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Economy
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  WHEN I WROTE the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I
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lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house
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which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord,
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Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I
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lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in
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civilized life again.
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  I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my
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readers if very particular inquiries had not been made by my
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townsmen concerning my mode of life, which some would call
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impertinent, though they do not appear to me at all impertinent,
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but, considering the circumstances, very natural and pertinent. Some
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have asked what I got to eat; if I did not feel lonesome; if I was not
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afraid; and the like. Others have been curious to learn what portion
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of my income I devoted to charitable purposes; and some, who have
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large families, how many poor children I maintained. I will
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therefore ask those of my readers who feel no particular interest in
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me to pardon me if I undertake to answer some of these questions in
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this book. In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in
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this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main
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difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all,
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always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much
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about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.
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Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my
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experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or
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last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely
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what he has heard of other men's lives; some such account as he
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would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived
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sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me. Perhaps these
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pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the
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rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I
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trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for
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it may do good service to him whom it fits.
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  I would fain say something, not so much concerning the Chinese and
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Sandwich Islanders as you who read these pages, who are said to live
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in New England; something about your condition, especially your
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outward condition or circumstances in this world, in this town, what
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it is, whether it is necessary that it be as bad as it is, whether
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it cannot be improved as well as not. I have travelled a good deal
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in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the
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inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand
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remarkable ways. What I have heard of Bramins sitting exposed to
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four fires and looking in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended,
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with their heads downward, over flames; or looking at the heavens over
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their shoulders "until it becomes impossible for them to resume
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their natural position, while from the twist of the neck nothing but
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liquids can pass into the stomach"; or dwelling, chained for life,
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at the foot of a tree; or measuring with their bodies, like
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caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires; or standing on one leg on
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the tops of pillars- even these forms of conscious penance are
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hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which I daily
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witness. The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison
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with those which my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only
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twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that these men slew or
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captured any monster or finished any labor. They have no friend Iolaus
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to burn with a hot iron the root of the hydra's head, but as soon as
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one head is crushed, two spring up.
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  I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have
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inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these
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are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born
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in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen
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with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made
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them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when
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man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin
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digging their graves as soon as they are born? They have got to live a
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man's life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well
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as they can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh
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crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of
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life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its
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Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage,
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mowing, pasture, and woodlot! The portionless, who struggle with no
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such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to
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subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.
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  But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon
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plowed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called
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necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up
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treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through
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and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the
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end of it, if not before. It is said that Deucalion and Pyrrha created
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men by throwing stones over their heads behind them:
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        Inde genus durum sumus, experiensque laborum,
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        Et documenta damus qua simus origine nati.
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Or, as Raleigh rhymes it in his sonorous way,
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        "From thence our kind hard-hearted is, enduring pain and care,
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         Approving that our bodies of a stony nature are."
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So much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle, throwing the
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stones over their heads behind them, and not seeing where they fell.
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  Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere
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ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and
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superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be
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plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy
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and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not
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leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain
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the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the
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market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he
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remember well his ignorance- which his growth requires- who has so
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often to use his knowledge? We should feed and clothe him gratuitously
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sometimes, and recruit him with our cordials, before we judge of
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him. The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can
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be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat
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ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.
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  Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are
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sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath. I have no doubt that some
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of you who read this book are unable to pay for all the dinners which
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you have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast
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wearing or are already worn out, and have come to this page to spend
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borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour. It is
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very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live, for my
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sight has been whetted by experience; always on the limits, trying
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to get into business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient
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slough, called by the Latins aes alienum, another's brass, for some of
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their coins were made of brass; still living, and dying, and buried by
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this other's brass; always promising to pay, promising to pay,
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tomorrow, and dying today, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get
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custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison offences; lying,
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flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civility
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or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that
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you may persuade your neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat,
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or his coat, or his carriage, or import his groceries for him; making
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yourselves sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day,
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something to be tucked away in an old chest, or in a stocking behind
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the plastering, or, more safely, in the brick bank; no matter where,
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no matter how much or how little.
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  I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, as
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to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called
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Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave
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both North and South. It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is
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worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the
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slave-driver of yourself. Talk of a divinity in man! Look at the
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teamster on the highway, wending to market by day or night; does any
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divinity stir within him? His highest duty to fodder and water his
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horses! What is his destiny to him compared with the shipping
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interests? Does not he drive for Squire Make-a-stir? How godlike, how
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immortal, is he? See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day
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he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of
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his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public
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opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a
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man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather
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indicates, his fate. Self-emancipation even in the West Indian
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provinces of the fancy and imagination- what Wilberforce is there to
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bring that about? Think, also, of the ladies of the land weaving
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toilet cushions against the last day, not to betray too green an
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interest in their fates! As if you could kill time without injuring
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eternity.
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  The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called
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resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go
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into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the
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bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair
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is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of
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mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it
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is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
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  When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the
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chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life,
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it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living
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because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there
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is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun
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rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of
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thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What
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everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true today may turn out to
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be falsehood tomorrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted
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for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What
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old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds
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for old people, and new deeds for new. Old people did not know enough
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once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; new
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people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the
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globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the
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phrase is. Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an
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instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.
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One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of
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absolute value by living. Practically, the old have no very important
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advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial,
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and their lives have been such miserable failures, for private
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reasons, as they must believe; and it may be that they have some faith
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left which belies that experience, and they are only less young than
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they were. I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have
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yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from
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my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me
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anything to the purpose. Here is life, an experiment to a great extent
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untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it. If I
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have any experience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that
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this my Mentors said nothing about.
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  One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food solely,
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for it furnishes nothing to make bones with"; and so he religiously
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devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw
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material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen,
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which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow
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along in spite of every obstacle. Some things are really necessaries
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of life in some circles, the most helpless and diseased, which in
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others are luxuries merely, and in others still are entirely unknown.
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  The whole ground of human life seems to some to have been gone
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over by their predecessors, both the heights and the valleys, and
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all things to have been cared for. According to Evelyn, "the wise
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Solomon prescribed ordinances for the very distances of trees; and the
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Roman praetors have decided how often you may go into your
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neighbor's land to gather the acorns which fall on it without
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trespass, and what share belongs to that neighbor." Hippocrates has
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even left directions how we should cut our nails; that is, even with
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the ends of the fingers, neither shorter nor longer. Undoubtedly the
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very tedium and ennui which presume to have exhausted the variety
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and the joys of life are as old as Adam. But man's capacities have
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never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any
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precedents, so little has been tried. Whatever have been thy
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failures hitherto, "be not afflicted, my child, for who shall assign
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to thee what thou hast left undone?"
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  We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests; as, for instance,
