Without Lifting A Finger

Emerson to Carlyle: I read with interest what you say of the political omens in England. I could wish our country a better comprehension of its felicity. But government has come to be a trade, and is managed solely on commercial principles. A man plunges into politics to make his fortune, and only cares that the world should last his day. We have had in different parts of the country mobs and moblike legislation, and even moblike judicature, which have betrayed an almost godless state of society; so that I begin to think even here it behoves every man to quit his dependency on society as much as he can, as he would learn to go without crutches that will be soon plucked away from him, and settle with himself the principles he can stand upon, happen what may. There is reading, and public lecturing too, in this country, that I could recommend as medicine to any gentleman who finds the love of life too strong in him.

Carlyle to Emerson: One more juicy bit (for today): What with railways, steamships, printing presses, it has surely become a most monstrous “tissue,” this life of ours; if evil and confusion in the one Hemisphere, then good and order in the other, a man knows not how: and so it rustles forth, immeasurable, from “that roaring Loom of Time,” — miraculous ever as of old!

Carlyle to Emerson: Work and wages: the two prime necessities of man! It is pity they should ever be disjoined; yet of the two, if one must, in this mad Earth, be dispensed with, it is really wise to say at all hazards, Be it the wages then.