Howard Dean is always first!

Howard Dean is undoubtedly first!

Do you think we could give McCain his 'n'?  loL

It would be nice to get an explanation of what the problem with the sequencing is.

new post on hannah 

♡ It's still Dean ♡

listener
Fri, 03/28/08

Thank you

hi listener!  waving madly....  :)

84.

Jo*in*Vermont
Fri, 03/28/08


things truly are changing in this country - a certain republican...who has NEVER voted for a democrat in his life, that person is now voting for Obama.

we have more in common than not.
----------

Amen!

Today's Gallup Poll Daily tracking update finds Barack Obama with an eight percentage point advantage over Hillary Clinton (50% to 42%), this gives him a statistically significant advantage for the first time since before the Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy

http://www.gallup.com/poll/105814/Gallup-Daily-Obama-Back-Into-Lead-Democratic-Race.aspx

Some Democrats terrified that their bloody primary campaign will doom them in November are floating a consolation prize for Hillary Clinton: governor of New York.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/129399

6+ hrs. late.

BlogPac 

Some Democrats terrified that their bloody primary campaign will doom them in November are floating a consolation prize for Hillary Clinton: governor of New York.

Saints preserve us!!!!! 

That's sounds an awful lot like our FIght McCai, not each other petition.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

As in: Fight McCain?  

Sometimes, spell checkers are *wonderful*. . . .

Clever puddle, attaching the DNC money ask to Rosie.  It actually works.  only thing, they now want the extra four diggets for the zip, but don't seem particular about the match.  I don't know my extra four, so put in any old number.  Most of these software programs only care that all the blanks are filled in; not that the info actually matches.

spell checkers aren't much good with proper names.

What I think is that the christian and judaic religions are an effort to compensate for real-life abusive parents, but that once the damage is done and the individual feels rejected by his/her progenitor, it's very difficult to negate the inferiority complex.  Indeed, it's the effort to cancel out the feeling of inferiority by assuming a superior stance which, in turn, leads to the subjugation of someone else.  So, abuse breeds abuse. 

Zip+4 Lookup

SoapBlox (what legitimate blogware looks like) 

...her situation, emergency room, because she was too poor to afford Obama's expensive health care, she would then have been penalized to even use emergency room.

======================

Linda is confusing Obama's  modus operandi with the one Clinton used. 

Obama's plan is in a constant state of flux and he has expressed a willingness to discuss and form the plan with others.  His proposals so far represent his own ideas, not decrees of a fait accompli undertaking like Hillary did in the 1990s, which she tries to force down everybody's throats.

She says she learned, but her followers blame her failure on the unwillingness of others to accept her plan, whereas Obama will allow others to form a plan with him - a big difference.

Monica, my checker picked up on both: the capital I in flght, and McCai  ~~ it let "McCain" go. . . .

puddle, Rosie is now installed on Hannah, with the link.  I feel so proud.  LOL

mainefem, I don't want to know my +4.  Don't even want to have the 5.  Was time when the postman could find us with just the name and the town.  Now we get mail that should have gone to new zealand.  And the mailman says it's the GPS fault.

I got an e-mail from Dean today, asking for money so the DNC can go after McCain.

The Democrats have to rearrange their priorities and go after McCain now with the considerable resources they already possess.

He's getting a free ride from the "liberal mediia", Asshole Bill Clinton is calling him a "moderate" and the Democratic candidates are lobbing softballs that McCain's Swifties hit out of the park.

Gore didn't go after Bush, he lost. Kerry didn't attack Bush, he lost. The Democrats are wasting valuable time while this frightening old Putz defines himself as the country's salvation, and the Democrats indulge in an orgy of mutual destruction.

Meanwhile McCain and his allies are framing them as "soft on terrorism" and "tax and spend".

Einstein nailed it. Insanity is making the same mistakes over and over, and expecting a different result.

We do need a new party. The Democrats are the 21'st century Whigs.

Buried by the HQ incompetents at 6:33pm

Pat

That was a good post, thank you. 

listener

Great post.  I'll read it.  

Who *invented* the monotheistic god?  Does anyone know? 

