Henry David Thoreau
Life Without Principle
At a lyceum, not long since, I felt that the lecturer had chosen a theme
too foreign to himself, and so failed to interest me as much as he might have
done. He described things not in or near to his heart, but toward his
extremities and superficies. There was, in this sense, no truly central or
centralizing thought in the lecture. I would have had him deal with his
privatest experience, as the poet does. The greatest compliment that was ever
paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer. I am
surprised, as well as delighted, when this happens, it is such a rare use he
would make of me, as if he were acquainted with the tool. Commonly, if men want
anything of me, it is only to know how many acres I make of their land - since
I am a surveyor - or, at most, what trivial news I have burdened myself with.
They never will go to law for my meat; they prefer the shell. A man once came a
considerable distance to ask me to lecture on Slavery; but on conversing with
him, I found that he and his clique expected seven-eighths of the lecture to be
theirs, and only one-eighth mine; so I declined. I take it for granted, when
I am invited to lecture anywhere - for I have had a little experience in that
business - that there is a desire to hear what I think on some subject, though
I may be the greatest fool in the country - and not that I should say pleasant
things merely, or such as the audience will assent to; and I resolve,
accordingly, that I will give them a strong dose of myself. They have sent for
me, and engaged to pay for me, and I am determined that they shall have me,
though I bore them beyond all precedent.
So now I would say something similar to you, my readers. Since you are my
readers, and I have not been much of a traveller, I will not talk about people
a thousand miles off, but come as near home as I can. As the time is short,
I will leave out all the flattery, and retain all the criticism.
Let us consider the way in which we spend our lives.
This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle! I am awaked
almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams.
There is no sabbath. It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once.
It is nothing but work, work, work. I cannot easily buy a blank-book to write
thoughts in; they are commonly ruled for dollars and cents. An Irishman, seeing
me making a minute in the fields, took it for granted that I was calculating my
wages. If a man was tossed out of a window when an infant, and so made
a cripple for life, or scared out of his wits by the Indians, it is regretted
chiefly because he was thus incapacitated for - business! I think that there is
nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life
itself, than this incessant business.
There is a coarse and boisterous money-making fellow in the outskirts of
our town, who is going to build a bank-wall under the hill along the edge
meadow. The powers have put this into his head to keep him out of mischief, and
he wishes me to spend three weeks digging there with him. The result will be
that he will perhaps get some more money to hoard, and leave for his heirs to
spend foolishly. If I do this, most will commend me as an industrious and
hardworking man; but if I choose to devote myself to certain labors which yield
more real profit, though but little money, they may be inclined to look on me
as an idler. Nevertheless, as I do not need the police of meaningless labor to
regulate me, and do not see anything absolutely praiseworthy in this fellow's
undertaking, any more than in many an enterprise of our own or foreign
governments however amusing it may be to him or them, I prefer to finish my
education at a different school.
If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in
danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as
a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time,
he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. As if a town had no
interest in its forests but to cut them down!
Most men would feel insulted, if it were proposed all and to employ them in
throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they
might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now. For
instance: just after sunrise, one summer morning, I noticed one of my neighbors
walking beside his team, which was slowly drawing a heavy hewn stone swung
under the axle, surrounded by an atmosphere of industry, his day's work begun -
his brow commenced to sweat, - a reproach to all sluggards and idlers - pausing
a breast the shoulders of his oxen, and half turning round with a flourish of
his merciful whip, while they gained their length on him. And I thought, such
is the labor which the American Congress exists to protect - honest manly
toil - honest as the day is long - that makes his bread taste sweet, and keeps
society sweet - which all men respect and have consecrated; one of the sacred
band, doing the needful, but irksome drudgery. Indeed, I felt a slight
reproach, because I observed this from the window, and was not abroad and
stirring about a similar business. The day went by and at evening I passed the
yard of another neighbor, who keeps many servants, and spends much money
foolishly, while he adds nothing to the common stock, and there I saw the stone
of the morning lying beside a whimsical structure intended to adorn this Lord
Timothy Dexter's premises, and the dignity forthwith departed from the
teamsters labor, in my eyes. In my opinion, the sun was made to light worthier
toil than this. I may add, that his employer has since run off, in debt to
a good part of the town, and, after passing through Chancery, has settled
somewhere else, there to become once more a patron of the arts.
