For America, type of progress, and of essential faith in man, above
all his errors and wickedness--few suspect how deep, how deep it
really strikes. The world evidently supposes, and we have evidently
supposed so too, that the States are merely to achieve the equal
franchise, an elective government--to inaugurate the respectability
of labor, and become a nation of practical operatives, law-abiding,
orderly and well off. Yes, those are indeed parts of the task of
America; but they not only do not exhaust the progressive conception,
but rather arise, teeming with it, as the mediums of deeper, higher
progress. Daughter of a physical revolution--mother of the true
revolutions, which are of the interior life, and of the arts. For so
long as the spirit is not changed, any change of appearance is of no
avail.
The old men, I remember as a boy, were always talking of American
independence. What is independence? Freedom from all laws or bonds
except those of one's own being, control'd by the universal ones.
To lands, to man, to woman, what is there at last to each, but the
inherent soul, nativity, idiocrasy, free, highest-poised, soaring its
own flight, following out itself?
At present, these States, in their theology and social standards, (of
greater importance than their political institutions,) are entirely
held possession of by foreign lands. We see the sons and daughters
of the New World, ignorant of its genius, not yet inaugurating the
native, the universal, and the near, still importing the distant, the
partial, and the dead.
Pages:
383
384
385
386
387
388
389
390
391
392
393
394
395
396
397
398
399
400
401
402
403
404
405
406
407