Obama's plan is in a constant state of flux and he has expressed a willingness to discuss and form the plan with others.  His proposals so far represent his own ideas,

Alas, Fred, Obama's  "plan" caters to the health-care industry, which has donated big bucks to his campaign.

What part of Universal Single Payer doesn't he understand?

Buried at 6:38 pm

      By Mark S. Smith
Skirball Professor of Bible and Near Eastern Studies
New York University   

    For decades, scholars have tried to penetrate the Bible's story about Israelite monotheism. According to traditional interpretations of the Bible, monotheism was part of Israel's original covenant with Yahweh on Mount Sinai, and the idolatry subsequently criticized by the prophets was due to Israel's backsliding from its own heritage and history with Yahweh. However, scholars have long noted that beneath this presentation lies a number of questions. Why do the Ten Commandments command that there should be no other gods "before Me" (the Lord), if there are no other gods as claimed by other biblical texts? Why should the Israelites sing at the crossing of the Red Sea that "there is no god like You, O Lord?" (Exodus 15:11). Such passages suggest that Israelites knew about other gods and did not simply reject them. It seems that Israelites may have known of other deities and perhaps various passages suggest that behind the Bible's broader picture of monotheism was a spectrum of polytheisms that centered on the worship of Yahweh as the pantheon's greatest figure.

Temple reveals secrets of the one God
Archaeologists believe they have uncovered origins of monotheism in northern Jordan

Stephanie Saldana
Daily Star, Lebanon
5 March 2002

AMMAN: In a remote corner of Jordan, archaeologists have uncovered a room that may transform the way we think about God.

Its massive stones still clinging to the damp hills of the Jordan River Valley, the Migdol Temple at first appears to be little more than an ancient network of fortified walls. Yet when Jordanian and Australian archaeologists working at the site of ancient Pella began piecing it together in 1997, it didn't take them long to realize that they were reconstructing something extraordinary: a 3,600-year-old textbook in stone.

The Migdol Temple charts within a single room one of the most important events in human history: the transition from polytheism to the belief in one God.

Measuring an impressive 29 by 22 meters, the Migdol Temple is the largest Bronze and Iron Age Temple known to man, an enormous structure justified in its size and emotional impact to the worship of a single God, and which may at one point have functioned as a four-storey temple to the Canaanite god El. These days, however, religious and historical scholars are far less excited about the temple's size than by the magnitude of its historical importance.

http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Culture/Monotheism.html 

Most mainstream Old Testament scholars believe that the religion of the early Israelites was neither monotheistic nor polytheistic but “monolatrous.” While the existence of other gods was not denied, Israel was to worship no god but Yahweh. In virtue of the Mosaic covenant, Yahweh became the “confederate god” of Israel, and they become his people (Meek: 215). In part, this is characteristic of any “national religion: in practice only the gods of one's own nation are significant.” Yet it was also unique, for “one of the distinguishing characteristics of the Israelite religion is the belief that there are not several gods of Israel but only one, Yahweh, who claims exclusive devotion.” (Ringgren: 67) There are no unambiguous assertions of monotheism from the pre-exilic period, however. Even so, biblical scholars agree that the religion of Israel was at least “incipiently” monotheistic from its Mosaic beginnings. Why? Three things were arguably decisive.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/monotheism/#1 

Well, that's enuf of that for now.  LOL

Perhaps the book that listener told us about has answers. 

puddle, good clickies!

1. Monotheism's Origins

Most mainstream Old Testament scholars believe that the religion of the early Israelites was neither monotheistic nor polytheistic but “monolatrous.” While the existence of other gods was not denied, Israel was to worship no god but Yahweh. In virtue of the Mosaic covenant, Yahweh became the “confederate god” of Israel, and they become his people

=======================

Like "my dog's better than your dog?"

Alas, Fred, Obama's  "plan" caters to the health-care industry, which has donated big bucks to his campaign.

What part of Universal Single Payer doesn't he understand?