The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward.
To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly
idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer
pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself. If you would get money as a writer
or lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go down perpendicularly. Those
services which the community will most readily pay for it is most disagreeable
to render. You are paid for being something less than a man. The State does not
commonly reward a genius any more wisely. Even the poet-laureate would rather
not have to celebrate the accidents of royalty. He must be bribed with a pipe
of wine; and perhaps another poet is called away from his muse to gauge that
very pipe. As for my own business, even that kind of surveying which I could do
with most satisfaction my employers do not want. They would prefer that
I should do my work coarsely and not too well, ay, not well enough. When
I observe that there are different ways of surveying, my employer commonly asks
which will give him the most land, not which is most correct. I once invented a
rule for measuring cord-wood, and tried to introduce it in Boston; but the
measurer there told me that the sellers did not wish to have their wood
measured correctly - that he was already too accurate for them, and therefore
they commonly got their wood measured in Charlestown before crossing the
bridge.
The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get "a good
job", but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a pecuniary sense, it
would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not
feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for
scientific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money,
but him who does it for love of it.
It is remarkable that there are few men so well employed, so much to their
minds, but that a little money or fame would commonly buy them off from their
present pursuit. I see advertisements for active young men, as if activity were
the whole of a young man's capital. Yet I have been surprised when one has with
confidence proposed to me, a grown man, to embark in some enterprise of his, as
if I had absolutely nothing to do, my life having been a complete failure
hitherto. What a doubtful compliment this to pay me! As if he had met me
half-way across the ocean beating up against the wind, but bound nowhere, and
proposed to me to go along with him! If I did, what do you think the
underwriters would say? No, no! I am not without employment at this stage of
the voyage. To tell the truth, I saw an advertisement for able-bodied seamen,
when I was a boy, sauntering in my native port, and as soon as I came of age
I embarked.
The community has no bribe that will tempt a wise man. You may raise money
enough to tunnel a mountain, but you cannot raise money enough to hire a man
who is minding his own business. An efficient and valuable man does what he
can, whether the community pay him for it or not. The inefficient offer their
inefficiency to the highest bidder, and are forever expecting to be put into
office. One would suppose that they were rarely disappointed.
Perhaps I am more than usually jealous with respect to my freedom. I feel
that my connection with and obligation to society are still very slight and
transient. Those slight labors which afford me a livelihood, and by which it is
allowed that I am to some extent serviceable to my contemporaries, are as yet
commonly a pleasure to me, and I am not often reminded that they are
a necessity. So far I am successful. But I foresee, that, if my wants should be
much increased, the labor required to supply them would become a drudgery. If I
should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do,
I am sure, that, for me, there would be nothing left worth living for. I trust
that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage. I wish to
suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well.
There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his
life getting his living. All great enterprises are self-supporting. The poet,
for instance, must sustain his body by his poetry, as a steam planing-mill
feeds its boilers with the shavings it makes. You must get your living by
loving. But as it is said of the merchants that ninety-seven in a hundred fail,
so the life of men generally, tried by this standard, is a failure, and
bankruptcy may be surely prophesied.
Merely to come into the world the heir of a fortune is not to be born, but
to be still-born, rather. To be supported by the charity of friends, or
a government pension - provided you continue to breathe - by whatever fine
synonymes you describe these relations, is to go into the almshouse. On Sundays
the poor debtor goes to church to take an account of stock, and finds, of
course, that his outgoes have been greater than his income. In the Catholic
Church, especially, they go into Chancery, make a clean confession, give up
all, and think to start again. Thus men will lie on their backs, talking about
the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up.
As for the comparative demand which men make on life, it is an important
difference between two, that the one is satisfied with a level success, that
his marks can all be hit by point-blank shots, but the other, however low and
unsuccessful his life may be, constantly elevates his aim, though at a very
slight angle to the horizon. I should much rather be the last man - though, as
the Orientals say, "Greatness doth not approach him who is forever looking
down; and all those who are looking high are growing poor."
