ABSTRACT
“In the history of the world, the doctrine of Reform had never such scope as at the present hour.” With these words, the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson summed up the dominant social climate of the mid-nineteenth century in the United States. Speaking before an eager audience of young men, members of the Mechanics’ Apprentices’ Library, in Boston on January 25, 1841, Emerson described the tenor of the times as one of “judgment” in which “Christianity, the laws, commerce, schools, the farm, the laboratory” were all succumbing to the “new spirit” and its effects. This new spirit, as Emerson described it, found expression in many forms, yet at its heart, consisted of one core impulse: “the conviction that there is an infinite worthiness in man which will appear at the call of worth, and that all particular reforms are the removing of some impediment” (218, 237).
