lish success has grown out of the very renunciation of principles, and the dedication to outsides? A civility of trifles, of money and expense, an erudition of sensation takes place, and the putting as many impediments as we can between the man and his objects. Hardly the bravest among them have the manliness to resist it successfully. Hence it has come that not the aims of a manly life, but the means of meeting a certain ponderous expense, is that which is to be considered by a youth in England emerging from his minority.

This could serve as an equally apt description of the United States today, a country that has inherited England's power and wealth along with the spiritual torpor that already, in Emerson's day, foreshadowed England's decline. The vastness of the British empire, Emerson understands, contains "no vast hope." Englishmen enjoy all the requirements of a good life except appropriate outlets for their energy and ambition, which therefore aim only to become well educated, clever, and comfortable. It says a great deal about the reduced scale of this ambition, according to Emerson, that a "large family is reckoned a misfortune" and that even the "death of the young" presents itself as a blessing in disguise, since a "source of expense" is thereby closed. ^* A society that finds so little for young people to do cannot welcome new members with much enthusiasm—another sign, as Emerson puts it in another context, that England now "lives on its capital."

In 1856, it was still possible to hope that things would turn out otherwise in the New World. "There, in that great sloven continent, in high Allegheny pastures, in the sea-wide sky-skirted prairie, still sleeps and murmurs and hides the great mother, long since driven away from the trim

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*	These considerations may help to explain the curious belief, referred to in chapter 3, that runs through sentimental Victorian fiction, that children are better off dead.

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