DUTY OF A REFORMER. 333 



the number of stockings, if there are not enough of them and you are swept away. 

 Your number is diminished by smaller wages, by what Malthus calls the preventive 

 and positive checks to population; just as if you were vermin, against which society 

 wages war." 



Conditions, and not theories, bring about the necessity of reforms, and 

 it is necessity, not theory, that brings out the reformer. His duty begins 

 where equal rights are ignored, and never ends until justice and equity 

 are obtained. 



Emerson says : 



" What is a man born for, but to be a reformer, a re-maker of what man has made, 

 a renouncer of lies, a restorer of truth and good, imitating that great Nature which 

 embosoms us all, and which sleeps no moment on an old past, but every hour 

 repairs herself, yielding us every morning a new day, and with every pulsation a new 

 life ? The power, which is at once spring and regulator in all efforts of reform, is 

 the conviction that there is an infinite worthiness in man which will appear at 

 the call of worth, and that all reforms are the removing of some impediment. 

 The Americans have no faith; they rely on the power of a dollar; they are deaf to 

 sentiment; they think you may talk the north wind down as easily as to raise society. 

 And no class is more faithless than the scholars or intellectual men. Now, if I talk 

 with a sincere wise man, and my friend with a poet, with a conscientious youth, who 

 is still under the dominion of his own wild thoughts, and not yet harnessed in the 

 team of society to drag with us all in the ruts of custom, I see at once how paltry is 

 all this generation of unbelievers, and what a house of cards their institutions are; 

 and I see what one brave man, what one great thought executed, might effect. But 

 the reformer not only beholds his heaven to be possible, but already to begin to exist; 

 not by the men or materials the statesman uses, but by men transfigured and raised 

 above themselves by the power of principles. To principles something else is pos- 

 sible, that transcends all the power of expedients." 



The estimate put upon a reformer, in the true sense of the word, by 

 Mr. Emerson, was in reality a tribute to all the virtues. How true this 

 is ! When the generations that come after look back upon the efforts of 

 reform, the dark shades with which it was enveloped are turned into 

 brighter beams, and the methods then considered doubtful become the 

 maxims of future conduct. True reforms, true beneficence, and better 

 conditions for the human race, are bound together in indissoluble 

 bonds of union. Where one is found, all may be seen ; and where 

 either is wanting, neither need be expected. 



The Alliance is the one grand reform of the nineteenth century. Its 

 objects are to enlighten, elevate, and make better. It is founded upon 

 the principle of equal and exact justice to all. It demands reform 

 in the conditions which obtain among those who labor in production, 

 especially the farmers. Being the most conservative element of society, 