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that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system
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of earths like ours. If I had remembered this it would have
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prevented some mistakes. This was not the light in which I hoed
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them. The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles! What
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distant and different beings in the various mansions of the universe
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are contemplating the same one at the same moment! Nature and human
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life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what
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prospect life offers to another? Could a greater miracle take place
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than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant? We
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should live in all the ages of the world in an hour; ay, in all the
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worlds of the ages. History, Poetry, Mythology!- I know of no
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reading of another's experience so startling and informing as this
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would be.
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  The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul
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to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my
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good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may
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say the wisest thing you can, old man- you who have lived seventy
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years, not without honor of a kind- I hear an irresistible voice which
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invites me away from all that. One generation abandons the enterprises
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of another like stranded vessels.
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  I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may
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waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow
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elsewhere. Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our
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strength. The incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well-nigh
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incurable form of disease. We are made to exaggerate the importance of
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what work we do; and yet how much is not done by us! or, what if we
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had been taken sick? How vigilant we are! determined not to live by
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faith if we can avoid it; all the day long on the alert, at night we
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unwillingly say our prayers and commit ourselves to uncertainties.
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So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing
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our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way,
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we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from
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one centre. All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a
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miracle which is taking place every instant. Confucius said, "To
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know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not
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know, that is true knowledge." When one man has reduced a fact of
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the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, I foresee that
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all men at length establish their lives on that basis.
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  Let us consider for a moment what most of the trouble and anxiety
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which I have referred to is about, and how much it is necessary that
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we be troubled, or at least careful. It would be some advantage to
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live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward
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civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessaries of
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life and what methods have been taken to obtain them; or even to
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look over the old day-books of the merchants, to see what it was
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that men most commonly bought at the stores, what they stored, that
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is, what are the grossest groceries. For the improvements of ages have
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had but little influence on the essential laws of man's existence:
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as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those
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of our ancestors.
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  By the words, necessary of life, I mean whatever, of all that man
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obtains by his own exertions, has been from the first, or from long
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use has become, so important to human life that few, if any, whether
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from savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without
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it. To many creatures there is in this sense but one necessary of
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life, Food. To the bison of the prairie it is a few inches of
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palatable grass, with water to drink; unless he seeks the Shelter of
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the forest or the mountain's shadow. None of the brute creation
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requires more than Food and Shelter. The necessaries of life for man
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in this climate may, accurately enough, be distributed under the
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several heads of Food, Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel; for not till we
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have secured these are we prepared to entertain the true problems of
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life with freedom and a prospect of success. Man has invented, not
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only houses, but clothes and cooked food; and possibly from the
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accidental discovery of the warmth of fire, and the consequent use
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of it, at first a luxury, arose the present necessity to sit by it. We
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observe cats and dogs acquiring the same second nature. By proper
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Shelter and Clothing we legitimately retain our own internal heat; but
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with an excess of these, or of Fuel, that is, with an external heat
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greater than our own internal, may not cookery properly be said to
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begin? Darwin, the naturalist, says of the inhabitants of Tierra del
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Fuego, that while his own party, who were well clothed and sitting
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close to a fire, were far from too warm, these naked savages, who were
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farther off, were observed, to his great surprise, "to be streaming
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with perspiration at undergoing such a roasting." So, we are told, the
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New Hollander goes naked with impunity, while the European shivers
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in his clothes. Is it impossible to combine the hardiness of these
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savages with the intellectualness of the civilized man? According to
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Liebig, man's body is a stove, and food the fuel which keeps up the
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internal combustion in the lungs. In cold weather we eat more, in warm
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less. The animal heat is the result of a slow combustion, and
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disease and death take place when this is too rapid; or for want of
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fuel, or from some defect in the draught, the fire goes out. Of course
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the vital heat is not to be confounded with fire; but so much for
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analogy. It appears, therefore, from the above list, that the
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expression, animal life, is nearly synonymous with the expression,
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animal heat; for while Food may be regarded as the Fuel which keeps up
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the fire within us- and Fuel serves only to prepare that Food or to
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increase the warmth of our bodies by addition from without- Shelter
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and Clothing also serve only to retain the heat thus generated and
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absorbed.
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  The grand necessity, then, for our bodies, is to keep warm, to
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keep the vital heat in us. What pains we accordingly take, not only
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with our Food, and Clothing, and Shelter, but with our beds, which are
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our night-clothes, robbing the nests and breasts of birds to prepare
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this shelter within a shelter, as the mole has its bed of grass and
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leaves at the end of its burrow! The poor man is wont to complain that
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this is a cold world; and to cold, no less physical than social, we
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refer directly a great part of our ails. The summer, in some climates,
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makes possible to man a sort of Elysian life. Fuel, except to cook his
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Food, is then unnecessary; the sun is his fire, and many of the fruits
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are sufficiently cooked by its rays; while Food generally is more
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various, and more easily obtained, and Clothing and Shelter are wholly
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or half unnecessary. At the present day, and in this country, as I
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find by my own experience, a few implements, a knife, an axe, a spade,
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a wheelbarrow, etc., and for the studious, lamplight, stationery,
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and access to a few books, rank next to necessaries, and can all be
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obtained at a trifling cost. Yet some, not wise, go to the other
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side of the globe, to barbarous and unhealthy regions, and devote
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themselves to trade for ten or twenty years, in order that they may
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live- that is, keep comfortably warm- and die in New England at
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last. The luxuriously rich are not simply kept comfortably warm, but
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unnaturally hot; as I implied before, they are cooked, of course a
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la mode.
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  Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life,
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are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the
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elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the
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wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor.
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The ancient philosophers, Chinese, Hindoo, Persian, and Greek, were
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a class than which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so
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rich in inward. We know not much about them. It is remarkable that
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we know so much of them as we do. The same is true of the more
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modern reformers and benefactors of their race. None can be an
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impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground
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of what we should call voluntary poverty. Of a life of luxury the
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fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or commerce, or literature,
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or art. There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not
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philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once
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admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle
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thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live
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according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence,
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magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life,
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not only theoretically, but practically. The success of great scholars
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and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not
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manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as
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their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a noble race
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of men. But why do men degenerate ever? What makes families run out?
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What is the nature of the luxury which enervates and destroys nations?
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Are we sure that there is none of it in our own lives? The philosopher
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is in advance of his age even in the outward form of his life. He is
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not fed, sheltered, clothed, warmed, like his contemporaries. How
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can a man be a philosopher and not maintain his vital heat by better
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methods than other men?
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  When a man is warmed by the several modes which I have described,
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what does he want next? Surely not more warmth of the same kind, as
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more and richer food, larger and more splendid houses, finer and
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more abundant clothing, more numerous, incessant, and hotter fires,
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and the like. When he has obtained those things which are necessary to
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life, there is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities;
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and that is, to adventure on life now, his vacation from humbler
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toil having commenced. The soil, it appears, is suited to the seed,
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for it has sent its radicle downward, and it may now send its shoot
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upward also with confidence. Why has man rooted himself thus firmly in
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the earth, but that he may rise in the same proportion into the
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heavens above?- for the nobler plants are valued for the fruit they
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bear at last in the air and light, far from the ground, and are not
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treated like the humbler esculents, which, though they may be
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biennials, are cultivated only till they have perfected their root,
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and often cut down at top for this purpose, so that most would not
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know them in their flowering season.
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  I do not mean to prescribe rules to strong and valiant natures,
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who will mind their own affairs whether in heaven or hell, and
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perchance build more magnificently and spend more lavishly than the
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richest, without ever impoverishing themselves, not knowing how they
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live- if, indeed, there are any such, as has been dreamed; nor to
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those who find their encouragement and inspiration in precisely the
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present condition of things, and cherish it with the fondness and
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enthusiasm of lovers- and, to some extent, I reckon myself in this
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number; I do not speak to those who are well employed, in whatever
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circumstances, and they know whether they are well employed or not;-
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but mainly to the mass of men who are discontented, and idly
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complaining of the hardness of their lot or of the times, when they
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might improve them. There are some who complain most energetically and
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inconsolably of any, because they are, as they say, doing their
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duty. I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly
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impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not
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how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden
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or silver fetters.
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  If I should attempt to tell how I have desired to spend my life in
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years past, it would probably surprise those of my readers who are
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somewhat acquainted with its actual history; it would certainly
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astonish those who know nothing about it. I will only hint at some
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of the enterprises which I have cherished.
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  In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious
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to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on
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the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely
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the present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some
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obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most
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men's, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very
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nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and never
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paint "No Admittance" on my gate.
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  I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am
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still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning
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them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I
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have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the
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horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they
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seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.
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  To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if
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possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before
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yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about
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mine! No doubt, many of my townsmen have met me returning from this
#
enterprise, farmers starting for Boston in the twilight, or
#
woodchoppers going to their work. It is true, I never assisted the sun
#
materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last
#
importance only to be present at it.
#
 
