These bear,
mostly, as on one inclosing point of need.
For after the rest is said--after the many time-honor'd and really
true things for subordination, experience, rights of property, &c.,
have been listen'd to and acquiesced in--after the valuable and
well-settled statement of our duties and relations in society is
thoroughly conn'd over and exhausted--it remains to bring forward and
modify everything else with the idea of that Something a man is, (last
precious consolation of the drudging poor,) standing apart from
all else, divine in his own right, and a woman in hers, sole and
untouchable by any canons of authority, or any rule derived from
precedent, state-safety, the acts of legislatures, or even from what
is called religion, modesty, or art. The radiation of this truth is
the key of the most significant doings of our immediately preceding
three centuries, and has been the political genesis and life of
America. Advancing visibly, it still more advances invisibly.
Underneath the fluctuations of the expressions of society, as well as
the movements of the politics of the leading nations of the world,
we see steadily pressing ahead and strengthening itself, even in the
midst of immense tendencies toward aggregation, this image of
completeness in separatism, of individual personal dignity, of a single
person, either male or female, characterized in the main, not from
extrinsic acquirements or position, but in the pride of himself or
herself alone; and, as an eventual conclusion and summing up, (or else
the entire scheme of things is aimless, a cheat, a crash,) the simple
idea that the last, best dependence is to be upon humanity itself, and
its own inherent, normal, fullgrown qualities, without any superstitious
support whatever.
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