who keeps watch in the universe and lets no offence go unchastised." Injustice defies fate and thus invites retaliation. Sooner or later, in one way or another, the hollow triumphs it makes possible turn to dust. The inexorable force of fate, as Emerson sees it, nowhere shows itself more clearly than in the principle of compensation, the "vindictive circumstance" or "deep remedial force" in nature that overrides our designs and imposes a heavy tax on every attempt to surmount or circumvent it. Compensation is the "law of laws," and it is "fatal." Punishment "ripens within the flower of pleasure"; it grows out of the same stem as the crime. "Men seek to be great; they would have offices, wealth, power and fame. They think that to be great is to possess one side of nature—the sweet, without the other side, the bitter." But sooner or later they find that "pleasure is taken out of pleasant things, profit out of profitable things, power out of strong things, as soon as we seek to separate them from the whole." No amount of unscrupulous boldness or ingenuity can detach the part from the whole, the cause from the effect, the end from the means.

Calvinist theologians spoke of God's "vindictive" justice, thereby offending liberal ministers who pleaded for a softer, more amiable conception of justice. Emerson restores the older conception in all its uncompromising severity. He shows that it was not only old-line Calvinists who recognized the law of retribution; it is universally recognized, according to Emerson, in the world's mythology and folklore. Like Edwards, he rests his case on observation of "daily life," which indicates that men and women intuitively understand the principle of compensation. Preachers may deny it, but the people affirm it in their proverbs: "Tit for tat; an eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth; blood for blood; measure for measure; love for love." The people see more deeply into things than the official guardians of morality.

Men are better than their theology.... That which the droning world, chained to appearances, will not allow the realist to say in his own words, it will suffer him to say in proverbs without contradiction. And this law of laws, which the pulpit, the senate and the college deny, is hourly preached in all markets and workshops by flights of proverbs, whose teaching is as true and as omnipresent as that of birds and flies.

-269-