#
  So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside the town,
#
trying to hear what was in the wind, to hear and carry it express! I
#
well-nigh sunk all my capital in it, and lost my own breath into the
#
bargain, running in the face of it. If it had concerned either of
#
the political parties, depend upon it, it would have appeared in the
#
Gazette with the earliest intelligence. At other times watching from
#
the observatory of some cliff or tree, to telegraph any new arrival;
#
or waiting at evening on the hill-tops for the sky to fall, that I
#
might catch something, though I never caught much, and that,
#
manna-wise, would dissolve again in the sun.
#
 
#
  For a long time I was reporter to a journal, of no very wide
#
circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk
#
of my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only my
#
labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their own
#
reward.
#
 
#
  For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow-storms and
#
rain-storms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not of highways,
#
then of forest paths and all across- lot routes, keeping them open,
#
and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel
#
had testified to their utility.
#
 
#
  I have looked after the wild stock of the town, which give a
#
faithful herdsman a good deal of trouble by leaping fences; and I have
#
had an eye to the unfrequented nooks and corners of the farm; though I
#
did not always know whether Jonas or Solomon worked in a particular
#
field today; that was none of my business. I have watered the red
#
huckleberry, the sand cherry and the nettle-tree, the red pine and the
#
black ash, the white grape and the yellow violet, which might have
#
withered else in dry seasons.
#
 
#
  In short, I went on thus for a long time (I may say it without
#
boasting), faithfully minding my business, till it became more and
#
more evident that my townsmen would not after all admit me into the
#
list of town officers, nor make my place a sinecure with a moderate
#
allowance. My accounts, which I can swear to have kept faithfully, I
#
have, indeed, never got audited, still less accepted, still less
#
paid and settled. However, I have not set my heart on that.
#
 
#
  Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the house
#
of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. "Do you wish to buy any
#
baskets?" he asked. "No, we do not want any," was the reply. "What!"
#
exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, "do you mean to starve
#
us?" Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off- that the
#
lawyer had only to weave arguments, and, by some magic, wealth and
#
standing followed- he had said to himself: I will go into business;
#
I will weave baskets; it is a thing which I can do. Thinking that when
#
he had made the baskets he would have done his part, and then it would
#
be the white man's to buy them. He had not discovered that it was
#
necessary for him to make it worth the other's while to buy them, or
#
at least make him think that it was so, or to make something else
#
which it would be worth his while to buy. I too had woven a kind of
#
basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth any one's
#
while to buy them. Yet not the less, in my case, did I think it
#
worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it
#
worth men's while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the
#
necessity of selling them. The life which men praise and regard as
#
successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at
#
the expense of the others?
#
 
#
  Finding that my fellow-citizens were not likely to offer me any room
#
in the court house, or any curacy or living anywhere else, but I
#
must shift for myself, I turned my face more exclusively than ever
#
to the woods, where I was better known. I determined to go into
#
business at once, and not wait to acquire the usual capital, using
#
such slender means as I had already got. My purpose in going to Walden
#
Pond was not to live cheaply nor to live dearly there, but to transact
#
some private business with the fewest obstacles; to be hindered from
#
accomplishing which for want of a little common sense, a little
#
enterprise and business talent, appeared not so sad as foolish.
#
 
