Emerson's interest in "virtue" and "character" as the proper ends of political life, though seldom couched in the rhetoric of citizenship, links him to the republican and populist traditions. "It is a peremptory point of virtue that a man's independence be secured," he writes in "Wealth." A debtor is a "slave." "When one observes in the hotels and palaces of our Atlantic capitals the habit of expense, the riot of the senses, the absence of bonds, clanship, fellow-feeling of any kind—he feels that when a man or a woman is driven to the wall, the chances of integrity are frightfully diminished." Poverty and luxury alike erode independence. The "manly part" is to find an honorable line of work and to pursue it "with might and main." The "brave workman" forfeits "grace" and "elegance" but gains "a certain haughtiness." The "mechanic at his bench," with his "quiet heart and assured manners," deals "on even terms with men of any condition." Those who speak through their "faithful work" can "afford not to conciliate."

By the middle of the nineteenth century, republican "virtue" had lost most of its earlier associations with the pursuit of glory, as we have seen, and now survived, in a residual form, chiefly as a synonym for the independence conferred by property ownership and an honest calling. Emerson shares his contemporaries' concern with the social preconditions of "virtue and self-respect"—qualities explicitly linked together in "Friendship" and in a number of other essays. But he restores all the earlier connotations of virtue as well: "energy of the spirit," "genius," "force," "vigor." The "vigor of wild virtue" equips us for the "rugged battle of fate." It dissolves "cowardly doubts" and "skepticism." It frees man from "condescension to circumstances." It cannot be learned in libraries or drawing rooms, in "tea, essays and catechism." It needs "rougher instruction"—"men, labor, trade, farming, war, hunger, plenty, love, hatred, doubt and terror." Virtue overcomes "natural force," perhaps because it partakes of this same excess in nature—its overflowing vitality and abundance, its fullness and profusion, its willingness to sacrifice the individual to the species. Virtue is heedless of personal safety and comfort. Its antithesis, as Emerson makes clear in "Heroism" (1841), his most extended

-274-