at his greater and lesser means, and his share in the great future which opens before the people of this country."
Page 137, note 1. In the autumn following his Address to the Divinity Students in 1838, Mr. Emerson had been so much denounced for his dangerous heresies that it almost seemed to him that his lecture courses, on which he largely depended for support, might not be attended. He evidently began to consider man's primitive means of support, for he wrote in the journal of September 30, immediately in connection with some entries, suggested by the attacks made upon him:—
"It seems as if a man should learn to fish, to plant or to hunt that he might be secure if he were cast out from society and not be painful to his friends and fellow men."
While planting his potatoes this comforting thought occurred: "A great fact of much import to the new philosophical opinions is the garden discovery that a potato put into a hole, in six weeks becomes ten. This is the miracle of the multiplication of loaves."
And again, May, 1839: "I think we ought to have manual labor, each man. Why else this rapid impoverishing which brings every man continually to the presence of the fact that bread is by the sweat of the face."
Page 139, note 1. It should be remembered that this address was written at the period when the old New England farming had not yet quite passed into the new. The farmer and his boys were still working together on many farms, and the mother and daughters doing dairy and household work. The farmer was less of a trader than he must be now to succeed, for he and his family mainly lived off the farm. The machine-farming was but beginning, and most farm-work, and even marketing, was done at the pace of the ox, and the
