The cholera, the small-pox, have proved as mortal to some tribes as a frost to the crickets, which, having filled the summer with noise, are silencedīy a fall of the temperature of one night.
Our western prairie shakes with fever and ague. The scurvy at sea, the sword of the climate in the west of Africa, at Cayenne, at Panama, at New Orleans, cut off men like a massacre. At Naples three years ago ten thousand persons were crushed in a few minutes. At Lisbon an earthquake killed men like flies. The planet is liable to shocks from comets, perturbations from planets, rendings from earthquake and volcano, alterations of climate, precessions of equinoxes. You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughter-house is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity, expensive races,-race living at the expense of race. The habit of snake and spider, the snap 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. The diseases, the elements, fortune, gravity, lightning, respect no persons. The cold, inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood, benumbs your feet, freezes a man likeĪn apple. We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a woman, but swallows your ship like a grain of dust.
But Nature is no sentimentalist,-does not cosset or pamper us. And now and then an amiable parson, like Jung Stilling or Robert Huntington, believes in a pistareen-Providence, which, whenever the good man wants a dinner, makes that somebody shall knock at his door and leave a half-dollar. The broad ethics of Jesus were quickly narrowed to village theologies, which preach an election or favoritism. Savages cling to a local god of one tribe or town. The great immense mind of Jove is not to be transgressed." The Greek Tragedy expressed the same sense. The Turk, the Arab, the Persian, accepts the foreordained fate:. The Turk, who believes his doom is written on the iron leaf in the moment when he entered the world, rushes on the enemy's sabre with undivided will. The Spartan, embodying his religion in his country, dies before its majesty without a question. Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it. Our America has a bad name for superficialness. Any excess ofĮmphasis on one part would be corrected, and a just balance would be made.īut let us honestly state the facts. If one would study his own time, it must be by this method of taking up in turn each of the leading topics which belong to our scheme of human life, and by firmly stating all that is agreeable to experience on one, and doing the same justice to the opposing facts in the others, the true limitations will appear. The riddle of the age has for each a private solution. We are sure that, though we know not how, necessity does comport with liberty, the individual with the world, my polarity with the spirit of the times. By the same obedience to other thoughts we learn theirs, and then comes some reasonable hope of harmonizing them. What to do? By obeying each thought frankly, by harping, or, if you will, pounding on each string, we learn at last its power. But our geometry cannot span these extreme points and reconcile them. If we must accept Fate, we are not less compelled to affirm liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, the power of character. īut if there be irresistible dictation, this dictation understands itself.
We must begin our reform earlier still,-at generation: that is to say, there is Fate, or laws of the world. But the boys and girls are not docile we can make nothing of them. After many experiments we find that we must begin earlier,-at school. We are fired with the hope to reform men. In our first steps to gain our wishes we come upon immovable limitations. 'T is fine for us to speculate and elect our course, if we must accept an irresistible dictation. Our geometry cannot span the huge orbits of the prevailing ideas, behold their return and reconcile their opposition. How shall I live? We are incompetent to solve the times. To me, however, the question of the times resolved itself into a practical question of the conduct of life. It so happened that the subject had the same prominence in some remarkable pamphlets and journals issued in London in the same season. By an odd coincidence, four or five noted men were each reading a discourse to the citizens of Boston or New York, on the Spirit of the Times. IT chanced during one winter a few years ago, that our cities were bent on discussing the theory of the Age.
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