... I insisted ... that the manifest absurdity of the
view to English feasibility could make no difference to a
gentleman; that as to our secure tenure of our mutton-chop and
spinach in London or in Boston, the soul might quote Talleyrand,
'_Messieurs, je n'en vois pas la necessite_.'" In other
words, Emerson laid before his great English friends a programme,
as nearly as might then be, of philosophical anarchism, and
naturally it met with no more acceptance than it would if now
presented to the most respectable of his American readers. Yet it
is never to be forgotten that it was the English who, with all
their weight of feudal tradition, and amidst the nightmares to
which their faery dream seemed so long subject, invented the only
form of Democratic Christianity the world has yet known, unless
indeed the German Mennonites are the same as the earlier English
Quakers were in creed and life. In the pseudo-republic of the
Cromwellian commonwealth the English had a state as wholly
without liberty, equality, and fraternity as in the king-capped
oligarchy they had before and have had ever since.
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