==================

I think that's what I think is good about Obama's "plan"

I agree neither one of them have a plan I like, but on the other hand one has to be extremely cagey going into a presidential election.  Promising to cover all and addressing the snafus and snags people have experienced, like huge deductibles, non-coverage, and ineligibility, like previously existing conditions is a much better way to evoke sympathy for universal coverage and single-payer than proposing it out-and-out as "socialized medicine"

It is an evolutionary process that the public has to engage.  While I understand polls show the country closer to accepting universal coverage, or "socialized medicine" I think an incremental approach is good.

for example IMO the USSR broke up too fast and that laid the ground work for pervasive corruption.  We are seeing the backlash for that with Putin's new form of "democratic" authoritarianism.

Thank you, Governor Dean for speaking up.
Thank you, Senator Leahy for speaking up.

Iraq in 30 Seconds
Posted by Moira Whelan

News has been coming fast out of Iraq, and folks are collecting information and trying to decipher what is going on. At this time, most analysts are saying the situation is unclear. One contact of mine working in Iraq gave this quick assessment which is interesting:

Best case scenario: the Iraqi central government seizes this opportunity to demonstrate strength and unity. They hold strong and isolate the problems in Basra. They gain confidence going forward, but ultimately 1/3 of Iraq becomes ungovernable.

Worst case scenario: the Iraqi central government and the military do not step up, and all hell breaks lose.

I’m not saying this is absolute, but bottom line, I think “bleak” is a good description at this point.

http://www.democracyarsenal.org/

Wow!  Look at all I missed after the store got busy, my laptop's four hour battery juiced out and I drove home!  LOL!

Thanks, Seashell and Fred!

Yes, I'd say it was the Hebrew people who most strongly went for a monotheistic God, but there were also bits of it in various faiths and cults...including some of the fertility Goddess groups.   What I appreciate about it is the idear that all is ONE, all is interconnected ~ and when you recognise that they didn't realise how true that really is...we're all on one planet, in one solar system, in one universe, in one existence.  And they were just imagining their little region!  But it works at any level.  In many ways monotheism and Buddhism have a lot in common, since both bow to the reality that we're all in this together.  

What I most appreciated when I studied the Hebrew Scriptures was that the "I will be your God and you will be my people" thing was really an amazing Covenant of protection and fairness...unlike anything else in its day.  Even "an eye for an eye" was a huge improvement in its day over the concept of "your entire family and all your land for an eye." The idear was to be fair, not brutal. Sort of the original "let the punishment fit the crime." 

I will warn, regarding the book I recommended, that the type is smaller than average (though readable) and the layout not gorgeous...the print goes up high on the page...not very gentle on the eyes in general.  But it is a book that I know is long overdue.  As someone who meets with people who are seeking spiritual guidance, I can tell you that everything a person of faith imagines is connected at the core level to their particular view of God...or, I should say, views of God, because most people are influenced by many different (and conflicting) views of God, such as the view their family passed on, the prevailing view among their closest peers, the views accepted in the culture, and their own experiences.  What often happens is that sometime in their 40's they trip over the reality that how they "behave" in relation to the faith tradition's "shoulds" (often portraying a God of who expects "right" behaviour) is in strong disagreement with how they have experienced a tender and loving and humourous God.  Once they see what they're doing, they can usually let go of the outmoded views.  I swear that some of those views are hangovers from the Inquisition and the basic mode of authoritative types who were doing as much "crowd control" as they were doing teaching on faith.  If you can control the masses, your view of God gets to stay in power.  I find that real faith tends to go underground in times of oppression.  

In fact, seeing Tibet rise up in protest may be sign of inner strength...in that they aren't cowering out of view despite what it will mean. Unfortunately, violence begets violence. 

Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love.  ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

7:44pm EDT

I just posted a long post about monotheism and violence.  

Sorry for the mixup of when things post 

***DFA BLOGMEISTERS!!!  ... "H O W * L O N G ???" before this sequencing is FIXED???

Can't someone just add Timestamps again???

SERIOUSLY...if you need help fixing this, PLEASE EMAIL ME!!!
My son lives in Burlington and makes websites for a living
...so he may be able to assist.   

Bummer about the extra space thing.   SORRY BLOG!! 

listener waves to Jo*in*Vermont 

and sends greetings of thanks for all the kind remarks "up"thread!

