“doing good,
  Disinterested good, is not our trade.”

And America found that England had not learned that trade when, fifteen years after this discourse was delivered, the conflict between the free and slave states threatened the ruin of the great Republic, and England forgot her Anti-slavery in the prospect of the downfall of “a great empire which threatens to overshadow the whole earth.”

It must be remembered that Emerson had never been identified with the abolitionists.  But an individual act of wrong sometimes gives a sharp point to a blunt dagger which has been kept in its sheath too long:—­

“The events of the last few years and months and days have taught us the lessons of centuries.  I do not see how a barbarous community and a civilized community can constitute one State.  I think we must get rid of slavery or we must get rid of freedom.”

These were his words on the 26th of May, 1856, in his speech on “The Assault upon Mr. Sumner.”  A few months later, in his “Speech on the Affairs of Kansas,” delivered almost five years before the first gun was fired at Fort Sumter, he spoke the following fatally prophetic and commanding words:—­

“The hour is coming when the strongest will not be strong enough.  A harder task will the new revolution of the nineteenth century be than was the revolution of the eighteenth century.  I think the American Revolution bought its glory cheap.  If the problem was new, it was simple.  If there were few people, they were united, and the enemy three thousand miles off.  But now, vast property, gigantic interests, family connections, webs of party, cover the land with a net-work that immensely multiplies the dangers of war.

“Fellow-citizens, in these times full of the fate of the Republic, I think the towns should hold town meetings, and resolve themselves into Committees of Safety, go into permanent sessions, adjourning from week to week, from month to month.  I wish we could send the sergeant-at-arms to stop every American who is about to leave the country.  Send home every one who is abroad, lest they should find no country to return to.  Come home and stay at home while there is a country to save.  When it is lost it will be time enough then for any who are luckless enough to remain alive to gather up their clothes and depart to some land where freedom exists.”

Two short speeches follow, one delivered at a meeting for the relief of the family of John Brown, on the 18th of November, 1859, the other after his execution:—­

“Our blind statesmen,” he says, “go up and down, with committees of vigilance and safety, hunting for the origin of this new heresy.  They will need a very vigilant committee indeed to find its birthplace, and a very strong force to root it out.  For the arch-Abolitionist, older than Brown, and older than the Shenandoah Mountains, is Love, whose other name is Justice, which was before Alfred, before Lycurgus, before Slavery, and will be after it.”

From his “Discourse on Theodore Parker” I take the following vigorous sentence:—­