But

world to brook the rage of the cultivated classes. Their rage is decorous and prudent, for they are timid as being very vulnerable themselves. when to their feminine rage the indignation of the people is added, when the ignorant and the poor are aroused, when the unintelligent brute force that lies at the bottom of society is made to growl and mow it needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike as a matter of no concernment."

How far America has had the courage or the grace to follow him is another matter. He has been taunted with having had very little "influence" (sacred word of the philologer) upon American life and letters. But the reproach has its own humors. That he should have no school of disciples, if not proof of his influence, was the very burden of his doctrine.

"I have been writing and speaking," he says in his journal in 1859, "what were once called novelties, for twentyfive or thirty years, and have not now one disciple. Why? Not that what I have said was not true; not that it has not found intelligent receivers; but because it did not go from any wish in me to bring men to me, but to themselves. I delight in driving them from me. . . This is my boast that I have no school follower. I should count it a measure of the impurity of insight, if it did not create independence."

It is possible to read into the record a touch of chagrin, but the tenor of his life confirms its serenity and its sincerity.

The schools in revenge have been chary. Professional philosophers will none of him. It is a little hard, indeed, to see where they are to have a philosopher who could say, "I would write on the lintels of the doorpost, whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation." Or one who could put in the privacy of his journal. for a day's entry, "Damn consistency! Or one who could write, in a letter that marked the turning point of his life, "I could not give an account of myself if challenged. . . . For I do not know what argument means, in reference to any expression of thought."

No one, I think, would deny Emerson the title of philosopher, but his method is clearly not the method of the schools. His harvest is rich, but he tops his grain and does not cut the straw, to say nothing of grubbing at the roots. Part of the business of philosophy, cer

Courtesy N. Y. Public Library

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

tainly, is to grub at roots, to examine grounds, to eschew whim, to be consistent, to explain, to lug in arguments. At the best the schools do a service. Not every age produces a Socrates or a Spinoza, and it is well that their channels should be kept clear and flowing. But whoever has frequented the chess tournaments of the schools at their perennial norm-the moves laid down in the rules, every gambit known, with Plato as king, or Aristotle, Hegel or Kant-will wonder little at their new shape on prompt rejection of a the board, neither rook nor knight, nor knight, neither pawn nor queen.

Emerson has fared best with the lone hands, the humanists, men of free intellect, without school and without ax to grind. They are akin to him, and perhaps in nothing so much as in their diversity. He himself is almost Biblical in his power of yielding a ringing text. for every variety of bent and opinion. He is Proteus-Emerson the poet, the prose master, the priest, the apostate, the saint, the radical, the mystic, the intellectualist. He quotes himself in yet another rôle: "If I am the Devil's child, I will then live from the Devil'." But beneath the diversity of these kindred of his, and beneath the particular facet which each of them, in the special emphasis of his own temper, has set uppermost, they have shared with him a certain centrality, intellectual and moral. Among his contemporaries Holmes, Lowell, Carlyle, Leslie Stephen, Matthew Arnold, and among ours Mr. Woodberry, Mr. Brownell, Mr.

Chapman, Mr. Frye, Mr. Babbitt, Mr. More, Mr. Firkin-no one could wish a kinder fate than to be comprehended by such a company, themselves almost to a man humanists of marked breadth of culture, and almost to a man a little suspect of the flock, a little aside from the passions of their times, gadflies in the herd, who have kept alive the memory of the forgotten man.

THE

HE bulk of mankind lie, morally speaking, between the herd and the humanist, and are bound together by a common moral interest. It might be expected, therefore, that a prophet with so conspicuous a moral bent as Emerson's would meet a large acclaim on that middle ground. But Emerson's morals are strong meat. "In self-trust all the virtues are comprehended," he says; and "if the single man plant himself indomitably upon his instinct, the huge world will come around to him."

