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SELF-RELIANCE

If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises,
they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say
he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our
colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year
afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York,
it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in
being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life.
A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in
turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it,
peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes
to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive
years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a
hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his
days, and feels no shame in not 'studying a profession,' for
he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not
one chance, but a hundred chances. Let a Stoic open the
resources of man, and tell men they are not leaning
willows, but can and must detach themselves; that with
the exercise of self-trust, new powers shall appear; that a
man is the word made flesh, born to shed healing to the
nations, that he should be ashamed of our compassion,
and that the moment he acts from himself, tossing the
laws, the books, idolatries, and customs out of the
window, we pity him no more, but thank and revere him,
— and that teacher shall restore the life of man to
splendor, and make his name dear to all history.

It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work
a revolution in all the offices and relations of men; in their
religion; in their education; in their pursuits; their modes
of living; their association; in their property; in their
speculative views.

1. In what prayers do men allow themselves! That
which they call a holy office is not so much as brave and
manly. Prayer looks abroad and asks for some foreign
addition to come through some foreign virtue, and loses
itself in endless mazes of natural and supernatural, and
mediatorial and miraculous. Prayer that craves a
particular commodity, — any thing less than all good, —

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