“For He that ruleth high and wise,
    Nor pauseth in His plan,
  Will take the sun out of the skies
    Ere freedom out of man.”

The new National League of Independent Workmen of America has very appropriately taken its motto from Emerson:—­

  “For what avail the plough or sail
  Or land or life, if freedom fail?”

The sympathetic reader of Emerson comes often upon passages written long ago which are positively startling in their anticipation of sentiments common to-day and apparently awakened by very recent events.  One would suppose that the following passage was written yesterday.  It was written fifty-six years ago.  “And so, gentlemen, I feel in regard to this aged England, with the possessions, honors, and trophies, and also with the infirmities of a thousand years gathering around her, irretrievably committed as she now is to many old customs which cannot be suddenly changed; pressed upon by the transitions of trade, and new and all incalculable modes, fabrics, arts, machines, and competing populations,—­I see her not dispirited, not weak, but well remembering that she has seen dark days before;—­indeed with a kind of instinct that she sees a little better in a cloudy day, and that in storm of battle and calamity, she has a secret vigor and a pulse like a cannon.”

Before the Civil War the Jew had no such place in society as he holds to-day.  He was by no means so familiar to Americans as he is now.  Emerson speaks twice of the Jew in his essay on Fate, in terms precisely similar to those we commonly hear to-day:  “We see how much will has been expended to extinguish the Jew, in vain....  The sufferance which is the badge of the Jew has made him in these days the ruler of the rulers of the earth.”  Those keen observations were made certainly more than forty years ago, and probably more than fifty.

Landscape architecture is not yet an established profession among us, in spite of the achievements of Downing, Cleveland, and Olmsted and their disciples; yet much has been accomplished within the last twenty-five years to realize the predictions on this subject made by Emerson in his lecture on The Young American.  He pointed out in that lecture that the beautiful gardens of Europe are unknown among us, but might be easily imitated here, and said that the landscape art “is the Fine Art which is left for us....  The whole force of all arts goes to facilitate the decoration of lands and dwellings....  I look on such improvement as directly tending to endear the land to the inhabitant.”  The following sentence might have been written yesterday, so consistent is it with the thought of to-day:  “Whatever events in progress shall go to disgust men with cities, and infuse into them the passion for country life and country pleasures, will render a service to the whole face of this continent, and will further the most poetic of all the occupations of real life, the bringing out by art the native but hidden graces of the landscape.”