#
  I have always endeavored to acquire strict business habits; they are
#
indispensable to every man. If your trade is with the Celestial
#
Empire, then some small counting house on the coast, in some Salem
#
harbor, will be fixture enough. You will export such articles as the
#
country affords, purely native products, much ice and pine timber
#
and a little granite, always in native bottoms. These will be good
#
ventures. To oversee all the details yourself in person; to be at once
#
pilot and captain, and owner and underwriter; to buy and sell and keep
#
the accounts; to read every letter received, and write or read every
#
letter sent; to superintend the discharge of imports night and day; to
#
be upon many parts of the coast almost at the same time- often the
#
richest freight will be discharged upon a Jersey shore;- to be your
#
own telegraph, unweariedly sweeping the horizon, speaking all
#
passing vessels bound coastwise; to keep up a steady despatch of
#
commodities, for the supply of such a distant and exorbitant market;
#
to keep yourself informed of the state of the markets, prospects of
#
war and peace everywhere, and anticipate the tendencies of trade and
#
civilization- taking advantage of the results of all exploring
#
expeditions, using new passages and all improvements in navigation;-
#
charts to be studied, the position of reefs and new lights and buoys
#
to be ascertained, and ever, and ever, the logarithmic tables to be
#
corrected, for by the error of some calculator the vessel often splits
#
upon a rock that should have reached a friendly pier- there is the
#
untold fate of La Perouse;- universal science to be kept pace with,
#
studying the lives of all great discoverers and navigators, great
#
adventurers and merchants, from Hanno and the Phoenicians down to
#
our day; in fine, account of stock to be taken from time to time, to
#
know how you stand. It is a labor to task the faculties of a man- such
#
problems of profit and loss, of interest, of tare and tret, and
#
gauging of all kinds in it, as demand a universal knowledge.
#
 
#
  I have thought that Walden Pond would be a good place for
#
business, not solely on account of the railroad and the ice trade;
#
it offers advantages which it may not be good policy to divulge; it is
#
a good port and a good foundation. No Neva marshes to be filled;
#
though you must everywhere build on piles of your own driving. It is
#
said that a flood-tide, with a westerly wind, and ice in the Neva,
#
would sweep St. Petersburg from the face of the earth.
#
 
#
  As this business was to be entered into without the usual capital,
#
it may not be easy to conjecture where those means, that will still be
#
indispensable to every such undertaking, were to be obtained. As for
#
Clothing, to come at once to the practical part of the question,
#
perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty and a regard for the
#
opinions of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility. Let him
#
who has work to do recollect that the object of clothing is, first, to
#
retain the vital heat, and secondly, in this state of society, to
#
cover nakedness, and he may judge how much of any necessary or
#
important work may be accomplished without adding to his wardrobe.
#
Kings and queens who wear a suit but once, though made by some
#
tailor or dressmaker to their majesties, cannot know the comfort of
#
wearing a suit that fits. They are no better than wooden horses to
#
hang the clean clothes on. Every day our garments become more
#
assimilated to ourselves, receiving the impress of the wearer's
#
character, until we hesitate to lay them aside without such delay
#
and medical appliances and some such solemnity even as our bodies.
#
No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his
#
clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to
#
have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to
#
have a sound conscience. But even if the rent is not mended, perhaps
#
the worst vice betrayed is improvidence. I sometimes try my
#
acquaintances by such tests as this- Who could wear a patch, or two
#
extra seams only, over the knee? Most behave as if they believed
#
that their prospects for life would be ruined if they should do it. It
#
would be easier for them to hobble to town with a broken leg than with
#
a broken pantaloon. Often if an accident happens to a gentleman's
#
legs, they can be mended; but if a similar accident happens to the
#
legs of his pantaloons, there is no help for it; for he considers, not
#
what is truly respectable, but what is respected. We know but few men,
#
a great many coats and breeches. Dress a scarecrow in your last shift,
#
you standing shiftless by, who would not soonest salute the scarecrow?
#
Passing a cornfield the other day, close by a hat and coat on a stake,
#
I recognized the owner of the farm. He was only a little more weather-
#
beaten than when I saw him last. I have heard of a dog that barked
#
at every stranger who approached his master's premises with clothes
#
on, but was easily quieted by a naked thief. It is an interesting
#
question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were
#
divested of their clothes. Could you, in such a case, tell surely of
#
any company of civilized men which belonged to the most respected
#
class? When Madam Pfeiffer, in her adventurous travels round the
#
world, from east to west, had got so near home as Asiatic Russia,
#
she says that she felt the necessity of wearing other than a
#
travelling dress, when she went to meet the authorities, for she
#
"was now in a civilized country, where... people are judged of by
#
their clothes." Even in our democratic New England towns the
#
accidental possession of wealth, and its manifestation in dress and
#
equipage alone, obtain for the possessor almost universal respect. But
#
they yield such respect, numerous as they are, are so far heathen, and
#
need to have a missionary sent to them. Beside, clothes introduced
#
sewing, a kind of work which you may call endless; a woman's dress, at
#
least, is never done.
#
 
#
  A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a
#
new suit to do it in; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty
#
in the garret for an indeterminate period. Old shoes will serve a hero
#
longer than they have served his valet- if a hero ever has a valet-
#
bare feet are older than shoes, and he can make them do. Only they who
#
go to soirees and legislative balls must have new coats, coats to
#
change as often as the man changes in them. But if my jacket and
#
trousers, my hat and shoes, are fit to worship God in, they will do;
#
will they not? Who ever saw his old clothes- his old coat, actually
#
worn out, resolved into its primitive elements, so that it was not a
#
deed of charity to bestow it on some poor boy, by him perchance to
#
be bestowed on some poorer still, or shall we say richer, who could do
#
with less? I say, beware of all enterprises that require new
#
clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new
#
man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any
#
enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not
#
something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to
#
be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or
#
dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in
#
some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain
#
it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moulting season,
#
like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon
#
retires to solitary ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its
#
slough, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry
#
and expansion; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal
#
coil. Otherwise we shall be found sailing under false colors, and be
#
inevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion, as well as that of
#
mankind.
#
 
