tions—fate, moral corruption, and virtue. In effect, he transposes the political economy of populism (which derived, as we have seen, both from liberal and from republican antecedents) into the higher register of moral and ontological speculation. But he does not always live on these heights. He also talks about more mundane affairs; his consistent preoccupation is to show how ordinary concerns intersect with ultimate concerns—to consider the everyday in the light of the eternal, but also to draw on everyday experience in order to enrich our understanding of last things.

Emerson's works often address the topics of the day quite directly, and his social views can easily be recognized, I think, as the views of a nineteenth-century populist. He has a populist's disdain for the fashionable life of cities, which he repeatedly dismisses as a life fit only for "fops." In Nature, he speaks of the "advantage which the country-life possesses, for a powerful mind, over the artificial and curtailed life of cities." He returns to the attack in "Self-Reliance." "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." City society is "babyish," Emerson writes in a much later essay, "Wealth." It fosters vanity, luxury, and frivolous display. Though it sometimes puts wealth to good use in the form of libraries, galleries, and other "civilizing benefits," for the most part it subordinates the public uses of wealth to private amusement and thus makes wealth a "toy." We need cities as "centers where the best things are found," as Emerson calls them in "Culture," but they "degrade us by magnifying trifles." A countryman in the city finds himself "among a supple, glib-tongued tribe, who live for show, servile to public opinion." He misses the "lines of grandeur of the horizon, hills and plains, and with them sobriety and elevation."

Emerson believes in the moral value of manual labor. In "The American Scholar" (1837), he endorses the belief in the "dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen." In "Man the Reformer" (1841), he adds that although fairness clearly requires that a society's manual labor "be shared among all the members," the argument rests not on fairness alone but on the benefits conferred by such work. "A man should have a farm or a mechanical craft for his culture.... Not only health, but education is in the work." To the objection that the populist program would forgo the

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