genius of the Anglo-Saxon his ability to make great changes, both in law and government, without resort to violence? His movement may be slow, at times so deliberate as to be imperceptible, but none the less he moves. The radical of to-day is the conservative of to-morrow; the rearguard camps at night by the smoking watch fires from which the vanguard departed in the morning; but without breaking ranks or losing touch the whole column moves steadily onward to a broadening figure. In opening my remarks I promised not to burden you by any reference to the problems of the hour. May I be released from that engagement for a closing word? When all comparisons have been made, and all differences recounted, the fact remains that the members of the legal profession in England are in very truth our brethren overseas. The common law by which we live has its roots in English soil. The judges who interpret it on both sides of the water look to their distant colleagues for counsel and assistance, and the principles of liberty which it embodies are the rod and staff by which our peoples walk. Trained in the same school, professing the same great ideals, sharers of like immunities and privileges, there rests upon the legal profession in England and America a duty which is joint and not several, compact and not divisible. The nations whom they serve stand to-day supreme in present strength and in potential energy. Upon them Destiny has laid accordingly the largest responsibility for the immediate future of the world. Shall not the lawyers, who lead as well as serve them, guide them in the ways of mutual confidence and joint endeavor in the service of mankind?

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

Address of Ralph Waldo Emerson, essayist and poet (born in Boston, May 25, 1803; died in Concord, Mass., April 27, 1882), delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, August 31, 1837. This address must be ranked among the great American orations. When delivered, it made a powerful impression, and its influence on American thought has continued ever since. Two after-dinner speeches by Emerson are printed in Volume II.

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN :- -I greet you on the recommencement of our literary year. Our anniversary is one of hope, and perhaps, not enough of labor. We do not meet for games of strength or skill, for the recitation of histories, tragedies, and odes, like the ancient Greeks; for parliaments of love and poesy, like the Troubadours; nor for the advancement of science, like our contemporaries in the British and European capitals. Thus far, our holiday has been simply a friendly sign of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to give to letters any more. As such it is precious as the sign of an indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already come when it ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions that around us are rushing into life cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers

announce, shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years? In this hope I accept the topic which not only usage but the nature of our association seem to prescribe to this daythe American Scholar. Year by year we come up hither to read one more chapter of his biography. Let us inquire what light new days and events have thrown on his character and his hopes.

It is one of those fables which out of an unknown antiquity convey an unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning, divided Man into men, that he might be more helpful to himself; just as the hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer its end. The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is One Man-present to all particular men only partially, or through one faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state these functions are parceled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his. The fable implies that the individual, to possess himself, must sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other laborers. But, unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters-a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.

Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. The planter, who is Man sent out into the field to gather food, is seldom cheered by any idea of the true dignity of his ministry. He sees his bushel and his cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into the farmer, instead of Man on the farm. The tradesman scarcely ever gives an ideal worth to his work, but is ridden by the routine of his craft, and the soul is subject to dollars. The priest becomes a form; the attorney a statutebook; the mechanic a machine; the sailor a rope of the ship. In this distribution of functions the scholar is the delegated