It is remarkable that there is little or nothing to be remembered written
on the subject of getting a living; how to make getting a living not merely
honest and honorable, but altogether inviting and glorious; for if getting
a living is not so, then living is not. One would think, from looking at
literature, that this question had never disturbed a solitary individuals
musings. Is it that men are too much disgusted with their experience to speak
of it? The lesson of value which money teaches, which the Author of the
Universe has taken so much pains to teach us, we are inclined to skip
altogether. As for the means of living, it is wonderful how indifferent men of
all classes are about it, even reformers, so called - whether they inherit, or
earn, or steal it. I think that society has done nothing for us in this
respect, or at least has undone what she has done. Cold and hunger seem more
friendly to my nature than those methods which men have adopted and advise to
ward them off.
The title wise is, for the most part, falsely applied. How can one be
a wise man, if he does not know any better how to live than other men? - if he
is only more cunning and intellectually subtle? Does Wisdom work in a tread-
mill? or does she teach how to succeed by her example? Is there any such thing
as wisdom not applied to life? Is she merely the miller who grinds the finest
logic? It is pertinent to ask if Plato got his living in a better way or more
successfully than his contemporaries - or did he succumb to the difficulties of
life like other men? Did he seem to prevail over some of them merely by
indifference, or by assuming grand airs? or find it easier to live, because his
aunt remembered him in her will? The ways in which most men get their living,
that is, live, are mere make-shifts, and a shirking of the real business of
life - chiefly because they do not know, but partly because they do not mean,
any better.
The rush to California, for instance, and the attitude, not merely of
merchants, but of philosophers and prophets, so called, in relation to it,
reflect the greatest disgrace on mankind. That so many are ready to live by
luck, and so get the means of commanding the labor of others less lucky,
without contributing any value to society! And that is called enterprise!
I know of no more startling development of the immorality of trade, and all the
common modes of getting a living. The philosophy and poetry and religion of
such a mankind are not worth the dust of a puff-ball. The hog that gets his
living by rooting, stirring up the soil so, would be ashamed of such company.
If I could command the wealth of all the worlds by lifting my finger, I would
not pay such a price for it. Even Mahomet knew that God did not make this world
in jest. It makes God to be a moneyed gentleman who scatters a handful of
pennies in order to see mankind scramble for them. The world's raffle!
A subsistence in the domains of Nature a thing to be raffled for! What
a comment, what a satire on our institutions! The conclusion will be, that
mankind will hang itself upon a tree. And have all the precepts in all the
Bibles taught men only this? and is the last and most admirable invention of
the human race only an improved muck-rake? Is this the ground on which
Orientals and Occidentals meet? Did God direct us so to get our living, digging
where we never planted - and He would, perchance, reward us with lumps of gold?
God gave the righteous man a certificate entitling him to food and raiment,
but the unrighteous man found a facsimile of the same in God's coffers, and
appropriated it, and obtained food and raiment like the former. It is one of
the most extensive systems of counterfeiting that the world has seen. I did not
know that mankind were suffering for want of gold. I have seen a little of it.
I know that it is very malleable, but not so malleable as wit. A grain of gold
will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom.
The gold-digger in the ravines of the mountains is as much a gambler as his
fellow in the saloons of San Francisco. What difference does it make, whether
you shake dirt or shake dice? If you win, society is the loser. The gold-digger
is the enemy of the honest laborer, whatever checks and compensations there may
be. It is not enough to tell me that you worked hard to get your gold. So does
the Devil work hard. The way of transgressors may be hard in many respects. The
humblest observer who goes to the mines sees and says that gold-digging is of
the character of a lottery; the gold thus obtained is not the same thing with
the wages of honest toil. But, practically, he forgets what he has seen, for he
has seen only the fact, not the principle, and goes into trade there, that is,
buys a ticket in what commonly proves another lottery, where the fact is not so
obvious.
After reading Howitt's account of the Australian gold-diggings one evening,
I had in my mind's eye, all night, the numerous valleys, with their streams,
all cut up with foul pits, from ten to one hundred feet deep, and half a dozen
feet across, as close as they can be dug, and partly filled with water - the
locality to which men furiously rush to probe for their fortunes - uncertain
where they shall break ground - not knowing but the gold is under their camp
itself - sometimes digging one hundred and sixty feet before they strike the
vein, or then missing it by a foot - turned into demons, and regardless of each
other's rights, in their thirst for riches - whole valleys, for thirty miles,
suddenly honey-combed by the pits of the miners, so that even hundreds are
drowned in them - standing in water, and covered with mud and clay, they work
night and day, dying of exposure and disease. Having read this, and partly
forgotten it, I was thinking, accidentally, of my own unsatisfactory life,
doing as others do; and with that vision of the diggings still before me,
I asked myself, why I might not be washing sonic gold daily, though it were
only the finest particles - why I might not sink a shaft down to the gold
within me, and work that mine. There is a Ballarat, a Bendigo for you - what
though it were a Sulky Gully? At any rate, I might pursue some path, however
solitary and narrow and crooked, in which I could walk with love and reverence.
