First Use of Term "Establishment": Advice Needed

[Fred Shapiro]

The OED's first use for a major sense of the word "establishment" ("the
Establishment: a social group exercising power generally, or within a
given field or institution, by virtue of its traditional superiority, and
by the use esp. of tacit understandings and often a common mode of speech,
and having as a general interest the maintenance of the status quo.") is
dated 1923.  Nigel Rees, Cassell Companion to Quotations, finds the phrase
in George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876).

However, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote the following in 1867:

There are always two parties, the party of the Past and the party of the
Future; the Establishment and the Movement.
        "Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England" (1867)

Is anyone willing to look at OED for me and give me an opinion as to
whether the Emerson quotation is an antedating of the OED sense mentioned
above, or whether it fits some other sense of "establishment" better?

Fred Shapiro


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Fred R. Shapiro                             Editor
Associate Librarian for Collections and     YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS
  Access and Lecturer in Legal Research     Yale University Press,
Yale Law School                             forthcoming
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu               http://quotationdictionary.com
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