Page 58 - SampleIssue

KING PELLINORE’S LITERARY MAGAZINE

And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance
on governments which protect it, is the want of self-
reliance. Men have looked away from themselves and at
things so long, that they have come to esteem the
religious, learned, and civil institutions as guards of
property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because
they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure
their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by
what each is. But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of
his property, out of new respect for his nature. Especially
he hates what he has, if he see that it is accidental, —
came to him by inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels
that it is not having; it does not belong to him, has no root
in him, and merely lies there, because no revolution or no
robber takes it away. But that which a man is does always
by necessity acquire, and what the man acquires is living
property, which does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs,
or revolutions, or fire, or storm, or bankruptcies, but
perpetually renews itself wherever the man breathes. "Thy
lot or portion of life," said the Caliph Ali, "is seeking after
thee; therefore be at rest from seeking after it." Our
dependence on these foreign goods leads us to our slavish
respect for numbers. The political parties meet in
numerous conventions; the greater the concourse, and
with each new uproar of announcement, The delegation
from Essex! The Democrats from New Hampshire! The
Whigs of Maine! the young patriot feels himself stronger
than before by a new thousand of eyes and arms. In like
manner the reformers summon conventions, and vote and
resolve in multitude. Not so, O friends! will the God deign
to enter and inhabit you, but by a method precisely the
reverse. It is only as a man puts off all foreign support,
and stands alone, that I see him to be strong and to
prevail. He is weaker by every recruit to his banner. Is not
a man better than a town? Ask nothing of men, and in the
endless mutation, thou only firm column must presently
appear the upholder of all that surrounds thee. He who
knows that power is inborn, that he is weak because he

58