..."
Beneath all lay a greater matter,--Emerson's grasp of the forms and
conditions of progress, his reach of intellect, which could afford fair
play to every one.
His lecture on The Conservative is not a puzzling _jeu d'esprit_, like
Bishop Blougram's Apology, but an honest attempt to set up the opposing
chessmen of conservatism and reform so as to represent real life. Hardly
can such a brilliant statement of the case be found elsewhere in
literature. It is not necessary to quote here the reformer's side of the
question, for Emerson's whole life was devoted to it. The conservatives'
attitude he gives with such accuracy and such justice that the very
bankers of State Street seem to be speaking:--
"The order of things is as good as the character of the population
permits. Consider it as the work of a great and beneficent and
progressive necessity, which, from the first pulsation in the first
animal life up to the present high culture of the best nations, has
advanced thus far....
"The conservative party in the universe concedes that the radical
would talk sufficiently to the purpose if we were still in the
garden of Eden; he legislates for man as he ought to be; his theory
is right, but he makes no allowance for friction, and this omission
makes his whole doctrine false.
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