Two authors expressed their feelings, doubts, and predictions about the current state of the American people in the 19th century in independently written essays. They further strove to show what they believed the essential American citizen should become to better his country, his family, and himself. These authors were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Through their life experiences they formed opinions about how America had triumphed and what the individual could do in his lifetime.
             Emerson said that Americans are "a people too busy to give to letters any more". He believed that these democratic people needed to slow down and get back to their roots. "Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. For everything that is given, something is taken." Emerson gave an example of this in a comparison of a "thinking American" and a "naked New Zealander". The white person may have sundry possessions that are "better" than the native, but what of his health. The aborigine has greater strength, and better instincts. "If the traveler tell us truly, strike the savage with a broad axe, and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send the white to his grave." Emerson also believed that Americans are too divided in their efforts. If America is to truly move forward, sail through the "social wave", it will be necessary to unite in our functions. "The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters, - a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man." Emerson described this social wave in terms of water. The medium through which a wave moves does not progress, the water that constitutes a wave does not move forward even though the wave does. An American needs to study the days of yore if he de...