the coarsest manual labor, ... there is a spirit of cowardly compromise." Young men "cannot see much virtue" in the "daily employments" open to them, and they cry out for something "worthy to do." In "Character," Emerson concedes that even commerce can elicit "genius" but adds that "this virtue draws the mind more when it appears in action to ends not so mixed." In the nineteenth century, however, unmixed ends are in short supply—occupations, in other words, commensurate with the capacity for devotion and wonder.

English Traits, Emerson's most extended venture into social criticism, can be read as an elaboration of this last thought. Emerson admires the English—their "thoroughness" and "pluck," their rude strength, veracity, and common sense, their "supreme eye to facts." He thinks these qualities, however, might have been brought to the service of a better cause than "magnificence and endless wealth." England is the "best of actual nations," but an excessive concern with comfort, a "headlong bias to utility," and a "self-conceited modish life made up of trifles" have coarsened the English character and led to a loss of "commanding views in literature, philosophy and science." Emerson does not minimize the hardiness and wisdom that have "made this small territory great," turning an "ungenial land" into a "paradise of comfort and plenty." Anyone who still thinks of him as an addled idealist with his head in the clouds should read English Traits, with its carefully observed social details and its appreciative account of a "fruitful, luxurious and imperial" civilization. "No want and no waste," as Emerson sees it, is by no means the worst principle on which to build a nation; nor is it a negligible accomplishment to have "diffused the taste for plain substantial hats, shoes and coats throughout Europe." The English make things as if they meant it. "They build of stone: public and private buildings are massive and durable." The same quality appears in their speech, their "power of saying rude truth, sometimes in the lion's mouth."

Their respect for workmanship notwithstanding, the English have nevertheless created a civilization in which a "manly" life becomes more and more difficult to achieve. Their very success, which strengthens "base wealth" and "vulgar aims," dampens youthful ardor or else forces it into the wrong channels.

Who can propose to youth poverty and wisdom, when mean gain has arrived at the conquest of letters and arts; when Eng

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