1863 LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE by Henry David Thoreau
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 seared 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 of his 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 board, and leave for his heirs to spend
foolishly. If I do this, most will commend me as an industrious and
hard-working 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 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 abreast 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 a 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 teamster’s 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 synonyms 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
holiest 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 individual’s 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 makeshifts, 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 puffball. 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 was suffering for want of old. I have seen
a little of it. I know that it is very malleable, but not so
malleable as wit. A grain of gold 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 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 others’ rights, in their thirst
for riches- whole valleys, for thirty miles, suddenly honeycombed 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 some 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 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 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 did 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 Huns, 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 my 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 signboards, 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 bar-room 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 had 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
bride 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 economical and moral tyrant. Now that the republic- the
respublica- 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 heaven-born
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 infrahuman, 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. Why should
we not meet, not always as dyspeptics, to tell our had dreams, but
sometimes as eupeptics, to congratulate each other on the
ever-glorious morning? I do not make an exorbitant demand, surely.
THE END .