of science and art.  Galileo, with an opera-glass, discovered a more splendid series of celestial phenomena than any one since.  Columbus[272] found the New World in an undecked boat.  It is curious to see the periodical disuse and perishing of means and machinery, which were introduced with loud laudation a few years or centuries before.  The great genius returns to essential man.  We reckoned the improvements of the art of war among the triumphs of science, and yet Napoleon[273] conquered Europe by the bivouac, which consisted of falling back on naked valor, and disencumbering it of all aids.  The Emperor held it impossible to make a perfect army, says Las Casas,[274] “without abolishing our arms, magazines, commissaries, and carriages, until, in imitation of the Roman custom, the soldier should receive his supply of corn, grind it in his handmill, and bake his bread himself.”

Society is a wave.  The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not.  The same particle does not rise from the valley to the ridge.  Its unity is only phenomenal.  The persons who make up a nation to-day, next year die, and their experience with them.

And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance.  Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long, that they have come to esteem the religious, learned, and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property.  They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is.  But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature.  Especially he hates what he has, if he see that it is accidental,—­came to him by inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not having; it does not belong to him, has no root in him, and merely lies there, because no revolution or no robber takes it away.  But that which a man is, does always by necessity acquire, and what the man acquires is living property, which does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fire, or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually renews itself wherever the man breathes.  “Thy lot or portion of life,” said the Caliph Ali,[275] “is seeking after thee; therefore be at rest from seeking after it.”  Our dependence on these foreign goods leads us to our slavish respect for numbers.  The political parties meet in numerous conventions; the greater the concourse, and with each new uproar of announcement, The delegation from Essex![276] The Democrats from New Hampshire!  The Whigs of Maine!  The young patriot feels himself stronger than before by a new thousand of eyes and arms.  In like manner the reformers summon conventions, and vote and resolve in multitude.  Not so, O friends! will the god deign to enter and inhabit you, but by a method precisely the reverse.  It is only as a man puts off all foreign support, and stands alone,