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

Meantime Trade had begun to appear: Trade, a plant which grows
wherever there is peace, as soon as there is peace, and as long as
there is peace. The luxury and necessity of the noble fostered it.
And as quickly as men go to foreign parts, in ships or caravans, a
new order of things springs up; new command takes place, new servants
and new masters. Their information, their wealth, their
correspondence, have made them quite other men than left their native
shore. _They_ are nobles now, and by another patent than the king's.
Feudalism had been good, had broken the power of the kings, and had
some good traits of its own; but it had grown mischievous, it was
time for it to die, and, as they say of dying people, all its faults
came out. Trade was the strong man that broke it down, and raised a
new and unknown power in its place. It is a new agent in the world,
and one of great function; it is a very intellectual force. This
displaces physical strength, and instals computation, combination,
information, science, in its room. It calls out all force of a
certain kind that slumbered in the former dynasties. It is now in
the midst of its career. Feudalism is not ended yet. Our
governments still partake largely of that element. Trade goes to
make the governments insignificant, and to bring every kind of
faculty of every individual that can in any manner serve any person,
_on sale_. Instead of a huge Army and Navy, and Executive
Departments, it converts Government into an Intelligence-Office,
where every man may find what he wishes to buy, and expose what he
has to sell, not only produce and manufactures, but art, skill, and
intellectual and moral values. This is the good and this the evil of
trade, that it would put everything into market, talent, beauty,
virtue, and man himself.

By this means, however, it has done its work. It has its
faults, and will come to an end, as the others do. The philosopher
and lover of man have much harm to say of trade; but the historian
will see that trade was the principle of Liberty; that trade planted
America and destroyed Feudalism; that it makes peace and keeps peace,
and it will abolish slavery. We complain of its oppression of the
poor, and of its building up a new aristocracy on the ruins of the
aristocracy it destroyed. But the aristocracy of trade has no
permanence, is not entailed, was the result of toil and talent, the
result of merit of some kind, and is continually falling, like the
waves of the sea, before new claims of the same sort. Trade is an
instrument in the hands of that friendly Power which works for us in
our own despite. We design it thus and thus; it turns out otherwise
and far better. This beneficent tendency, omnipotent without
violence, exists and works. Every line of history inspires a
confidence that we shall not go far wrong; that things mend. That is
the moral of all we learn, that it warrants Hope, the prolific mother
of reforms. Our part is plainly not to throw ourselves across the
track, to block improvement, and sit till we are stone, but to watch
the uprise of successive mornings, and to conspire with the new works