite the evils they fear."

But certainly no physiologist, no cattle-breeder, no Calvinistic
predestinarian could put his view more vigorously than Emerson, who
dearly loves a picturesque statement, has given it in these words,
which have a dash of science, a flash of imagination, and a hint of the
delicate wit that is one of his characteristics:--

"People are born with the moral or with the material bias;--uterine
brothers with this diverging destination: and I suppose, with
high magnifiers, Mr. Fraunhofer or Dr. Carpenter might come to
distinguish in the embryo at the fourth day, this is a whig and that
a free-soiler."

Let us see what Emerson has to say of "Power:"--

"All successful men have agreed in one thing--they were
_causationists_. They believed that things went not by luck, but by
law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that
joins the first and the last of things.

"The key to the age may be this, or that, or the other, as the young
orators describe;--the key to all ages is,--Imbecility; imbecility
in the vast majority of men at all times, and, even in heroes, in
all but certain eminent moments; victims of gravity, custom, and
fear. This gives force to the strong,--that the multitude have no
habit of self-reliance or original action.--

"We say that success is constitutional; depends on a _plus_
condition of mind and body, on power of work, on courage; that is of
main efficacy in carrying on the world, and though rarely found
in the right state