Wherever a man separates from the multitude, and goes his own way in this mood,
there indeed is a fork in the road, though ordinary travellers may see only
a gap in the paling. His solitary path across lots will turn out the higher way
of the two.
Men rush to California and Australia as if the true gold were to be found
in that direction; but that is to go to the very opposite extreme to where it
lies. They go prospecting farther and farther away from the true lead, and are
most unfortunate when they think themselves most successful. Is not our native
soil auriferous? Does not a stream from the golden mountains flow through our
native valley? and has not this for more than geologic ages been bringing down
the shining particles and forming the nuggets for us? Yet, strange to tell, if
a digger steal away, prospecting for this true gold, into the unexplored
solitudes around us, there is no danger that any will dog his steps, and
endeavor to supplant him. He may claim and undermine the whole valley even,
both the cultivated and the uncultivated portions, his whole life long in
peace, for no one will ever dispute his claim. They will not mind his cradles
or his toms. He is not confined to a claim twelve feet square, as at Ballarat,
but may mine anywhere, and wash the whole wide world in his tom.
Howitt says of the man who found the great nugget which weighted twenty-
eight pounds, at the Bendigo diggings in Australia: "He soon began to drink;
got a horse and rode all about, generally at full gallop, and when he met
people, called out to inquire if they knew who he was, and then kindly informed
them that he was "the bloody wretch that had found the nugget." At last he rode
full speed against a tree, and I think however nearly knocked his brains out."
I think, however, there was no danger of that, for he had already knocked his
brains out against the nugget. Howitt adds, "He is a hopelessly ruined man."
But he is a type of the class. They are all fast men. Hear some of the names of
the places where they dig: "Jackass Flat" - "Sheep's-Head Gully" - "Murderer's
Bar" etc. Is there no satire in these names? Let them carry their ill-gotten
wealth where they will, I am thinking it will still be "Jackass Flat," if not
"Murderer's Bar," where they live.
The last resource of our energy has been the robbing of graveyards on the
Isthmus of Darien, an enterprise which appears to be but in its infancy; for,
according to late accounts, an act has passed its second reading in the
legislature of New Granada, regulating this kind of mining; and a correspondent
of the "Tribune" writes: "In the dry season, when the weather will permit of
the country being properly prospected, no doubt other rich "guacas" [that is,
graveyards] will be found." To emigrants he says: "do not come before December;
take the Isthmus route in preference to the Boca del Toro one; bring no useless
baggage, and do not cumber yourself with a tent; but a good pair of blankets
will be necessary; a pick, shovel, and axe of good material will be almost all
that is required"; advice which might have been taken from the "Burker's
Guide." And he concludes with this line in Italics and small capitals: "If you
are doing well at home, STAY THERE," which may fairly be interpreted to mean,
"If you are getting a good living by robbing graveyards at home, stay there."
But why go to California for a text? She is the child of New England, bred
at her own school and church.
It is remarkable that among all the preachers there are so few moral
teachers. The prophets are employed in excusing the ways of men. Most reverend
seniors, the illuminati of the age, tell me, with a gracious, reminiscent
smile, betwixt an aspiration and a shudder, not to be too tender about these
things - to lump all that, that is, make a lump of gold of it. The highest
advice I have heard on these subjects was grovelling. The burden of it was - it
is not worth your while to undertake to reform the world in this particular. Do
not ask how your bread is buttered; it will make you sick, if you do - and the
like. A man had better starve at once than lose his innocence in the process
of getting his bread. If within the sophisticated man there is not an
unsophisticated one, then he is but one of the devil's angels. As we grow old,
we live more coarsely, we relax a little in our disciplines, and, to some
extent, cease to obey our finest instincts. But we should be fastidious to the
extreme of sanity, disregarding the gibes of those who are more unfortunate
than ourselves.