It is utterances of this sort that have been the stumbling block for the wise and the prudent. Self-trust is not unknown, but the trust of others' selftrust is rare. Sex and greed, greed of

power and greed of possession, are perhaps the strongest of the instincts and are scarcely in need of the support of philosophy. For an Emerson, perhaps, with two centuries of Calvinism behind him, and no little chill of the Boston east wind in his own blood, such language may be innocuous enough. But for the class-room of democracy the precept is equivocal. The grain of salt that cooled the ice in Emerson's veins is not a universal ingredient. Instinct! The crumb has stuck even in humanistic throats. There is a savor of Rousseau in it.

It need scarcely be said, however, that the instincts which he so defiantly challenged us were not the animal instincts. It is the defect not so much of his thought as of his method that he stood calmly aloof from the mere need to be understood. He can not spend his day in explaining. Where his discrete aphorisms, infinitely repellent particles as he confessed them, failed to strike home at once, or in striking home clashed with other discrete particles already domesticated there, his reconciliations rarely occur on the spot. "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," he says blithely, in perhaps the most quoted of his audacities, and the most comfortingly misapplied. Here, for once

however, he does pause to explain: "I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the sallies of his will are rounded in by the law of his being. . . . Let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and I cannot doubt, it will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not and see it not." His own inconsistencies are as November meteors for number and brilliance, and much good sport and much honest perturbation have centered about them. But they yield in the end, for the most part, so singleminded was the utterer, sometimes to a closer scrutiny of his language, but more often to the perspective that is to be had from the central point of his character and his doctrine. And so with instinct.

For instinct read intellect, in spite of paradox. If he could say, "Plant yourself indomitably upon your instinct," he could a moment later say, "See that you hold yourself fast by the intellect." His own instinct was all intellectual, and on this occasion he was addressing scholars. There is no paradox here. The instinct behind the intellect is all for truth. Even the lie itself is an afterthought, used for reasons that are secondary and irrelevant.

To Emerson's sense, however, the subtle enemy of truth, and hence of virtue, was not the lie but the voices of the world that kept the individual ear from hearing and heeding the faint first. whisper of the idea signalling to the consciousness. The shock that perturbed his contemporaries was his insistence that the arch-fiend that kept them from listening might well be what they accounted virtue itself-their devotion to a moral code, their love of books, their loyalty to an institution, their faith in a creed.

For Emerson the virtue of the individual lay in the exercise of his one talent. His hierarchy of the universe, years before Darwin had popularized evolution, was significant: "The gases gather to the solid firmament; the chemic lump arrives at the plant, and grows; arrives at the quadruped, and walks; arrives at the man, and thinks." The man's one talent is to think, to be the conduit, little or big, that translates the dumb infinities of the universe into the measured realizations of consciousness. And all the conformities are but second fiddle to the bold harmonies of those who have obeyed the instinct and heeded the authentic music of their own inward ears.

Nothing could be further from the spirit of Rousseau. Bipeds both, the two men moved in opposite directions from a common point, the one on all fours, the other on wings. If Emerson did sometimes venture too rashly off the ground, he escaped the subtle humor that forever mocks the anti-intellectualist that to down the intellect he must use the intellect, and prove its invalidities by its validity.

It has been often felt and vigorously said that he was coldly, almost inhumanly, indifferent to causes. His sympathizers can take comfort in his defense of free speech in memory of Lovejoy, his letter to President Van Buren over the removal of the Cherokees, and his courage before the mob in his long stand on Abolition. But it is true that his heart was not in specific causes. He stood aloof from the maddest riot of reformers that the world can well have looked on, and came as near to overt humor as he ever attained in his ironic-sympathetic descriptions of them. His own ethic was of a different complexion.

Causes are the luxury of the utilitarian, and most men are utilitarians, valuing virtue for something else, a means to other ends. The defect in

It was the point of Emerson's ethics, on the other hand, that virtue itself was the end, and virtue, for him, was summed up in the energy of that human differentia, the power to think, and in trust of the instinct that animates that power. Evil was the surrender of that power, the failure of that trust, in lazy, or frugal, or fearful acquiescence in the good things already thought. And the clarion of his voice was raised unremittingly in reminder of that ultimate point of entry for all that humanizes life-the Man Thinking.