Well, enough sitting down for me.

I have to go fill an order for greeting cards, then
clean my home office, as we have guests coming Sun & Mon
and I have to work all day tomorrow and cook all evening.

And I have swollen glands on top of having shingles!
{ I think I need to go on retreat for a month.  Ha! }

Democrat Barack Obama seemed to suggest in an interview aired Friday that his former pastor has acknowledged that his controversial remarks were inappropriate and hurtful, although there are no public accounts of the minister having done so.

Obama discussed his relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright on ABC's "The View," which was taped Thursday and aired Friday.

"Had the reverend not retired and had he not acknowledged that what he had said had deeply offended people and were inappropriate and mischaracterized what I believe is the greatness of this country, for all its flaws, then I wouldn't have felt comfortable staying there at the church," Obama said.

Obama spokesman Bill Burton said the senator's remarks did not imply that Wright has expressed misgivings about his statements.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080328/ap_o...

Barack Obama got a surprise boost in the last big state of the long Democratic campaign Friday with an endorsement from Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey Jr., while another Obama supporter sought to nudge Hillary Rodham Clinton out of the race.
ADVERTISEMENT

Clinton leads by double-digits in Pennsylvania polls, and Obama hopes Casey's endorsement will earn him a second look from the state's white, working class and Catholic voters — groups that have leaned toward Clinton in other Democratic contests this year.

Clinton, on the other hand, is hoping a victory in Pennsylvania will help persuade party "superdelegates" to support her and allow her to catch Obama in the race for National Convention delegates.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont senator who endorsed Obama in January, said she was never going to win enough delegates, and he suggested she should throw in the towel in "the interests of a Democratic victory in November." A number of Democrats have expressed concern that Republican John McCain is getting a head start while Obama and Clinton fight on.

Undeterred, Clinton said the competition would only strengthen the party in the long run.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080328/ap_o...

http://www.grist.org/news/2008/03/21/kansas_coal/index.html

new thread

this will prolly be the last post of this thread.  LOL

listener wrote "I just posted a long post about monotheism and violence."

I don't think that there's much connection bet. mono and Buddhism, except for the teaching  of the Oneness, which most monotheistic religions do not preach or practice as evidenced by the endless wars and killing.  I think monotheism ideally is supposed to teach that we are One and that there is no other god, and certainly no god that is *better* than any other.  Unfortunately, we now have poly-gods,each one better than the other, according to one's point of view, nationality, ideology etc.   And to think that 3 major religions sprang from the *loins* of Abraham...warring endlessly and aggressively.

Buddhism is pacific and eschews war. 

Perhaps we need to go back to worshipping Mother Nature and the tree nymphs.  :-) 

Liberal, --- and Conservative?

For all who want to know what the meaning of Liberalism, "Innovation", and Conservatism is, Ralph Waldo Emerson explains both in "The Conservative", A Lecture delivered at the Masonic Temple, Boston, Mass. December 9, 1841.

For all who would condemn Liberalism, "Innovation" and praise Conservatism, if you are a part of the 70% MAJORITY COMMON POPULATION as a Class and Culture, I strongly recommend that you read the full text of "The Conservative", as follows:


"THE CONSERVATIVE", a Lecture by Ralph Waldo Emerson - Essays and Lectures; Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 83-5447

THE TWO PARTIES which divide the state, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation, are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made. This quarrel is the subject of civil history. The conservative party established the reverend hierarchies and monarchies of the most ancient world. The battle of patrician and plebeian, of parent state and colony, of old usage and accommodation to new facts, of the rich and the poor, reappears in all countries and times. The war rages not only in battlefields, in national councils, and ecclesiastical synods, but agitates every man's bosom with opposing advantages every hour. On rolls the old world meantime, and now one, now the other gets the day, and still the fight renews itself as if for the first time, under new names and hot personalities.

Such an irreconcilable antagonism, of course, must have a correspondent depth of seat in the human constitution. It is the opposition of Past and Future, of Memory and Hope, of the Understanding and the Reason. It is the primal antagonism, the appearance in trifles of the two poles of nature.

