Inside the Box

We take it for granted nowadays that public figures can be misinformed dolts, but it's a matter of faith that "great men" from the past were fonts of knowledge and wisdom. And then I read that Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote: "The first farmer was the first man and all historic nobility rests on possession and use of the land." The second man, I guess, was a warrior whose nobility rested on taking away someone else's land.