EMERSON AND A HASTY PEACE.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."]
Sin,—At a time when we are all called upon to practise the utmost economy, which the Pacificists are trying to exploit to persuade us that the one thing we need as a remedy for our alleged sufferings is peace--on the German terms—the following, written by Emerson during the financial crisis in New York of 1661-62, will serve to show the attitude of that great American towards such a senti• ment
" The 1st of January [1862] has found me in quite as poor a plight as the rest of the Americans. Not a penny from my books since last June, which usually yield five or six hundred a year; no dividends from the banks or from Lidian's Plymouth property. Then almost all income from lectures has quite ceased, so that your letter found me in a study how to pay three or four hundred dollars with fifty. . . . Meanwhile we are trying to be as unconsuming as candles under an extinguisher, and 'tis frightful to think how many rivals we have in distress and in economy. But far better that this grinding should go on bad and worse than we be driven by any impatience into a hasty peace, or any peace restoring the old rottenness."—Quoted in J. F. Rhodes's History of the United States (Vol. III., pp. 560-61) from J. E. Cabot's Emerson.
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