In our science and philosophy, even, there is commonly no true and absolute
account of things. The spirit of sect and bigotry has planted its hoof amid the
stars. You have only to discuss the problem, whether the stars are inhabited or
not, in order to discover it. Why must we daub the heavens as well as the
earth? It was an unfortunate discovery that Dr. Kane was a Mason, and that Sir
John Franklin was another. But it was a more cruel suggestion that possibly
that was the reason why the former went in search of the latter. There is not a
popular magazine in this country that would dare to print a child's thought on
important subjects without comment. It must be submitted to the D. D.s. I would
it were the chickadee-dees.
You come from attending the funeral of mankind to attend to a natural
phenomenon. A little thought is sexton to all the world.
I hardly know an intellectual man, even, who is so broad and truly liberal
that you can think aloud in his society. Most with whom you endeavor to talk
soon come to a stand against some institution in which they appear to hold
stock - that is, some particular, not universal, way of viewing things. They
will continually thrust their own low roof, with its narrow skylight, between
you and the sky, when it is the unobstructed heavens you would view. Get out of
the way with your cobwebs, wash your windows, I say! In some lyceums they tell
me that they have voted to exclude the subject of religion. But how do I know
what their religion is, and when I am near to or far from it? I have walked
into such an arena and done my best to make a clean breast of what religion
I have experienced, and the audience never suspected what I was about. The
lecture was as harmless as moonshine to them. Whereas, if I had read to them
the biography of the greatest scamps in history, they might have thought that I
had written the lives of the deacons of their church. Ordinarily, the inquiry
is, Where did you come from? or, Where are you going? That was a more pertinent
question which I overheard one of my auditors put to another one - "What does
he lecture for?" It made me quake in my shoes.
To speak impartially, the best men that I know are not serene, a world in
themselves. For the most part, they dwell in forms, and flatter and study
effect only more finely than the rest. We select granite for the underpinning
of our houses and barns; we build fences of stone; but we do not ourselves rest
on an underpinning of granitic truth, the lowest primitive rock. Our sills are
rotten. What stuff is the man made of who is not coexistent in our thought with
the purest and subtilest truth? I often accuse my finest acquaintances of an
immense frivolity; for, while there are manners and compliments we do not meet,
we do not teach one another the lessons of honesty and sincerity that the
brutes do, or of steadiness and solidity that the rocks do. The fault is
commonly mutual, however; for we do not habitually demand any more of each
other.
That excitement about Kossuth, consider how characteristic, but
superficial, it was! - only another kind of politics or dancing. Men were
making speeches to him all over the country, but each expressed only the
thought, or the want of thought, of the multitude. No man stood on truth. They
were merely banded together, as usual, one leaning on another, and all together
on nothing; as the Hindoos made the world rest on an elephant, the elephant on
a tortoise, and the tortoise on a serpent, and had nothing to put under the
serpent. For all fruit of that stir we have the Kossuth hat.
Just so hollow and ineffectual, for the most part, is our ordinary
conversation. Surface meets surface. When our life ceases to be inward and
private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. We rarely meet a man who
can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his
neighbor; and, for the most part, the only difference between us and our fellow
is, that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not. In
proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to
the post-office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with
the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not
heard from himself this long while.
I do not know but it is too much to read one newspaper a week. I have tried
it recently, and for so long it seems to me that I have not dwelt in my native
region. The sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees say not so much to me. You
cannot serve two masters. It requires more than a day's devotion to know and to
possess the wealth of a day.
We may well be ashamed to tell what things we have read or heard in our
day. I do not know why my news should be so trivial - considering what one's
dreams and expectations are, why the developments should be so paltry. The news
we hear, for the most part, is not news to our genius. It is the stalest
repetition. You are often tempted to ask why such stress is laid on
a particular experience which you have had - that, after twenty-five years, you
should meet Hobbins, Registrar of Deeds, again on the sidewalk. Have you not
budged an inch, then? Such is the daily news. Its facts appear to float in the
atmosphere, insignificant as the sporules of fungi, and impinge on some
neglected thallus, or surface of our minds, which affords a basis for them, and
hence a parasitic growth. We should wash ourselves clean of such news. Of what
consequence, though our planet explode, if there is no character involved in
the explosion? In health we have not the least curiosity about such events. We
do not live for idle amusement. I would not run round a corner to see the world
blow up.
