At times the moral purpose of these great writers of the nineteenth century tires us, their sermons seem too long—naïve. The crudity, disorder, ugliness and lawlessness of commercial and industrial expansion which scandalized them have been our only environment, our normalcy. And sometimes we are a little impatient with their romantic naïveté. When Emerson tells us, “Drudgery, calamity, exasperation, want, are instructors in eloquence and wisdom,” we can’t help wondering what he would have made of some of the sinister intricacies of a modern organization.
