of each individual; and he was impatient of any other. He did not
believe in association. The very idea of it involved a surrender by the
individual of some portion of his identity, and of course all the
reformers worked through their associations. With their general aims he
sympathized. "These reforms," he wrote, "are our contemporaries; they
are ourselves, our own light and sight and conscience; they only name
the relation which subsists between us and the vicious institutions
which they go to rectify." But with the methods of the reformers he had
no sympathy: "He who aims at progress should aim at an infinite, not at
a special benefit. The reforms whose fame now fills the land with
temperance, anti-slavery, non-resistance, no-government, equal labor,
fair and generous as each appears, are poor bitter things when
prosecuted for themselves as an end." Again: "The young men who have
been vexing society for these last years with regenerative methods seem
to have made this mistake: they all exaggerated some special means, and
all failed to see that the reform of reforms must be accomplished
without means."

Emerson did not at first discriminate between the movement of the
Abolitionists and the hundred and one other reform movements of the
period; and in this lack of discrimination lies a point of extraordinary
interest. The Abolitionists, as it afterwards turned out, had in fact
got hold of the issue which was to control the fortunes of the republic
for thirty years. The difference between them and the other reformers
was this: that the Abolitionists were men set in motion by the primary
and unreasoning passion of pity. Theory played small part in the
movement. It grew by the excitement which exhibitions of cruelty will
arouse in the minds of sensitive people.

It is not to be denied that the social conditions in Boston in 1831