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The Emerson-Thoreau Correspondence.
[June,

for the vast majority. School education makes possible this participation in the world process of thought by means of the printed page. The book and periodical come to the individual, and prevent the mental paralysis or arrested development that used to succeed the school-days of the rural population.

With the colored people all educated in schools and become a reading people interested in the daily newspaper; with all forms of industrial training accessible to them, and the opportunity so improved that every form of mechanical and manufacturing skill has its quota of colored working men and women; with a colored ministry educated in a Christian theology interpreted in the missionary spirit, and finding its auxiliaries in modern science and modern literature,—with these educational essentials, the negro problem for the South will be solved without recourse to violent measures of any kind, whether migration, or disfranchisement, or ostracism.[1] Mutual respect for moral and intellectual character, for useful talents and industry, will surely not lead to miscegenation, but only to what is desirable, namely, to civil and political recognition.

W. T. Harris.

THE EMERSON-THOREAU CORRESPONDENCE.

EMERSON IN EUROPE.

A few undated notes from Emerson to Thoreau may be of the years between 1843 and 1847, but I am inclined to place them as late as the latter year. Here is the only one which will be cited, and that to show how friendly was the service these two comrades required of each other. The "Mr. Brownson" mentioned was Dr. Orestes A. Brownson, who had examined Thoreau for his first district school, when he went, during a college vacation, to teach in the town of Canton, near Boston, where Brownson was then a Universalist minister.

Thursday, p. m.

Dear Henry,—I am not to-day quite so robust as I expected to be, and so have to beg that you will come down and drink tea with Mr. Brownson, and charge yourself with carrying him to the Lyceum and introducing him to the curators. I hope you can oblige me so far.

Yours, R. W. E.

I. THOREAU TO HIS SISTER SOPHIA AT BANGOR.

Concord, October 24, 1847.

Dear Sophia,—I thank you for those letters about Ktadn, and hope you will save and send me the rest, and anything else you may meet with relating to the Maine woods. That Dr. Young is both young and green too at traveling in the woods. However, I hope he got "yarbs" enough to satisfy him. I went to Boston the 5th of this month to see Mr. Emerson off to Europe. He sailed in the Washington Irving packet

  1. Freedom itself is educatory. The energy of representative institutions is a valuable schoolmaster. To control one's labor, to enjoy the earnings of it, to make contracts freely, to have the right of locomotion and change of residence and business, have a helpful influence on manhood. These concrete and intelligible acts affect the negro far more than abstract speculations, or effusive sentiment, or the slow processes of remote and combined causes. They require prompt and spontaneous action, and one learns from personal experience that he is a constituent member of society. Unquestionably, he sometimes makes ludicrous mistakes, is guilty of offensive self-assertion, but despite these errors there is perceptible and hopeful progress.—J. L. M. C.