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Updated: June 17, 2025
Do not let the dying die; hold them back to this world, until you have charged their ear and heart with this message to other spiritual societies, announcing the melioration of our planet: "'Incertainties now crown themselves assured, And Peace proclaims olives of endless age." The "Conduct of Life" was published in 1860.
And it is the business of Europeans so to deal with the institutions of their inheritance or their choice as to ensure their steady melioration and to provide for the highest interests of the people.
I admit that improvements of the utmost value have been made, in the most important concerns: but I deny that the melioration has been general; and insist, on the contrary, that a considerable portion of the people are in a state, which, as relates to their physical condition, is greatly worsened, and, as touching their intellectual nature, is assuredly not improved.
Since every sort of tyranny has its vulnerable spot, since the despotism of Russia was tempered by assassination and of Japan by the effect of public suicide, so melioration of the tyranny of the medicine-man seems to have been found in rivalry amongst members of the craft itself.
The blessing of Heaven may turn it to the account of human improvement; accidents unforeseen and mischances not to be anticipated may baffle all its high purposes and disappoint its fairest expectations. But the design is great, is benevolent, is humane. It looks to the melioration of the condition of man.
It belongs to his habit of mind and body as "faint" and "swoon" belong to Keats. This word is one of the ear-marks by which Emerson's imitators are easily recognized. "Melioration" is another favorite word of Emerson's.
And when, aside from all the distorting and hardening influences exerted on our own moral natures by a grudging refusal to meet the calls of benevolence, we consider the civil and social melioration which has attended the pathway of this heavenly light, together with its refining and sanctifying influences of the individual soul; when we stretch our thoughts into the eternal world, and catch the songs of joy, unuttered and unutterable by mortal tongues, which will thrill forever the souls of the redeemed, what acts of life can the thoughtful mind contemplate, demanding more solemn consideration, more fervent prayer, than such decisions?
If a section of the English public stands disgraced in the eyes of Europe by its vicious speculation properly speaking, gambling in railway finance, our country is in some degree redeemed from obloquy by the grandeur of a social melioration which jobbing has not been able to obstruct.
America is a land of wonders, in which everything is in constant motion, and every movement seems an improvement. The idea of novelty is there indissolubly connected with the idea of melioration. No natural boundary seems to be set to the efforts of man; and what is not yet done is only what he has not yet attempted to do.
And I think it a presentable motive to a scholar, that, as, in an old community, a well-born proprietor is usually found, after the first heats of youth, to be a careful husband, and to feel an habitual desire that the estate shall suffer no harm by his administration, but shall be delivered down to the next heir in as good condition as he received it, so, a considerate man will reckon himself a subject of that secular melioration by which mankind is mollified, cured, and refined, and will shun every expenditure of his forces on pleasure or gain, which will jeopardize this social and secular accumulation.
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