"immense advantages reaped by the division of labor" and "put men back into barbarism," Emerson replies that although he sees "no instant prospect of a virtuous revolution," he would gladly sacrifice some of the "conveniences" of civilization to the moral culture conferred by farming or a craft. "I should not be pained at a change which threatened a loss of some of the luxuries or conveniences of society, if it proceeded from a preference of the agricultural life out of the belief that our primary duties as men could be better discharged in that calling." In "Wealth," he extols subsistence farming in language reminiscent of Brownson or Cobbett.

When men now alive were born, the farm yielded everything that was consumed on it. The farm yielded no money, and the farmer got on without. If he fell sick, his neighbors came in to his aid; each gave a day's work, or a half day; or lent his yoke of oxen, or his horse, and kept his work even; hoed his potatoes, mowed his hay, reaped his rye; well knowing that no man could afford to hire labor without selling his land. In autumn a farmer could sell an ox or a hog and get a little money to pay taxes withal. Now, the farmer buys almost all he consumes— tinware, cloth, sugar, tea, coffee, fish, coal, railroad tickets and newspapers.

It was precisely the farmer's growing dependence on the market, according to liberals like Theodore Parker, that not only expanded the demand for commodities of every kind but expanded the farmer's intellectual horizons, giving him access—as Emerson's examples remind us—to the news of the day, travel to distant places, and all the other advantages of modern life. Emerson's skepticism about all this puts him directly at odds with the prevailing political economy. So does his conviction that the cultivation of citizens, not the protection of property, is the proper object of political action. In "Politics" (1844), he argues that the prevailing social arrangements allow "the rich to encroach on the poor" and that "the whole constitution of property," moreover, "is injurious, ... its influence on persons deteriorating and degrading." But the same considerations that lead Emerson to condemn the political economy of Adam Smith and Theodore Parker, "Malthus and Ricardo," also lead him to abstain from an unqualified endorsement of the principal alternatives to it. In

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