This is copied from: http://www.walden.org/thoreau/
Life without
Principle
[1] 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
landsince I am a surveyoror, 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
anywherefor I have had a little experience in that
businessthat there is a desire to hear what I think
on some subject, though I may be the greatest fool in the
countryand 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.
[2] 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.
[3] Let us consider the way in which we
spend our lives.
[4] 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 forbusiness! I think that
there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry,
to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant
business.
[5] 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.
[6] 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!
[7] 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 begunhis brow commenced
to sweat,a reproach to all sluggards and
idlerspausing 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 protecthonest manly toilhonest as
the day is longthat makes his bread taste sweet,
and keeps society sweetwhich 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.
[8] 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
correctlythat he was already too accurate for them,
and therefore they commonly got their wood measured in
Charlestown before crossing the bridge.
[9] 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.
[10] 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.
[11] 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.
[12] 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.
[13] 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 pensionprovided you
continue to breatheby 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.
[14] 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
manthough, as the Orientals say, Greatness
doth not approach him who is forever looking down; and
all those who are looking high are growing poor.
[15] 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 calledwhether 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.
[16] 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 contemporariesor 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 lifechiefly because they do not
know, but partly because they do not mean, any better.
[17] 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 plantedand He would,
perchance, reward us with lumps of gold?
[18] 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.
[19] 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.
[20] 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 waterthe
locality to which men furiously rush to probe for their
fortunesuncertain where they shall break
groundnot knowing but the gold is under their camp
itselfsometimes digging one hundred and sixty feet
before they strike the vein, or then missing it by a
footturned into demons, and regardless of each
other's rights, in their thirst for richeswhole
valleys, for thirty miles, suddenly honey-combed by the
pits of the miners, so that even hundreds are drowned in
themstanding 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
particleswhy I might not sink a shaft down
to the gold within me, and work that mine. There
is a Ballarat, a Bendigo for youwhat 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.
[21] 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.
[22] Howitt says of the man who found the
great nugget which weighed 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
FlatSheep's-Head
GullyMurderer'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.
[23] 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.
[24] But why go to California for a text?
She is the child of New England, bred at her own school
and church.
[25] 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
thingsto 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 wasIt 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 doand 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.
[26] 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.
[27] You come from attending the funeral
of mankind to attend to a natural phenomenon. A little
thought is sexton to all the world.
[28] 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 stockthat 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
oneWhat does he lecture for? It made me
quake in my shoes.
[29] 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.
[30] 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.
[31] 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.
[32] 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.
[33] 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 trivialconsidering 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 hadthat, 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.
[34] 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
transpirethinner than the paper on which it is
printedthen 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.
[35] Pray, let us live without being
drawn by dogs, Esquimaux-fashion, tearing over hill and
dale, and biting each other's ears.
[36] 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 affairthe
news of the street; and I am astonished to observe how
willing men are to lumber their minds with such
rubbishto 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 itselfan 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 barif I may presume
him guilty before he is convictedwere all equally
criminal, and a thunderbolt might be expected to descend
and consume them all together.
[37] 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
wereits 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.
[38] If we have thus desecrated
ourselvesas 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 themhad
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 refinementbut 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?
[39] 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
republicthe res-publicahas been
settled, it is time to look after the res-privatathe
private stateto see, as the Roman senate charged
its consuls, ne quid res PRIVATA detrimenti
caperet, that the private state receive no
detriment.
[40] 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.
[41] With respect to a true culture and
manhood, we are essentially provincial still, not
metropolitanmere Jonathans. We are provincial,
because we do not find at home our standardsbecause
we do not worship truth, but the reflection of
truthbecause 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.
[42] 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 instancethe
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 daysmere 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.
[43] 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 Godand 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.
[44] 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
activitythe activity of flies about a
molasses-hogshead. Very well, observes one, if men were
oysters. And very well, answer I, if men were mosquitoes.
[45] 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
menthose rare fruits called heroes, saints, poets,
philosophers, and redeemers.
[46] 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.
[47] 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
itmore 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.
[48] 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
halvessometimes 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.
A Note on the Text: The text above reflects the
1906 Houghton Mifflin edition printing of the essay.
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