I often question myself if we—if I myself, for one—make enough allowance for the swelling and swelling and rising tide of radicalism of our time—whether after all an absolute majority of the millions of people now in this America is not radical, more or less, knowing or unknowing—radicalism everywhere, overflowing churches, states, institutions everywhere.

This socialistic movement—I see no harm in their having societies, subterranean or otherwise. Do they celebrate themselves? Let ’em! Even if they don’t half think themselves, they stir up other minds.
The eager and often inconsiderate appeals of reformers and revolutionists are indispensable, to counterbalance the inertness and fossilism making so large a part of human institutions. The latter will always take care of themselves—the danger being that they rapidly tend to ossify us. The former is to be treated with indulgence, and even with respect.

I think the fellows who rouse us and taunt us—perhaps even torment us—are the most valuable in some respects. It is best to draw all the shot of the reactionaries. If the work we try to do cannot stand up against the total opposition we may be sure we have gone off on a false scent.

But I am tired of mock radicalism. Among radicals as among the others there are hoggishnesses, narrownesses, inhumanities—their unceasing complaints, incessant caterwauling, against everything; their inability to appreciate the importance of conservatism, of restraint, even of persecution.
I have always had a latent toleration for the people who choose the reactionary course. I often wonder if we are not going ahead too swiftly. We must not rush aimlessly ahead; we’ve got to hold our horses. There is no doubt more than most of us see even in the stagnant pool.

The wise conservatives and the fool conservatives, the asses in authority, the granitic stupidities of the average world—it all has its place—all. I want it all to be spoken, heard, passed upon.

The conventionals, on their side, are generally too timid; the radicals of us, on our side, are often too cocky, which at times almost scares me for the future—for the future belongs to the radical and I want to see him do good things with it.
Be cocky, you young quarrelers—be cocky, be cocky, don’t be too damned cocky! Be radical—be radical—be not too damned radical! Don’t let your dislike for the conventions lead you to do the old things any injustice. Lots of the old stuff is just as new as it is old—some of the oldest things are the newest —the old forever new things, the things that take life forward.

My friends say I am getting conservative. Although my philosophy includes conservatives, everything else being equal I prefer the radicals as men and companions. All my sympathies are with the radicals.
I am as radical now as ever. I claim to be altogether radical—that’s my chief stock in trade. Take the radicalism out of the “Leaves”—do you think anything worthwhile would be left?

Each man thinks I am a radical his way. I suppose I am a radical his way, but I am not radical his way alone. I am a radical of radicals—but I don’t belong to any school. And I am not in any proper sense of the word a révolutionnaire. I am somehow afraid of agitators, though I believe in agitation.
I am, I hope, a bit of a reformer; I am an evolutionist.

Great are the reformers, windy and cyclonic—
The reformer ascends the platform, he spouts with his mouth and nose,
Let the reformers descend from the stands where they are forever bawling,
But with their lapses and screams, the reformers have one great advantage,
They are sincere, and speak with the convictions of their own experience,
Tough, tough, always maintain their ground, and carry out their programs fully.
Is reform needed? is it through you?
The greater the reform needed, the greater the personality you need to accomplish it.

There are to be sure plenty of reforms and panaceas offered—not the irregular and revolutionary efforts that would pull down rather than build up, but the progress that would wisely use the debris of the past to fertilize the soil for the coming seasons, the healthy and life-giving progress which comes from a clearer and broader view of human rights.

There are problems to which, although I think they will be solved, I confess I do not yet see any solution or indications of solution. Like some of the sciences, though it cannot be said that we have either got it, or see its resultant and absolute structure, we are working—thousands of good men are faithfully working—towards that resultant and absolute structure.
My belief is that things in our time—politics, religious investigation, sociology, and the movements of all—are going on as they should. Everything is progressing as it should. This activity, if continued, will achieve all the results desired by reformers.

I hear it was charged against me that I sought to destroy institutions,
But really I am neither for nor against institutions,
What indeed have I in common with them? or what with the destruction of them?
I have not appeared with violent hands to pull up by the roots anything that has grown.
Evil propels me and reform of evil propels me; I stand indifferent.
(Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I have changed my mind—and it’s not the first time I have had to change my mind.)

I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame,
I see the overthrown, the hurt, the oppressed of the whole earth,
I see in low life the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate,
I see the wife misused by her husband, I see the treacherous seducer of young women,
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny, I see martyrs and prisoners,
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like.
All these—all the meanness and agony without end—I sitting look out upon,
I mind them or the show or resonance of them,
See, hear, and am silent,
(But always keep up living interest in public questions—
This is the city and I am one of the citizens,
Whatever interests the rest interests me.)

Shallow people, possessed with zeal for any particular cause, make it a great merit to run to and fro after special prohibitions that will fix the case. Do you suppose the laws might be reformed and rectified? No man, no more now than at any time, is eligible to be made good by law. You cannot legislate men into morality; salvation can’t be legislated.
Men are not to be made moral by being spurred this way and that and told: You shall do so and so and so! Compulsion is a temporary support, causing much bad blood and certain reaction. Nine-tenths of the laws are not only unneeded laws, but positive nuisances and should be lopped off, and must be—it will be a great reform.

Were you looking to be held together by lawyers?
Were you looking to be held together by an agreement on a paper?
We are not going to be reformed in this way, by parcels, any one agency.
To hold men together by paper and seal or by compulsion is no account,
Nay, nor the world, nor any living thing, will so cohere.

We want no reforms, no institutions, no parties. Your mighty political improvements—good enough as far as they go—are still but partial reforms. We want a living principle. That only holds men together which aggregates all in a living principle as nature has, as the hold of the limbs of the body or the fibres of plants, under which nothing can go wrong.
That which really balances and conserves the social and political world is not so much legislation, police, treaties, and dread of punishment, as the latent eternal intuitional sense, in humanity, of fairness, manliness, decorum, etc.

The true friends of the many excellent reforms that mark the present age are not necessarily those who complacently put themselves forward and seek to carry the good through by penalties and stoppages and arrests and fines. The true friends of elevation and reform are the friends of the fullest rational liberty. For there is this vital and antiseptic power in liberty, that it tends forever to strengthen what is good and erase what is bad.

I have little belief in reform talk. Society, like a person in middle life, is set and you have to make the best of it. Our human nature is like the weather—it comes from all quarters—and while all these reforms, doctrines, may help, certainly belong, no one of them can do the business for us. It is too long a story.

The great affairs of our time (perhaps of any time—certainly of ours) go their way, revolutionize things, re-make, re-form, apart from all churches, societies, liberalizations of any sort. Beneath the surface-shows are influences—great undertows—through which the world is pressed on and on, in the human heart.

So long as the spirit is not changed, any change of appearance is of no avail.
Leap over and dive under all the reforms and propositions that worry these days,
And go to making of powerful men and women,
With these all reforms, all good, will come—
Without these all reforms, all good, all outside effects, were useless and helpless.

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