There is a fragment of old fable which seems somehow to have been dropped from the current mythologies, which may deserve attention, as it appears to relate to this subject.

Saturn grew weary of sitting alone, or with none but the great Uranus or Heaven beholding him, and he created an oyster. Then he would act again, but he made nothing more, but went on creating the race of oysters. Then Uranus cried, 'a new work, O Saturn! the old is not good again.'

Saturn replied. 'I fear. There is not only the alternative of making and not making, but also of unmaking. Seest thou the great sea, how it ebbs and flows? so is it with me; my power ebbs; and if I put forth my hands, I shall not do, but undo. Therefore I do what I have done; I hold what I have got; and so I resist Night and Chaos.'

'O Saturn,' replied Uranus, 'thou canst not hold thine own, but by making more. Thy oysters are barnacles and cockles, and with the next flowing of the tide, they will be pebbles and sea-foam.'

'I see,' rejoins Saturn, 'thou art in league with Night, thou art become an evil eye; thou spakest from love; now thy words smite me with hatred. I appeal to Fate, must there not be rest?' --- 'I appeal to Fate also,' said Uranus, 'must there not be motion?' --- But Saturn was silent, and went on making oysters for a thousand years.

After that, the word of Uranus came into his mind like a ray of the sun, and he made Jupiter; and then he feared again; and nature froze, the things that were made went backward, and, to save the world, Jupiter slew his father Saturn.

This may stand for the earliest account of a conversation on politics between a Conservative and a Radical, which has come down to us. It is ever thus. It is the counteraction of the centripetal and the centrifugal forces. Innovation is the salient energy; Conservatism the pause on the last movement. 'That which is was made by God,' saith Conservatism. 'He is leaving that, he is entering this other;' rejoins Innovation.

There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact. It affirms because it holds. Its fingers clutch the fact, and it will not open its eyes to see a better fact. The castle, which conservatism is set to defend, is the actual state of things, good and bad. The project of innovation is the best possible state of things. Of course, conservatism always has the worst of the argument, is always apologizing, pleading a necessity, pleading that to change would be to deteriorate; it must saddle itself with the mountainous load of the violence and vice of society, must deny the possibility of good, deny ideas, and suspect and stone the prophet; whilst innovation is always in the right, triumphant, attacking, and sure of final success. Conservatism stands on man's confessed limitations; reform on his indisputable infinitude; conservatism on circumstance; liberalism on power; one goes to make an adroit member of the social frame; the other to postpone all things to the man himself; conservatism is debonnair and social; reform is individual and imperious. We are reformers in spring and summer; in autum and winter, we stand by the old; reformers in the morning, conservers at night. Reform is affirmative, conservatism negative; conservatism goes for comfort, reform for truth. Conservatism is more candid to behold another's worth; reform more disposed to maintain and increase its own. Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention; it is all memory. Reform has no gratitude, no prudence, no husbandry. It makes a great difference to your figure and to your thought, whether your foot is advancing or receding. Conservatism never puts the foot forward; in the hour when it does that, it is not establishment, but reform. Conservatism tends to universal seeming and treachery, believes in a negative fate; believes that men's temper governs them; that for me, it avails not to trust in principles; they will fail me; I must bend a little; it distrusts nature; it thinks there is a general law without a particular application, --- law for all that does not include any one. Reform in its antagonism inclines to asinine resistance, to kick with hoofs; it runs to egotism and bloated self-conceit; it runs to a bodiless pretension, to unnatural refining and elevation, which ends in hypocrisy and sensual reaction.

And so whilst we do not go beyond general statements, it may be safely affirmed of these two metaphysical antagonists, that each is a good half, but an impossible whole. Each exposes the abuses of the other, but in a true society, in a true man, both must combine. Nature does not give the crown of its approbation, namely, beauty, to any action or emblem or actor, but to one which combines both these elements; not to the rock which resists the waves from age to age, nor to the wave which lashes incessantly the rock, but the superior beauty is with the oak which stands with its hundred arms against the storms of a century, and grows every year like a sapling; or the river which ever flowing, yet is found in the same bed from age to age; or, greatest of all, the man who has subsisted for years amid the changes of nature, yet has distanced himself, so that when you remember what he was, and see what he is, you say, what strides! what a disparity is here!