TH

HE humanist starts with the Man Thinking. By virtue of thought the animal man projects alternatives to himself and has the chance to choose what seems to his reflective desires the better. He thus rescues himself from the pure automatism of animal instinct and becomes in so far free and moral. Humanism is chary, therefore, of the non-reflective play of impulse, and looks askance at romanticism. It is equally chary of the seductive play of intellect that forgets its humanity and thrusts mankind somewhere on the periphery of a cosmic system. Humanism is fairly humble, and such arrogance grieves it-or angers it, or amuses it, according to individual temper.

I have called Emerson' a humanist. So much, however, has been made, even by himself, of his mysticism, his Transcendentalism, that I may seem inconsistent. Damn consistency, perhaps, but I am spending my day in explaining. To me, for one, then, (Please Turn to Page 756)

Smith Accepts

SOOTHSAYERS will no doubt draw conclusions from the way in which the Presidential candidates were treated by the elements on the great day of notification. The Hoover ceremony was performed under blue skies in the famous California sunshine. Governor Smith meant to speak his piece from the steps of the capitol at Albany; in fact, when he wrote it he began:

"Upon the steps of this Capitol where twenty-five years ago I first came into the service of the State, I receive my party's summons to lead it in the nation."

But he didn't. While the sun shone around and about, Albany was the scene of a dismal rain, and the speech of acceptance was heard by a few thousands in the Assembly Chamber. There was compensation for him in the fact that the radio hook-up surpassed all previous hook-ups; it comprised 104 transmitting stations.

Elsewhere in this issue The Outlook deals editorially with the Democratic candidate's treatment of the outstanding issues-prohibition, farm relief and power control. Herewith are highlights from other portions of his address:

"Dominant in the Republican party today is the element which proclaims and executes the political theories against which liberals like Roosevelt and La Follette and their party insurgents have rebelled. This reactionary element seeks to vindicate the theory of benevolent oligarchy. It assumes that a material prosperity, the very existence of which is challenged, is an excuse for political inequality. It makes the concern of government, not people but material things.

"I have fought this spirit in my own State. It have had to fight it and beat it, in order to place upon the statute books every one of the progressive, humane laws for whose enactment I assumed responsibility in my legislative and executive career. I shall know how to fight it in the nation.

"Of all men I have reason to believe that the people can and do grasp the problems of the government. Against

the opposition of the self-seeker and the partisan, again and again, I have seen legislation won by the pressure of popular demand, exerted after the people had had an honest, frank and complete explanation of the issues.

"The appropriation bills signed by the President of the United States for the last year are just one-half a billion dollars more than they were for the first year of his administration. The appropriations for the Executive Department itself (the President and the Vice-President) have increased more than ten per cent under President Coolidge.

"The figures for expenditure as distinguished from appropriations tell the same story. Aside from interest on the

public debt which has been reduced by retirement of bonds or by refinancing at lower interest rate, the actual expenditures for governmental activities during the fiscal year ending in 1928, were just $346,000,000 more than in President Coolidge's first year. . . . I wish to focus the public attention on these fundamental facts when it is fed with picturesque trifles about petty economies, such as eliminating stripes. from mail bags and extinguishing electric lights in the offices at night.

"Any foreign policy must have its roots deep in the approval of a very large majority of our people. Therefore, no greater service was ever ren

dered by any President than by

Woodrow Wilson when he struck at the methods of secret diplomacy. Today we have close relations, vital to our commercial and world standing, with every other nation. I regard it, therefore, as a paramount duty to keep alive the interest of our people in these questions and to advise the electorate as to facts and policies.

"I especially stress the necessity for the restoration of cordial relations with Latin America, and I take my text from a great Republican Secretary of State, Elihu Root, who said: 'We consider that the independence and equal rights of the smallest and weakest member of the family of nations deserve as much respect as those of the great empires. We pretend to no right, privilege or power that we do not freely

concede to each one of the American republics.'

It

"In 1921 there was negotiated a treaty for the limitation of the construction of battleships and battle cruisers of over ten thousand tons. was approved without party dispute as a start of the process of removing from the backs of the toiling masses of the world the staggering burden of the hundreds of millions of dollars that are wrung from them every year for wasteful transformation into engines of destruction. For seven years the Republican administration has followed it with nothing effective. No limitation has been placed upon land armaments, submarines, vessels of war of under ten thousand tons displacement, poisonous gases or any of the other machinery devised by man for the destruction of human life. In this respect our diplomacy has been futile.

