"Emerson, Ralph Waldo - The Conservative (1841)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo)

of mountains, and streams, is universal. The Indian and barbarous
name can never be supplanted without loss. The ancients tell us that
the gods loved the Ethiopians for their stable customs; and the
Egyptians and Chaldeans, whose origin could not be explored, passed
among the junior tribes of Greece and Italy for sacred nations.

Moreover, so deep is the foundation of the existing social
system, that it leaves no one out of it. We may be partial, but Fate
is not. All men have their root in it. You who quarrel with the
arrangements of society, and are willing to embroil all, and risk the
indisputable good that exists, for the chance of better, live, move,
and have your being in this, and your deeds contradict your words
every day. For as you cannot jump from the ground without using the
resistance of the ground, nor put out the boat to sea, without
shoving from the shore, nor attain liberty without rejecting
obligation, so you are under the necessity of using the Actual order
of things, in order to disuse it; to live by it, whilst you wish to
take away its life. The past has baked your loaf, and in the
strength of its bread you would break up the oven. But you are
betrayed by your own nature. You also are conservatives. However
men please to style themselves, I see no other than a conservative
party. You are not only identical with us in your needs, but also in
your methods and aims. You quarrel with my conservatism, but it is
to build up one of your own; it will have a new beginning, but the
same course and end, the same trials, the same passions; among the
lovers of the new I observe that there is a jealousy of the newest,
and that the seceder from the seceder is as damnable as the pope
himself.

On these and the like grounds of general statement,
conservatism plants itself without danger of being displaced.
Especially before this _personal_ appeal, the innovator must confess
his weakness, must confess that no man is to be found good enough to
be entitled to stand champion for the principle. But when this great
tendency comes to practical encounters, and is challenged by young
men, to whom it is no abstraction, but a fact of hunger, distress,
and exclusion from opportunities, it must needs seem injurious. The
youth, of course, is an innovator by the fact of his birth. There he
stands, newly born on the planet, a universal beggar, with all the
reason of things, one would say, on his side. In his first
consideration how to feed, clothe, and warm himself, he is met by
warnings on every hand, that this thing and that thing have owners,
and he must go elsewhere. Then he says; If I am born into the earth,
where is my part? have the goodness, gentlemen of this world, to show
me my wood-lot, where I may fell my wood, my field where to plant my
corn, my pleasant ground where to build my cabin.

`Touch any wood, or field, or house-lot, on your peril,' cry
all the gentlemen of this world; `but you may come and work in ours,
for us, and we will give you a piece of bread.'