Throughout nature the past combines in every creature with the present. Each of the convolutions of the sea-shell, each node and spine marks one year of the fish's life, what was the mouth of the shell for one season, with the addition of a new matter by the growth of the animal, becoming an ornamental node. The leaves and a shell of soft wood are all that the vegetation of this summer has made, but the solid columnar stem, which lifts that bank of foliage into the air to draw the eye and to cool us with its shade, is the gift and legacy of dead and buried years.

In nature, each of these elements being always present, each theory has a natural support. As we take our stand on Necessity, or on Ethics, shall we go for the conservative, or for the reformer. If we read the world historically, we shall say, Of all the ages, the present hour and circumstance is the cumulative result; this is the best throw of the dice of nature that has yet been, or that is yet possible. If we see it from the side of Will, or the Moral Sentiment, we shall accuse the Past and the Present, and require the impossible of the Future.

But although this bifold fact lies thus united in real nature, and so united that no man can continue to exist in whom both these elements do not work, yet men are not philosophers, but are rather very foolish children, who, by reason of their partiality, see everything in the most absurd manner, and are the victims at all times of the nearest object. There is even no philosopher who is a philosopher at all times. Our experience, our perception is conditioned by the need to acquire in parts and in succession, that is, with every truth a certain falsehood. As this is the invariable method of our training, we must give it allowance, and suffer men to learn as they have done for six millenniums, a word at a time, to pair off into insane parties, and learn the amount of truth each knows, by the denial of an equal amount of truth. For the present, then, to come at what sum is attainable to us, we must even hear the parties plead as parties.

That which is best about conservatism, that which, though it cannot be expressed in detail, inspires reverence in all, is the Inevitable. There is the question not only, what the conservative says for himself? but, why must he say it? What insurmountable fact binds him to that side? Here is the fact which men call Fate, and fate in dread degrees, fate behind fate, not to be disposed of by the consideration that the Conscience commands this or that, but necessitating the question, whether the faculties of man will play him true in resisting the facts of universal experience? For although the commands of the Conscience are essentially absolute, they are historically limitary. Wisdom does not seek a literal rectitude, but an useful, that is, a conditioned one, such a one as the faculties of man and the constitution of things will warrant. The reformer, the partisan loses himself in driving to the utmost some specialty of right conduct, until his own nature and all nature resist him; but Wisdom attempts nothing enormous and disproportioned to its powers, nothing which it cannot perform or nearly perform. We have all a certain intellection or presentiment of reform existing in the mind, which does not yet descend into the character, and those who throw themselves blindly on this lose themselves. Whatever they attempt in that direction, fails, and reacts suicidally on the actor himself. This is the penalty of having transcended nature. For the existing world is not a dream, and cannot with impunity be treated as a dream; neither is it a disease; but it is the ground on which you stand, it is the mother of whom you were born. Reform converses with possibilities, perchance with impossibilities; but here is sacred fact. This also was true, or it could not be: it had life in it, or it could not have existed; it has life in it, or it could not continue. Your schemes may be feasible, or may not be, but this has the endorsement of nature and a long friendship and cohabitation with the powers of nature. This will stand until a better cast of the dice is made. The contest between the Future and the Past is one between Divinity entering, and Divinity departing. You are welcome to try your experiments, and, if you can, to displace the actual order by that ideal republic you announce, for nothing but God will expel God. But plainly the burden of proof must lie with the projector. We hold to this, until you can demonstrate something better.

The system of property and law goes back for its origin to barbarous and sacred times; it is the fruit of the same mysterious cause as the mineral or animal world. There is a natural sentiment and prepossession in favor of age, of ancestors, of barbarous and aboriginal usages, which is a homage to the element of necessity and divinity which is in them. The respect for the old names of places, of mountains, and streams, is universal. The Indian and barbarous name can never be supplanted without loss. The ancients tell us that the gods loved the Ethiopians for their stable customs; and the Egyptians and Chaldeans, whose origin could not be explored, passed among the junior tribes of Greece and Italy for sacred nations.

