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SELF-RELIANCE

There is no more deviation in the moral standard than
in the standard of height or bulk. No greater men are now
than ever were. A singular equality may be observed
between the great men of the first and of the last ages; nor
can all the science, art, religion, and philosophy of the
nineteenth century avail to educate greater men than
Plutarch's heroes, three or four and twenty centuries ago.
Not in time is the race progressive. Phocion, Socrates,
Anaxagoras, Diogenes, are great men, but they leave no
class. He who is really of their class will not be called by
their name, but will be his own man, and, in his turn, the
founder of a sect. The arts and inventions of each period
are only its costume, and do not invigorate men. The harm
of the improved machinery may compensate its good.
Hudson and Behring accomplished so much in their
fishing-boats, as to astonish Parry and Franklin, whose
equipment exhausted the resources of science and art.
Galileo, with an opera-glass, discovered a more splendid
series of celestial phenomena than any one since.
Columbus found the New World in an undecked boat. It is
curious to see the periodical disuse and perishing of
means and machinery, which were introduced with loud
laudation a few years or centuries before. The great genius
returns to essential man. We reckoned the improvements
of the art of war among the triumphs of science, and yet
Napoleon conquered Europe by the bivouac, which
consisted of falling back on naked valor, and
disencumbering it of all aids. The Emperor held it
impossible to make a perfect army, says Las Casas,
"without abolishing our arms, magazines, commissaries,
and carriages, until, in imitation of the Roman custom,
the soldier should receive his supply of corn, grind it in
his hand-mill, and bake his bread himself."

Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the
water of which it is composed does not. The same particle
does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only
phenomenal. The persons who make up a nation to-day,
next year die, and their experience with them.

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