With respect to association as a means of reform, I have seen no reason to
change my view. Though, like the monastic, a life of devotion, to severe
criticism it offers a selfish and an unheroic aspect. When your letter
first spoke of your personal interest in the movement, I had written you a
long statement of my thought, which I did not send, and then partly spun
into an article for _The Present_, which I did not entirely finish. It was
only a strong statement of Individualism, which would not be new to you,
perhaps, and the essential reason of which could not be readily treated.
What we call union seems to me only a name for a phase of individual
action. I live only for myself; and in proportion to my own growth, so I
benefit others. As Fourier seems to me to have postponed his life, in
finding out how to live, so I often felt it was with Mr. Ripley. Besides,
I feel that our evils are entirely individual, not social. What is society
but the shadow of the single men behind it. That there is a slave on my
plantation or a servant in my kitchen is no evil; but that the slave and
servant should be unwilling to be so, that is the difficulty. The weary
and the worn do not ask of me an asylum, but aid. The need of the most
oppressed man is strength to endure, not means of escape. The slave
toiling in the Southern heats is a nobler aspect of thought than the freed
black upon the shore of England. That is just now the point which pains me
in association, its lack of heroism. Reform is purification, forming anew,
not forming again. Love, like genius, uses the means that are, and the
opportunities of to-day. If paints are wanting, it draws charcoal heads
with Michael Angelo. These crooked features of society we cannot rend and
twist into a Roman outline and grace; but they may be animated with a soul
that will utterly shame our carved and painted faces. A noble man purges
these present relations, and does not ask beautiful houses and landscapes
and appliances to make life beautiful. In Wall Street he gives another
significance to trade; in the City Hall he justifies its erection; in the
churches he interprets to themselves the weekly assembly of citizens. He