Moreover, so deep is the foundation of the existing social system, that it leaves no one out of it. We may be partial, but Fate is not. All men have their root in it. You who quarrel with the arrangements of society, and are willing to embroil all, and risk the indisputable good that exists, for the chance of better, live, move, and have your being in this, and your deeds contradict your words every day. For as you cannot jump from the ground without using the resistance of the ground, nor put out the boat to sea, without shoving from the shore, nor attain liberty without rejecting obligation, so you are under the necessity of using the Actual order of things, in order to disuse it; to live by it, whilst you wish to take away its life. The past has baked your loaf, and in the strength of its bread you would break up the oven. But you are betrayed by your own nature. You also are conservatives. However men please to style themselves, I see no other than a conservative party. You are not only identical with us in your needs, but also in your methods and aims. You quarrel with my conservatism, but it is to build up one of your own; it will have a new beginning, but the same course and end, the same trials, the same passions; among the lovers of the new I observe that there is a jealousy of the newest, and that the seceder from the seceder is as damnable as the pope himself.

On these and the like grounds of general statement, conservatism plants itself without danger of being displaced. Especially before this personal appeal, the innovator must confess his weakness, must confess that no man is to be found good enough to be entitled to stand champion for the principle. But when this great tendency comes to practical encounters, and is challenged by young men, to whom it is no abstraction, but a fact of hunger, distress, and exclusion from opportunities, it must needs seem injurious. The youth, of course, is an innovator by the fact of his birth. There he stands, newly born on the planet, a universal beggar, with all the reason of things, one would say, on his side. In his first consideration how to feed, clothe, and warm himself, he is met by warnings on every hand, that this thing and that thing have owners, and he must go elsewhere. Then he says; If I am born into the earth, where is my part? have the goodness, gentlemen of this world, to show me my wood-lot, where I may fell my wood, my field where to plant my corn, my pleasant ground where to build my cabin.

'Touch any wood, or field, or house-lot, on your peril,' cry all the gentlemen of this world; 'but you may come and work in ours, for us, and we will give you a piece of bread.'

And what is that peril?

Knives and muskets, if we meet you in the act; imprisonment, if we find you afterward.

And by what authority, kind gentlemen?

By our law.

And your law, --- is it just?

As just for you as it was for us. We wrought for others under this law, and got our lands so.

I repeat the question, Is your law just?

Not quite just, but necessary. Moreover, it is juster now than it was when we were born; we have made it milder and more equal.

I will none of your law, returns the youth; it encumbers me. I cannot understand, or so much as spare time to read that needless library of your laws. Nature has sufficiently provided me with rewards and sharp penalties, to bind me not to transgress. Like the Persian noble of old, I ask "that I may neither command nor obey." I do not wish to enter into your complex social system. I shall serve those whom I can, and they who can will serve me. I shall seek those whom I love, and shun those whom I love not, and what more can all your laws render me?

With equal earnestness and good faith, replies to this plaintiff an upholder of the establishment, a man of many virtues:

Your opposition is feather-brained and overfine. Young man, I have no skill to talk with you, but look at me; I have risen early and sat late, and toiled honestly, and painfully for very many years. I never dreamed about methods; I laid my bones to, and drudged for the good I possess; it was not got by fraud, not by luck, but by work, and you must show me a warrant like these stubborn facts in your own fidelity and labor, before I suffer you, on the faith of a few fine words, to ride into my estate, and claim to scatter it as your own.

