the melting pot. Emerson did not. If we were to sum up his attitude towards the state in a single sentence, it would take some such form as this: The State exists for the benefit of all the individuals in it: and its stability and its welfare depend primarily on the effort of each individual in it. All concrete advance towards social regeneration, he believed, is accomplished by minorities—by minorities of one! In a country with a strong inclination towards beginning all efforts for moral reformation by the election of a president and a secretary, he proposes this modest method: "Count from yourself in order the persons that have near relation to you up to ten or fifteen, and see if you can consider your whole relation to each without squirming. That will be something." Commenting, in "Life and Letters in New England," on a socialistic scheme for imposing economic salvation on the world from No. 200 Broadway, he surmises that it would be better to say: "Let us be lovers and servants of that which is just, and straighway every man becomes a center of a holy and beneficent republic, which he sees to include all men in its law, like that of Plato and Christ." Let the great state arch above us, but let it beware of pressing too near, lest it crush more natural and vital powers—the power of the individual over himself; the power of the family, the neighborhood, the town-meeting, the local enterprise; the "atmospheric" power of culture, the gradual and beneficent pressure of a