#
  We don garment after garment, as if we grew like exogenous plants by
#
addition without. Our outside and often thin and fanciful clothes
#
are our epidermis, or false skin, which partakes not of our life,
#
and may be stripped off here and there without fatal injury; our
#
thicker garments, constantly worn, are our cellular integument, or
#
cortex; but our shirts are our liber, or true bark, which cannot be
#
removed without girdling and so destroying the man. I believe that all
#
races at some seasons wear something equivalent to the shirt. It is
#
desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay his hands on
#
himself in the dark, and that he live in all respects so compactly and
#
preparedly that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old
#
philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety. While one
#
thick garment is, for most purposes, as good as three thin ones, and
#
cheap clothing can be obtained at prices really to suit customers;
#
while a thick coat can be bought for five dollars, which will last
#
as many years, thick pantaloons for two dollars, cowhide boots for a
#
dollar and a half a pair, a summer hat for a quarter of a dollar,
#
and a winter cap for sixty-two and a half cents, or a better be made
#
at home at a nominal cost, where is he so poor that, clad in such a
#
suit, of his own earning, there will not be found wise men to do him
#
reverence?
#
 
#
  When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me
#
gravely, "They do not make them so now," not emphasizing the "They" at
#
all, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as the Fates, and I
#
find it difficult to get made what I want, simply because she cannot
#
believe that I mean what I say, that I am so rash. When I hear this
#
oracular sentence, I am for a moment absorbed in thought,
#
emphasizing to myself each word separately that I may come at the
#
meaning of it, that I may find out by what degree of consanguinity
#
'They' are related to me, and what authority they may have in an
#
affair which affects me so nearly; and, finally, I am inclined to
#
answer her with equal mystery, and without any more emphasis of the
#
"they"- "It is true, they did not make them so recently, but they do
#
now." Of what use this measuring of me if she does not measure my
#
character, but only the breadth of my shoulders, as it were a peg to
#
bang the coat on? We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcee, but
#
Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head
#
monkey at Paris puts on a traveller's cap, and all the monkeys in
#
America do the same. I sometimes despair of getting anything quite
#
simple and honest done in this world by the help of men. They would
#
have to be passed through a powerful press first, to squeeze their old
#
notions out of them, so that they would not soon get upon their legs
#
again; and then there would be some one in the company with a maggot
#
in his head, hatched from an egg deposited there nobody knows when,
#
for not even fire kills these things, and you would have lost your
#
labor. Nevertheless, we will not forget that some Egyptian wheat was
#
handed down to us by a mummy.
#
 
#
  On the whole, I think that it cannot be maintained that dressing has
#
in this or any country risen to the dignity of an art. At present
#
men make shift to wear what they can get. Like shipwrecked sailors,
#
they put on what they can find on the beach, and at a little distance,
#
whether of space or time, laugh at each other's masquerade. Every
#
generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the
#
new. We are amused at beholding the costume of Henry VIII, or Queen
#
Elizabeth, as much as if it was that of the King and Queen of the
#
Cannibal Islands. All costume off a man is pitiful or grotesque. It is
#
only the serious eye peering from and the sincere life passed within
#
it which restrain laughter and consecrate the costume of any people.
#
Let Harlequin be taken with a fit of the colic and his trappings
#
will have to serve that mood too. When the soldier is hit by a
#
cannon-ball, rags are as becoming as purple.
#
 
#
  The childish and savage taste of men and women for new patterns
#
keeps how many shaking and squinting through kaleidoscopes that they
#
may discover the particular figure which this generation requires
#
today. The manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely
#
whimsical. Of two patterns which differ only by a few threads more
#
or less of a particular color, the one will be sold readily, the other
#
lie on the shelf, though it frequently happens that after the lapse of
#
a season the latter becomes the most fashionable. Comparatively,
#
tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is called. It is not
#
barbarous merely because the printing is skin-deep and unalterable.
#
 
#
  I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which
#
men may get clothing. The condition of the operatives is becoming
#
every day more like that of the English; and it cannot be wondered at,
#
since, as far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is,
#
not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably,
#
that corporations may be enriched. In the long run men hit only what
#
they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they
#
had better aim at something high.
#
 
#
  As for a Shelter, I will not deny that this is now a necessary of
#
life, though there are instances of men having done without it for
#
long periods in colder countries than this. Samuel Laing says that
#
"the Laplander in his skin dress, and in a skin bag which he puts over
#
his head and shoulders, will sleep night after night on the snow... in
#
a degree of cold which would extinguish the life of one exposed to
#
it in any woollen clothing." He had seen them asleep thus. Yet he
#
adds, "They are not hardier than other people." But, probably, man did
#
not live long on the earth without discovering the convenience which
#
there is in a house, the domestic comforts, which phrase may have
#
originally signified the satisfactions of the house more than of the
#
family; though these must be extremely partial and occasional in those
#
climates where the house is associated in our thoughts with winter
#
or the rainy season chiefly, and two thirds of the year, except for
#
a parasol, is unnecessary. In our climate, in the summer, it was
#
formerly almost solely a covering at night. In the Indian gazettes a
#
wigwam was the symbol of a day's march, and a row of them cut or
#
painted on the bark of a tree signified that so many times they had
#
camped. Man was not made so large limbed and robust but that he must
#
seek to narrow his world and wall in a space such as fitted him. He
#
was at first bare and out of doors; but though this was pleasant
#
enough in serene and warm weather, by daylight, the rainy season and
#
the winter, to say nothing of the torrid sun, would perhaps have
#
nipped his race in the bud if he had not made haste to clothe
#
himself with the shelter of a house. Adam and Eve, according to the
#
fable, wore the bower before other clothes. Man wanted a home, a place
#
of warmth, or comfort, first of warmth, then the warmth of the
#
affections.
#
 
#
  We may imagine a time when, in the infancy of the human race, some
#
enterprising mortal crept into a hollow in a rock for shelter. Every
#
child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stay
#
outdoors, even in wet and cold. It plays house, as well as horse,
#
having an instinct for it. Who does not remember the interest with
#
which, when young, he looked at shelving rocks, or any approach to a
#
cave? It was the natural yearning of that portion, any portion of
#
our most primitive ancestor which still survived in us. From the
#
cave we have advanced to roofs of palm leaves, of bark and boughs,
#
of linen woven and stretched, of grass and straw, of boards and
#
shingles, of stones and tiles. At last, we know not what it is to live
#
in the open air, and our lives are domestic in more senses than we
#
think. From the hearth the field is a great distance. It would be
#
well, perhaps, if we were to spend more of our days and nights without
#
any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies, if the poet did
#
not speak so much from under a roof, or the saint dwell there so long.
#
Birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in
#
dovecots.
#
 