All summer, and far into the autumn, perchance, you unconsciously went by
the newspapers and the news, and now you find it was because the morning and
the evening were full of news to you. Your walks were full of incidents.
You attended, not to the affairs of Europe, but to your own affairs in
Massachusetts fields. If you chance to live and move and have your being
in that thin stratum in which the events that make the news transpire - thinner
than the paper on which it is printed - then these things will fill the world
for you; but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember
nor be reminded of them. Really to see the sun rise or go down every day, so to
relate ourselves to a universal fact, would preserve us sane forever. Nations!
What are nations? Tartars, and Nuns, and Chinamen! Like insects, they swarm.
The historian strives in vain to make them memorable. It is for want of a man
that there are so many men. It is individuals that populate the world. Any man
thinking may say with the Spirit of Lodin -
"I look down from my height on nations,
And they become ashes before me; -
Calm is dwelling in the clouds;
Pleasant are the great fields of my rest."
Pray, let us live without being drawn by dogs, Esquimaux-fashion, tearing
over hill and dale, and biting each other's ears.
Not without a slight shudder at the danger, I often perceive how near I had
come to admitting into my mind the details of some trivial affair - the news of
the street; and I am astonished to observe how willing men are to lumber their
minds with such rubbish - to permit idle rumors and incidents of the most
insignificant kind to intrude on ground which should be sacred to thought.
Shall the mind be a public arena, where the affairs of the street and the
gossip of the tea-table chiefly are discussed? Or shall it be a quarter of
heaven itself - an hypaethral temple, consecrated to the service of the gods? I
find it so difficult to dispose of the few facts which to me are significant,
that I hesitate to burden my attention with those which are insignificant,
which only a divine mind could illustrate. Such is, for the most part, the news
in newspapers and conversation. It is important to preserve the mind's chastity
in this respect. Think of admitting the details of a single case of the
criminal court into our thoughts, to stalk profanely through their very sanctum
sanctorum for an hour, ay, for many hours! to make a very bar-room of the
mind's inmost apartment, as if for so long the dust of the street had occupied
us, - the very street itself, with all its travel, its bustle, and filth had
passed through our thoughts' shrine! Would it not be an intellectual and moral
suicide? When I have been compelled to sit spectator and auditor in a court-
room for some hours, and have seen my neighbors, who were not compelled,
stealing in from time to time, and tiptoeing about with washed hands and faces,
it has appeared to my mind's eye, that, when they took off their hats, their
ears suddenly expanded into vast hoppers for sound, between which even their
narrow heads were crowded. Like the vanes of windmills, they caught the broad,
but shallow stream of sound, which, after a few titillating gyrations in their
coggy brains, passed out the other side. I wondered if, when they got home,
they were as careful to wash their ears as before their hands and faces. It has
seemed to me, at such a time, that the auditors and the witnesses, the jury and
the counsel, the judge and the criminal at the bar - if I may presume him
guilty before he is convicted - were all equally criminal, and a thunderbolt
might be expected to descend and consume them all together.
By all kinds of traps and sign-boards, threatening the extreme penalty
of the divine law, exclude such trespassers from the only ground which can be
sacred to you. It is so hard to forget what it is worse than useless to
remember! If I am to be a thoroughfare, I prefer that it be of the mountain
brooks, the Parnassian streams, and not the town sewers. There is inspiration,
that gossip which comes to the ear of the attentive mind from the courts of
heaven. There is the profane and stale revelation of the barroom and the police
court. The same ear is fitted to receive both communications. Only the
character of the hearer determines to which it shall be open, and to which
closed. I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of
attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with
triviality. Our very intellect shall be macadamized as it were - its foundation
broken into fragments for the wheels of travel to roll over; and if you would
know what will make the most durable pavement, surpassing rolled stones, spruce
blocks, and asphaltum, you have only to look into some of our minds which have
been subjected to this treatment so long.
