Nor pauseth in His plan,
Will take the sun out of the skies
Ere freedom out of man."

The new National League of Independent Workmen of America has very
appropriately taken its motto from Emerson:--

"For what avail the plough or sail
Or land or life, if freedom fail?"

The sympathetic reader of Emerson comes often upon passages written long
ago which are positively startling in their anticipation of sentiments
common to-day and apparently awakened by very recent events. One would
suppose that the following passage was written yesterday. It was
written fifty-six years ago. "And so, gentlemen, I feel in regard to
this aged England, with the possessions, honors, and trophies, and also
with the infirmities of a thousand years gathering around her,
irretrievably committed as she now is to many old customs which cannot
be suddenly changed; pressed upon by the transitions of trade, and new
and all incalculable modes, fabrics, arts, machines, and competing
populations,--I see her not dispirited, not weak, but well remembering
that she has seen dark days before;--indeed with a kind of instinct that
she sees a little better in a cloudy day, and that in storm of battle
and calamity, she has a secret vigor and a pulse like a cannon."

Before the Civil War the Jew had no such place in society as he holds
to-day. He was by no means so familiar to Americans as he is now.
Emerson speaks twice of the Jew in his essay on Fate, in terms precisely
similar to those we commonly hear to-day: "We see how much will has been
expended to extinguish the Jew, in vain.... The sufferance which is the