"I believe the American people desire to assume their fair share of responsibility for the administration of a world of which they are a part, without political alliance with any foreign nation. I pledge myself to a resumption of a real endeavor to make the outlawry of war effective by removing its causes and to substitute the methods of conciliation, conference, arbitration and judicial determination.

"The American people constitute a structure of many component parts. One of its foundations is labor. The reasonable contentment of those who toil with the conditions under which they live and work is an essential basis of the nation's well-being. The welfare of our country therefore demands governmental concern for the legitimate interest of labor. The Democratic Party has always recognized this fact and under the administration of Woodrow Wilson, a large body of progressive legislation for the protection of those laboring in industry, was enacted. Our platform continues that tradition of the party. We declare for the principle of collective bargaining which alone can put the laborer upon a basis of fair equality with the employer; for the human principle that labor is not a commodity; for fair treatment to government and federal

dians would say, he looks on us all as children, to be shielded from the world, the flesh and the devil."

"Despite high evidence that courts can function efficiently and quickly, he still prates of the law's delay. The more alarming because utterly sincere, the women who follow him lead another children's crusade, threatening a despotism which those profound students of the rise and decay of European empires, the framers of our State and Federal constitutions, sought once and for all to discard. So a new and untried chapter of American history unfolds."

"Whether or not we approve this risky experiment, we must at least beware of its extension, lest unknowingly we tap the very fountain head of our liberties."

censor meant

"Freedom from the nothing to Robinson Crusoe until his man Friday appeared. The right of free speech is of value only if there are hearers. And no one can force you to listen, or hear, or see. No one-I underline the thought-is obliged to lend his ears or eyes.

"But this is a truth the censor refuses to believe. So he would constitute himself his brother's keeper. Meantime we have been supine. Is it that America, having come of age, has lost the courage and resilience of her youth, and begins already to suffer from arterio sclerosis?"

A Veteran Newsman

SIXTY years in journalism and thirtyfive years as manager and counselor of

the Associated Press have given Melville E. Stone an extraordinary outlook on men and things.

The recent observance of Mr. Stone's eightieth birthday brought out many reminiscences and comparisons of old and new methods of circulating news.

It is just a hundred years ago since a "beat" in foreign news was scored by sending a sail-boat out to Sandy Hook. Compare this with the new scheme of launching airplanes from outgoing and incoming steamships to save a day of more for news and mail. Mr. Stone, as he says, has "lived from lightning to radio." When Morse sent his first telegram, "What hath God wrought" he did not forsee that "telegraphic transmission of news by means of a sort of typewriter arrangement is old stuff now that photographs and printed pages are being transmitted by telephone, telegraph and wireless."

2944 miles. Twice Romer encountered hurricanes; when he touched the Canary Islands he needed repairs; the second hurricane lasted five days and he slept not at all during that storm. The voyage took fifty-eight days.

When Captain Romer gets rested up, he proposes to sail and paddle along to New York City, hugging the shore and what islands there are.

We wish the gallant captain well. Probably his voyage teaches something, but what it is except man's intrepidity -we do not know.

Hoover in His Old Home SWOLLEN for the day from its normal size of 745 inhabitants to fifteen or twenty thousand, West Branch, Iowa, on August 21, welcomed Herbert Hoover to his birthplace.

In American fashion the hamlet rose to the emergency, handled the throngs capably, and even dammed up the creek and erected a spot light at the point where the old swimmin' hole of "Bert" Hoover's boyhood days was supposed to be. It was forty-five years. since the orphaned son of the local blacksmith had set out to become a world figure; but, as he told the people that gathered in and about a huge tent to hear him, he remembered the life there "the glories of snowy winters, the wonder of the growing crops, the joining of the neighbors to harvest, the gathering of apples." and so on-and he even found the real swimmin' hole. And with this introduction he enlarged upon his ideas of solving the farmer's problems.

In the older days farm-life was more secure than today, but the standards of living were lower. Retaining the