If we have thus desecrated ourselves - as who has not? - the remedy will be
by wariness and devotion to reconsecrate ourselves, and make once more a fane
of the mind. We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and
ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and
what subjects we thrust on their attention. Read not the Times. Read the
Eternities. Conventionalities are at length as bad as impurities. Even the
facts of science may dust the mind by their dryness, unless they are in a sense
effaced each morning, or rather rendered fertile by the dews of fresh and
living truth. Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light
from heaven. Yes, every thought that passes through the mind helps to wear and
tear it, and to deepen the ruts, which, as in the streets of Pompeii, evince
how much it has been used. How many things there are concerning which we might
well deliberate, whether we had better know them - had better let their
peddling-carts be driven, even at the slowest trot or walk, over that bridge of
glorious span by which we trust to pass at last from the farthest brink of time
to the nearest shore of eternity! Have we no culture, no refinement - but skill
only to live coarsely and serve the Devil? - to acquire a little worldly
wealth, or fame, or liberty, and make a false show with it, as if we were all
husk and shell, with no tender and living kernel to us? Shall our institutions
be like those chestnut-burs which contain abortive nuts, perfect only to prick
the fingers?
America is said to be the arena on which the battle of freedom is to be
fought; but surely it cannot be freedom in a merely political sense that is
meant. Even if we grant that the American has freed himself from a political
tyrant, he is still the slave of an economicaI and moral tyrant. Now that the
republic - the res-publica - has been settled, it is time to look after the
res-privata - the private state - to see, as the Roman senate charged its
consuls, "ne quid res PRIVATA detrimenti caperet," that the private state
receive no detriment.
Do we call this the land of the free? What is it to be free from King
George and continue the slaves of King Prejudice? What is it to be born free
and not to live free? What is the value of any political freedom, but as
a means to moral freedom? Is it a freedom to be slaves, or a freedom to be
free, of which we boast? We are a nation of politicians, concerned about the
outmost defences only of freedom. It is our children's children who may
perchance be really free. We tax ourselves unjustly. There is a part of us
which is not represented. It is taxation without representation. We quarter
troops, we quarter fools and cattle of all sorts upon ourselves. We quarter our
gross bodies on our poor souls, till the former eat up all the latter's
substance.
With respect to a true culture and manhood, we are essentially provincial
still, not metropolitan - mere Jonathans. We are provincial, because we do not
find at home our standards - because we do not worship truth, but the
reflection of truth - because we are warped and narrowed by an exclusive
devotion to trade and commerce and manufactures and agriculture and the like,
which are but means, and not the end.
So is the English Parliament provincial. Mere country bumpkins, they betray
themselves, when any more important question arises for them to settle, the
Irish question, for instance - the English question why did I not say? Their
natures are subdued to what they work in. Their "good breeding" respects only
secondary objects. The finest manners in the world are awkwardness and fatuity,
when contrasted with a finer intelligence. They appear but as the fashions of
past days - mere courtliness, knee-buckles and small-clothes, out of date. It
is the vice, but not the excellence of manners, that they are continually being
deserted by the character; they are cast-off clothes or shells, claiming the
respect which belonged to the living creature. You are presented with the
shells instead of the meat, and it is no excuse generally, that, in the case of
some fishes, the shells are of more worth than the meat. The man who thrusts
his manners upon me does as if he were to insist on introducing me to his
cabinet of curiosities, when I wished to see himself. It was not in this sense
that the poet Decker called Christ "the first true gentleman that ever
breathed." I repeat that in this sense the most splendid court in Christendom
is provincial, having authority to consult about Transalpine interests only,
and not the affairs of Rome. A praetor or proconsul would suffice to settle the
questions which absorb the attention of the English Parliament and the American
Congress.
Government and legislation! these I thought were respectable professions.
We have heard of heavenborn Numas, Lycurguses, and Solons, in the history of
the world, whose names at least may stand for ideal legislators; but think of
legislating to regulate the breeding of slaves, or the exportation of tobacco!
What have divine legislators to do with the exportation or the importation of
tobacco? what humane ones with the breeding of slaves? Suppose you were to
submit the question to any son of God - and has He no children in the
Nineteenth Century? is it a family which is extinct? - in what condition would
you get it again? What shall a State like Virginia say for itself at the last
day, in which these have been the principal, the staple productions? What
ground is there for patriotism in such a State? I derive my facts from
statistical tables which the States themselves have published.