Now you touch the heart of the matter, replies the reformer. To that fidelity and labor, I pay homage. I am unworthy to arraign your manner of living, until I too have been tried. But I should be more unworthy, if I did not tell you why I cannot walk in your steps. I find this vast network, which you call property, extended over the whole planet. I cannot occupy the bleakest crag of the White Hills or the Alleghany Range, but some man or corporation steps up to me to show me that it is his. Now, though I am very peaceable, and on my private account could well enough die, since it appears there was some mistake in my creation, and that I have been missent to this earth, where all the seats were already taken, --- yet I feel called upon in behalf of rational nature, which I represent, to declare to you my opinion, that, if the Earth is yours, so also is it mine. All your aggregate existences are less to me a fact than is my own; as I am born to the earth, so the Earth is given to me, what I want of it to till and to plant; nor could I, without pusillanimity, omit to claim so much. I must not only have a name to live, I must live. My genius leads me to build a different manner of life from any of yours. I cannot then spare you the whole world. I love you better. I must tell you the truth practically; and take that which you call yours. It is God's world and mine; yours as much as you want, mine as much as I want. Besides, I know your ways; I know the symptoms of the disease. To the end of your power, you will serve this lie which cheats you. Your want is a gulf which the possession of the broad earth would not fill. Yonder sun in heaven you would pluck down from shining on the universe, and make him a property and privacy, if you could; and the moon and the north star you would quickly have occasion for in your closet and bed chamber. What you do not want for use, you crave for ornament, and what your convenience could spare, your pride cannot.

On the other hand, precisely the defence which was set up for the British Constitution, namely, that with all its admitted defects, rotten boroughs and monopolies, it worked well, and substantial justice was somehow done; the wisdom and the worth did get into parliament, and every interest did by right, or might, or sleight, get represented; --- the same defence is set up for the existing institutions. They are not the best; they are not just; and in respect to you, personally, O brave young man! they cannot be justified. They have, it is most true, left you no acre for your own, and no law but our law, to the ordaining of which, you were no party. But they do answer the end, they are really friendly to the good; unfriendly to the bad; they second the industrious, and the kind; they foster genius. They really have so much flexibility as to afford your talent and character, on the whole, the same chance of demonstration and success which they might have, if there was no law and no property.

It is trivial and merely superstitious to say that nothing is given you, no outfit, no exhibition; for in this institution of credit, which is as universal as honesty and promise in the human countenance, always some neighbor stands ready to be bread and land and tools and stock to the young adventurer. And if in any one respect they have come short, see what ample retribution of good they have made. They have lost no time and spared no expense to collect libraries, museums, galleries, colleges, palaces, hospitals, observatories, cities. The ages have not been idle, nor kings slack, nor the rich niggardly. Have we not atoned for this small offence (which we could not help) of leaving you no right in the soil, by this splendid indemnity of ancestral and national wealth? Would you have been born like a gipsy in a hedge, and preferred your freedom on a heath, and the range of a planet which had no shed or boscage to cover you from sun and wind, --- to this towered and citied world? to this world of Rome, and Memphis, and Constantinople, and Vienna, and Paris, and London, and New York? For thee Naples, Florence and Venice, for thee the fair Mediterranean, the sunny Adriatic; for thee both Indies smile; for thee the hospitable North opens its heated palaces under the polar circle; for thee roads have been cut in every direction across the land, and fleets of floating palaces with every security for strength, and provision for luxury, swim by sail and by steam through all the waters of this world. Every island for thee has a town; every town a hotel. Though thou was born landless, yet to thy industry and thrift and small condescension to the established usage, --- scores of servants are swarming in every strange place with cap and knee to thy command, scores, nay hundreds and thousands, for thy wardrobe, thy table, thy chamber, thy library, thy leisure; and every whim is anticipated and served by the best ability of the whole population of each country. The king on the throne governs for thee, and the judge judges; the barrister pleads, the farmer tills, the joiner hammers, the postman rides. Is it not exaggerating a trifle to insist on a formal acknowledgment of your claims, when these substantial advantages have been secured to you? Now can your children be educated, your labor turned to their advantage, and its fruits secured to them after your death. It is frivolous to say, you have no acre, because you have not a mathematically measured piece of land. Providence takes care that you shall have a place, that you are waited for, and come accredited; and, as soon as you put your gift to use, you shall have acre or acre's worth according to your exhibition of desert, --- acre, if you need land; --- acre's worth, if you prefer to draw, or carve, or make shoes, or wheels, to the tilling of the soil.

Besides, it might temper your indignation at the supposed wrong which society has done you, to keep the quest