#
  However, if one designs to construct a dwelling-house, it behooves
#
him to exercise a little Yankee shrewdness, lest after all he find
#
himself in a workhouse, a labyrinth without a clue, a museum, an
#
almshouse, a prison, or a splendid mausoleum instead. Consider first
#
how slight a shelter is absolutely necessary. I have seen Penobscot
#
Indians, in this town, living in tents of thin cotton cloth, while the
#
snow was nearly a foot deep around them, and I thought that they would
#
be glad to have it deeper to keep out the wind. Formerly, when how
#
to get my living honestly, with freedom left for my proper pursuits,
#
was a question which vexed me even more than it does now, for
#
unfortunately I am become somewhat callous, I used to see a large
#
box by the railroad, six feet long by three wide, in which the
#
laborers locked up their tools at night; and it suggested to me that
#
every man who was hard pushed might get such a one for a dollar,
#
and, having bored a few auger holes in it, to admit the air at
#
least, get into it when it rained and at night, and hook down the lid,
#
and so have freedom in his love, and in his soul be free. This did not
#
appear the worst, nor by any means a despicable alternative. You could
#
sit up as late as you pleased, and, whenever you got up, go abroad
#
without any landlord or house-lord dogging you for rent. Many a man is
#
harassed to death to pay the rent of a larger and more luxurious box
#
who would not have frozen to death in such a box as this. I am far
#
from jesting. Economy is a subject which admits of being treated
#
with levity, but it cannot so be disposed of. A comfortable house
#
for a rude and hardy race, that lived mostly out of doors, was once
#
made here almost entirely of such materials as Nature furnished
#
ready to their hands. Gookin, who was superintendent of the Indians
#
subject to the Massachusetts Colony, writing in 1674, says, "The
#
best of their houses are covered very neatly, tight and warm, with
#
barks of trees, slipped from their bodies at those seasons when the
#
sap is up, and made into great flakes, with pressure of weighty
#
timber, when they are green.... The meaner sort are covered with
#
mats which they make of a kind of bulrush, and are also
#
indifferently tight and warm, but not so good as the former.... Some I
#
have seen, sixty or a hundred feet long and thirty feet broad.... I
#
have often lodged in their wigwams, and found them as warm as the best
#
English houses." He adds that they were commonly carpeted and lined
#
within with well-wrought embroidered mats, and were furnished with
#
various utensils. The Indians had advanced so far as to regulate the
#
effect of the wind by a mat suspended over the hole in the roof and
#
moved by a string. Such a lodge was in the first instance
#
constructed in a day or two at most, and taken down and put up in a
#
few hours; and every family owned one, or its apartment in one.
#
 
#
  In the savage state every family owns a shelter as good as the best,
#
and sufficient for its coarser and simpler wants; but I think that I
#
speak within bounds when I say that, though the birds of the air
#
have their nests, and the foxes their holes, and the savages their
#
wigwams, in modern civilized society not more than one half the
#
families own a shelter. In the large towns and cities, where
#
civilization especially prevails, the number of those who own a
#
shelter is a very small fraction of the whole. The rest pay an
#
annual tax for this outside garment of all, become indispensable
#
summer and winter, which would buy a village of Indian wigwams, but
#
now helps to keep them poor as long as they live. I do not mean to
#
insist here on the disadvantage of hiring compared with owning, but it
#
is evident that the savage owns his shelter because it costs so
#
little, while the civilized man hires his commonly because he cannot
#
afford to own it; nor can he, in the long run, any better afford to
#
hire. But, answers one, by merely paying this tax, the poor
#
civilized man secures an abode which is a palace compared with the
#
savage's. An annual rent of from twenty-five to a hundred dollars
#
(these are the country rates) entitles him to the benefit of the
#
improvements of centuries, spacious apartments, clean paint and paper,
#
Rumford fireplace, back plastering, Venetian blinds, copper pump,
#
spring lock, a commodious cellar, and many other things. But how
#
happens it that he who is said to enjoy these things is so commonly
#
a poor civilized man, while the savage, who has them not, is rich as a
#
savage? If it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the
#
condition of man- and I think that it is, though only the wise improve
#
their advantages- it must be shown that it has produced better
#
dwellings without making them more costly; and the cost of a thing
#
is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be
#
exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run. An average house
#
in this neighborhood costs perhaps eight hundred dollars, and to lay
#
up this sum will take from ten to fifteen years of the laborer's life,
#
even if he is not encumbered with a family- estimating the pecuniary
#
value of every man's labor at one dollar a day, for if some receive
#
more, others receive less;- so that he must have spent more than
#
half his life commonly before his wigwam will be earned. If we suppose
#
him to pay a rent instead, this is but a doubtful choice of evils.
#
Would the savage have been wise to exchange his wigwam for a palace on
#
these terms?
#
 
#
  It may be guessed that I reduce almost the whole advantage of
#
holding this superfluous property as a fund in store against the
#
future, so far as the individual is concerned, mainly to the defraying
#
of funeral expenses. But perhaps a man is not required to bury
#
himself. Nevertheless this points to an important distinction
#
between the civilized man and the savage; and, no doubt, they have
#
designs on us for our benefit, in making the life of a civilized
#
people an institution, in which the life of the individual is to a
#
great extent absorbed, in order to preserve and perfect that of the
#
race. But I wish to show at what a sacrifice this advantage is at
#
present obtained, and to suggest that we may possibly so live as to
#
secure all the advantage without suffering any of the disadvantage.
#
What mean ye by saying that the poor ye have always with you, or
#
that the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth
#
are set on edge?
#
 
#
  "As I live, saith the Lord God, ye shall not have occasion any
#
more to use this proverb in Israel.
#
 
#
  "Behold all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the
#
soul of the son is mine: the soul that sinneth, it shall die."
#
 
