Apprentices' Association in Boston in January, 1841, Emerson
described in the clearest manner the approaching strife between laborers
and employers, between poor and rich, and pointed out the cause of this
strife in the selfishness, unkindness, and mutual distrust which ran
through the community. He also described, with perfect precision, the
only ultimate remedy,--namely, the sentiment of love. "Love would put a
new face on this weary old world in which we dwell as pagans and enemies
too long.... The virtue of this principle in human society in
application to great interests is obsolete and forgotten. But one day
all men will be lovers; and every calamity will be dissolved in the
universal sunshine." It is more than sixty years since those words were
uttered, and in those years society has had large experience of
industrial and social strife, of its causes and consequences, and of
many attempts to remedy or soften it; but all this experience only goes
to show that there is but one remedy for these ills. It is to be found
in kindness, good fellowship, and the affections. In Emerson's words,
"We must be lovers, and at once the impossible becomes possible." The
world will wait long for this remedy, but there is no other.

Like every real seer and prophet whose testimony is recorded, Emerson
had intense sympathy with the poor, laborious, dumb masses of mankind,
and being a wide reader in history and biography, he early arrived at
the conviction that history needed to be written in a new manner. It was
long before Green's History of the English People that Emerson wrote:
"Hence it happens that the whole interest of history lies in the
fortunes of the poor." In recent years this view of history has come to
prevail, and we are given the stories of institutions, industries,
commerce, crafts, arts, and beliefs, instead of the stories of dynasties
and wars. For Emerson it is always feats of liberty and wit which make
epochs of history. Commerce is civilizing because "the power which the
sea requires in the sailor makes a man of him very fast." The invention
of a house, safe against wild animals, frost, and heat, gives play to
the finer faculties, and introduces art, manners, and social delights.
The discovery of the post office is a fine metre of civilization. The
sea-going steamer marks an epoch; the subjection of electricity to take
messages and turn wheels marks another. But, after all, the vital
stages of human progress are