"Emerson, Ralph W. - The Young American" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo)

West is intruding a new and continental element into the national
mind, and we shall yet have an American genius. How much better when
the whole land is a garden, and the people have grown up in the
bowers of a paradise. Without looking, then, to those extraordinary
social influences which are now acting in precisely this direction,
but only at what is inevitably doing around us, I think we must
regard the _land_ as a commanding and increasing power on the
citizen, the sanative and Americanizing influence, which promises to
disclose new virtues for ages to come.

2. In the second place, the uprise and culmination of the new
and anti-feudal power of Commerce, is the political fact of most
significance to the American at this hour.

We cannot look on the freedom of this country, in connexion
with its youth, without a presentiment that here shall laws and
institutions exist on some scale of proportion to the majesty of
nature. To men legislating for the area betwixt the two oceans,
betwixt the snows and the tropics, somewhat of the gravity of nature
will infuse itself into the code. A heterogeneous population
crowding on all ships from all corners of the world to the great
gates of North America, namely, Boston, New York, and New Orleans,
and thence proceeding inward to the prairie and the mountains, and
quickly contributing their private thought to the public opinion,
their toll to the treasury, and their vote to the election, it cannot
be doubted that the legislation of this country should become more
catholic and cosmopolitan than that of any other. It seems so easy
for America to inspire and express the most expansive and humane
spirit; new-born, free, healthful, strong, the land of the laborer,
of the democrat, of the philanthropist, of the believer, of the
saint, she should speak for the human race. It is the country of the
Future. From Washington, proverbially `the city of magnificent
distances,' through all its cities, states, and territories, it is a
country of beginnings, of projects, of designs, and expectations.

Gentlemen, there is a sublime and friendly Destiny by which the
human race is guided, -- the race never dying, the individual never
spared, -- to results affecting masses and ages. Men are narrow and
selfish, but the Genius or Destiny is not narrow, but beneficent. It
is not discovered in their calculated and voluntary activity, but in
what befalls, with or without their design. Only what is inevitable
interests us, and it turns out that love and good are inevitable, and
in the course of things. That Genius has infused itself into nature.
It indicates itself by a small excess of good, a small balance in
brute facts always favorable to the side of reason. All the facts in
any part of nature shall be tabulated, and the results shall indicate
the same security and benefit; so slight as to be hardly observable,
and yet it is there. The sphere is flattened at the poles, and
swelled at the equator; a form flowing necessarily from the fluid
state, yet _the_ form, the mathematician assures us, required to