#
  When I consider my neighbors, the farmers of Concord, who are at
#
least as well off as the other classes, I find that for the most
#
part they have been toiling twenty, thirty, or forty years, that
#
they may become the real owners of their farms, which commonly they
#
have inherited with encumbrances, or else bought with hired money- and
#
we may regard one third of that toil as the cost of their houses-
#
but commonly they have not paid for them yet. It is true, the
#
encumbrances sometimes outweigh the value of the farm, so that the
#
farm itself becomes one great encumbrance, and still a man is found to
#
inherit it, being well acquainted with it, as he says. On applying
#
to the assessors, I am surprised to learn that they cannot at once
#
name a dozen in the town who own their farms free and clear. If you
#
would know the history of these homesteads, inquire at the bank
#
where they are mortgaged. The man who has actually paid for his farm
#
with labor on it is so rare that every neighbor can point to him. I
#
doubt if there are three such men in Concord. What has been said of
#
the merchants, that a very large majority, even ninety-seven in a
#
hundred, are sure to fail, is equally true of the farmers. With regard
#
to the merchants, however, one of them says pertinently that a great
#
part of their failures are not genuine pecuniary failures, but
#
merely failures to fulfil their engagements, because it is
#
inconvenient; that is, it is the moral character that breaks down. But
#
this puts an infinitely worse face on the matter, and suggests,
#
beside, that probably not even the other three succeed in saving their
#
souls, but are perchance bankrupt in a worse sense than they who
#
fail honestly. Bankruptcy and repudiation are the springboards from
#
which much of our civilization vaults and turns its somersets, but the
#
savage stands on the unelastic plank of famine. Yet the Middlesex
#
Cattle Show goes off here with eclat annually, as if all the joints of
#
the agricultural machine were suent.
#
 
#
  The farmer is endeavoring to solve the problem of a livelihood by
#
a formula more complicated than the problem itself. To get his
#
shoestrings he speculates in herds of cattle. With consummate skill he
#
has set his trap with a hair springe to catch comfort and
#
independence, and then, as he turned away, got his own leg into it.
#
This is the reason he is poor; and for a similar reason we are all
#
poor in respect to a thousand savage comforts, though surrounded by
#
luxuries. As Chapman sings,
#
 
#
        "The false society of men-
#
 
#
             -for earthly greatness
#
 
#
         All heavenly comforts rarefies to air."
#
 
#
  And when the farmer has got his house, he may not be the richer
#
but the poorer for it, and it be the house that has got him. As I
#
understand it, that was a valid objection urged by Momus against the
#
house which Minerva made, that she "had not made it movable, by
#
which means a bad neighborhood might be avoided"; and it may still
#
be urged, for our houses are such unwieldy property that we are
#
often imprisoned rather than housed in them; and the bad
#
neighborhood to be avoided is our own scurvy selves. I know one or two
#
families, at least, in this town, who, for nearly a generation, have
#
been wishing to sell their houses in the outskirts and move into the
#
village, but have not been able to accomplish it, and only death
#
will set them free.
#
 
#
  Granted that the majority are able at last either to own or hire the
#
modern house with all its improvements. While civilization has been
#
improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to
#
inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create
#
noblemen and kings. And if the civilized man's pursuits are no
#
worthier than the savage's, if he is employed the greater part of
#
his life in obtaining gross necessaries and comforts merely, why
#
should he have a better dwelling than the former?
#
 
#
  But how do the poor minority fare? Perhaps it will be found that
#
just in proportion as some have been placed in outward circumstances
#
above the savage, others have been degraded below him. The luxury of
#
one class is counterbalanced by the indigence of another. On the one
#
side is the palace, on the other are the almshouse and "silent
#
poor." The myriads who built the pyramids to be the tombs of the
#
Pharaohs were fed on garlic, and it may be were not decently buried
#
themselves. The mason who finishes the cornice of the palace returns
#
at night perchance to a hut not so good as a wigwam. It is a mistake
#
to suppose that, in a country where the usual evidences of
#
civilization exist, the condition of a very large body of the
#
inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of savages. I refer to
#
the degraded poor, not now to the degraded rich. To know this I should
#
not need to look farther than to the shanties which everywhere
#
border our railroads, that last improvement in civilization; where I
#
see in my daily walks human beings living in sties, and all winter
#
with an open door, for the sake of light, without any visible, often
#
imaginable, wood-pile, and the forms of both old and young are
#
permanently contracted by the long habit of shrinking from cold and
#
misery, and the development of all their limbs and faculties is
#
checked. It certainly is fair to look at that class by whose labor the
#
works which distinguish this generation are accomplished. Such too, to
#
a greater or less extent, is the condition of the operatives of
#
every denomination in England, which is the great workhouse of the
#
world. Or I could refer you to Ireland, which is marked as one of
#
the white or enlightened spots on the map. Contrast the physical
#
condition of the Irish with that of the North American Indian, or
#
the South Sea Islander, or any other savage race before it was
#
degraded by contact with the civilized man. Yet I have no doubt that
#
that people's rulers are as wise as the average of civilized rulers.
#
Their condition only proves what squalidness may consist with
#
civilization. I hardly need refer now to the laborers in our
#
Southern States who produce the staple exports of this country, and
#
are themselves a staple production of the South. But to confine myself
#
to those who are said to be in moderate circumstances.
#
 
#
  Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are
#
actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think
#
that they must have such a one as their neighbors have. As if one were
#
to wear any sort of coat which the tailor might cut out for him, or,
#
gradually leaving off palm-leaf hat or cap of woodchuck skin, complain
#
of hard times because he could not afford to buy him a crown! It is
#
possible to invent a house still more convenient and luxurious than we
#
have, which yet all would admit that man could not afford to pay
#
for. Shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not
#
sometimes to be content with less? Shall the respectable citizen
#
thus gravely teach, by precept and example, the necessity of the young
#
man's providing a certain number of superfluous glow- shoes, and
#
umbrellas, and empty guest chambers for empty guests, before he
#
dies? Why should not our furniture be as simple as the Arab's or the
#
Indian's? When I think of the benefactors of the race, whom we have
#
apotheosized as messengers from heaven, bearers of divine gifts to
#
man, I do not see in my mind any retinue at their heels, any carload
#
of fashionable furniture. Or what if I were to allow- would it not
#
be a singular allowance?- that our furniture should be more complex
#
than the Arab's, in proportion as we are morally and intellectually
#
his superiors! At present our houses are cluttered and defiled with
#
it, and a good housewife would sweep out the greater part into the
#
dust hole, and not leave her morning's work undone. Morning work! By
#
the blushes of Aurora and the music of Memnon, what should be man's
#
morning work in this world? I had three pieces of limestone on my
#
desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted
#
daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw
#
them out the window in disgust. How, then, could I have a furnished
#
house? I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on
#
the grass, unless where man has broken ground.
#
 