A commerce that whitens every sea in quest of nuts and raisins, and makes
slaves of its sailors for this purpose! I saw, the other day, a vessel which
had been wrecked, and many lives lost, and her cargo of rags, juniper-berries,
and bitter almonds were strewn along the shore. It seemed hardly worth the
while to tempt the dangers of the sea between Leghorn and New York for the sake
of a cargo of juniper berries and bitter almonds. America sending to the Old
World for her bitters! Is not the sea-brine, is not shipwreck bitter enough to
make the cup of life go down here? Yet such, to a great extent, is our boasted
commerce; and there are those who style themselves statesmen and philosophers
who are so blind as to think that progress and civilization depend on precisely
this kind of interchange and activity - the activity of flies about a molasses-
hogshead. Very well, observes one, if men were oysters. And very well, answer
I, if men were mosquitoes.
Lieutenant Herndon, whom our government sent to explore the Amazon, and, it
is said, to extend the area of slavery, observed that there was wanting there
"an industrious and active population, who know what the comforts of life are,
and who have artificial wants to draw out the great resources of the country."
But what are the "artificial wants" to be encouraged? Not the love of luxuries,
like the tobacco and slaves of, I believe, his native Virginia, nor the ice and
granite and other material wealth of our native New England; nor are "the great
resources of a country" that fertility or barrenness of soil which produces
these. The chief want, in every State that I have been into, was a high and
earnest purpose in its inhabitants. This alone draws out "the great resources"
of Nature, and at last taxes her beyond her resources; for man naturally dies
out of her. When we want culture more than potatoes, and illumination more than
sugar-plums, then the great resources of a world are taxed and drawn out, and
the result, or staple production, is, not slaves, nor operatives, but men -
those rare fruits called heroes, saints, poets, philosophers, and redeemers.
In short, as a snow-drift is formed where there is a lull in the wind, so,
one would say, where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up. But
the truth blows right on over it, nevertheless, and at length blows it down.
What is called politics is comparatively something so superficial and
inhuman, that, practically, I have never fairly recognized that it concerns me
at all. The newspapers, I perceive, devote some of their columns specially to
politics or government without charge; and this, one would say, is all that
saves it; but, as I love literature, and, to some extent, the truth also,
I never read those columns at any rate. I do not wish to blunt my sense of
right so much. I have not got to answer for having read a single President's
Message. A strange age of the world this, when empires, kingdoms, and republics
come a-begging to a private man's door, and utter their complaints at his
elbow! I cannot take up a newspaper but I find that some wretched government or
other, hard pushed, and on its last legs, is interceding with me, the reader,
to vote for it - more importunate than an Italian beggar; and if I have a mind
to look at its certificate, made, perchance, by some benevolent merchant's
clerk, or the skipper that brought it over, for it cannot speak a word of
English itself, I shall probably read of the eruption of some Vesuvius, or the
overflowing of some Po, true or forged, which brought it into this condition. I
do not hesitate, in such a case, to suggest work, or the almshouse; or why not
keep its castle in silence, as I do commonly? The poor President, what with
preserving his popularity and doing his duty, is completely bewildered. The
newspapers are the ruling power. Any other government is reduced to a few
marines at Fort Independence. If a man neglects to read the Daily Times,
Government will go down on its knees to him, for this is the only treason in
these days.
Those things which now most engage the attention of men, as politics and
the daily routine, are, it is true, vital functions of human society, but
should be unconsciously performed like the corresponding functions of the
physical body. They are infra-human, a kind of vegetation. I sometimes awake to
a half consciousness of them going on about me, as a man may become conscious
of some of the processes of digestion in a morbid state, and so have the
dyspepsia as it is called. It is as if a thinker submitted himself to be rasped
by the great gizzard of creation. Politics is, as it were, the gizzard of
society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its two
opposite halves - sometimes split into quarters, it may be, which grind on each
other. Not only individuals, but States, have thus a confirmed dyspepsia, which
expresses itself, you can imagine by what sort of eloquence. Thus our life is
not altogether a forgetting, but also, alas! to a great extent, a remembering
of that which we should never have been conscious of certainly not in our
waking hours. Who should we not meet, not always as dyspeptics, to tell our bad
dreams, but sometimes as eupeptics, to congratulate each other on the ever
glorious morning? I do not make an exorbitant demand, surely.
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