nature of things.  He was a true democrat, but still could say:  “I think I see place and duties for a nobleman in every society; but it is not to drink wine and ride in a fine coach, but to guide and adorn life for the multitude by forethought, by elegant studies, by perseverance, self-devotion, and the remembrance of the humble old friend,—­by making his life secretly beautiful.”  How fine a picture of the democratic nobility is that!

In his lecture on Man the Reformer, which was read before the Mechanics’ 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  The virtue of this principle in human society in application to great interests is obsolete and forgotten.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 marked by steps toward personal, individual freedom.  The love of liberty was Emerson’s fundamental passion:—­