#
  It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions which the
#
herd so diligently follow. The traveller who stops at the best houses,
#
so called, soon discovers this, for the publicans presume him to be
#
a Sardanapalus, and if he resigned himself to their tender mercies
#
he would soon be completely emasculated. I think that in the
#
railroad car we are inclined to spend more on luxury than on safety
#
and convenience, and it threatens without attaining these to become no
#
better than a modern drawing-room, with its divans, and ottomans,
#
and sun-shades, and a hundred other oriental things, which we are
#
taking west with us, invented for the ladies of the harem and the
#
effeminate natives of the Celestial Empire, which Jonathan should be
#
ashamed to know the names of. I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have
#
it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion. I would rather
#
ride on earth in an ox cart, with a free circulation, than go to
#
heaven in the fancy car of an excursion train and breathe a malaria
#
all the way.
#
 
#
  The very simplicity and nakedness of man's life in the primitive
#
ages imply this advantage, at least, that they left him still but a
#
sojourner in nature. When he was refreshed with food and sleep, he
#
contemplated his journey again. He dwelt, as it were, in a tent in
#
this world, and was either threading the valleys, or crossing the
#
plains, or climbing the mountain-tops. But lo! men have become the
#
tools of their tools. The man who independently plucked the fruits
#
when he was hungry is become a farmer; and he who stood under a tree
#
for shelter, a housekeeper. We now no longer camp as for a night,
#
but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven. We have adopted
#
Christianity merely as an improved method of agriculture. We have
#
built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb.
#
The best works of art are the expression of man's struggle to free
#
himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to
#
make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten.
#
There is actually no place in this village for a work of fine art,
#
if any had come down to us, to stand, for our lives, our houses and
#
streets, furnish no proper pedestal for it. There is not a nail to
#
hang a picture on, nor a shelf to receive the bust of a hero or a
#
saint. When I consider how our houses are built and paid for, or not
#
paid for, and their internal economy managed and sustained, I wonder
#
that the floor does not give way under the visitor while he is
#
admiring the gewgaws upon the mantelpiece, and let him through into
#
the cellar, to some solid and honest though earthy foundation. I
#
cannot but perceive that this so-called rich and refined life is a
#
thing jumped at, and I do not get on in the enjoyment of the fine arts
#
which adorn it, my attention being wholly occupied with the jump;
#
for I remember that the greatest genuine leap, due to human muscles
#
alone, on record, is that of certain wandering Arabs, who are said
#
to have cleared twenty-five feet on level ground. Without factitious
#
support, man is sure to come to earth again beyond that distance.
#
The first question which I am tempted to put to the proprietor of such
#
great impropriety is, Who bolsters you? Are you one of the
#
ninety-seven who fail, or the three who succeed? Answer me these
#
questions, and then perhaps I may look at your bawbles and find them
#
ornamental. The cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful.
#
Before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls must
#
be stripped, and our lives must be stripped, and beautiful
#
housekeeping and beautiful living be laid for a foundation: now, a
#
taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors, where there
#
is no house and no housekeeper.
#
 
#
  Old Johnson, in his "Wonder-Working Providence," speaking of the
#
first settlers of this town, with whom he was contemporary, tells us
#
that "they burrow themselves in the earth for their first shelter
#
under some hillside, and, casting the soil aloft upon timber, they
#
make a smoky fire against the earth, at the highest side." They did
#
not "provide them houses," says he, "till the earth, by the Lord's
#
blessing, brought forth bread to feed them," and the first year's crop
#
was so light that "they were forced to cut their bread very thin for a
#
long season." The secretary of the Province of New Netherland, writing
#
in Dutch, in 1650, for the information of those who wished to take
#
up land there, states more particularly that "those in New Netherland,
#
and especially in New England, who have no means to build farmhouses
#
at first according to their wishes, dig a square pit in the ground,
#
cellar fashion, six or seven feet deep, as long and as broad as they
#
think proper, case the earth inside with wood all round the wall,
#
and line the wood with the bark of trees or something else to
#
prevent the caving in of the earth; floor this cellar with plank,
#
and wainscot it overhead for a ceiling, raise a roof of spars clear
#
up, and cover the spars with bark or green sods, so that they can live
#
dry and warm in these houses with their entire families for two,
#
three, and four years, it being understood that partitions are run
#
through those cellars which are adapted to the size of the family. The
#
wealthy and principal men in New England, in the beginning of the
#
colonies, commenced their first dwelling-houses in this fashion for
#
two reasons: firstly, in order not to waste time in building, and
#
not to want food the next season; secondly, in order not to discourage
#
poor laboring people whom they brought over in numbers from
#
Fatherland. In the course of three or four years, when the country
#
became adapted to agriculture, they built themselves handsome
#
houses, spending on them several thousands."
#
 
#
  In this course which our ancestors took there was a show of prudence
#
at least, as if their principle were to satisfy the more pressing
#
wants first. But are the more pressing wants satisfied now? When I
#
think of acquiring for myself one of our luxurious dwellings, I am
#
deterred, for, so to speak, the country is not yet adapted to human
#
culture, and we are still forced to cut our spiritual bread far
#
thinner than our forefathers did their wheaten. Not that all
#
architectural ornament is to be neglected even in the rudest
#
periods; but let our houses first be lined with beauty, where they
#
come in contact with our lives, like the tenement of the shellfish,
#
and not overlaid with it. But, alas! I have been inside one or two
#
of them, and know what they are lined with.
#
 
#
  Though we are not so degenerate but that we might possibly live in a
#
cave or a wigwam or wear skins today, it certainly is better to accept
#
the advantages, though so dearly bought, which the invention and
#
industry of mankind offer. In such a neighborhood as this, boards
#
and shingles, lime and bricks, are cheaper and more easily obtained
#
than suitable caves, or whole logs, or bark in sufficient
#
quantities, or even well-tempered clay or flat stones. I speak
#
understandingly on this subject, for I have made myself acquainted
#
with it both theoretically and practically. With a little more wit
#
we might use these materials so as to become richer than the richest
#
now are, and make our civilization a blessing. The civilized man is
#
a more experienced and wiser savage. But to make haste to my own
#
experiment.
#
 
#
  Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe and went down to
#
the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my
#
house, and began to cut down some tall, arrowy white pines, still in
#
their youth, for timber. It is difficult to begin without borrowing,
#
but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit your
#
fellow-men to have an interest in your enterprise. The owner of the
#
axe, as he released his hold on it, said that it was the apple of
#
his eye; but I returned it sharper than I received it. It was a
#
pleasant hillside where I worked, covered with pine woods, through
#
which I looked out on the pond, and a small open field in the woods
#
where pines and hickories were springing up. The ice in the pond was
#
not yet dissolved, though there were some open spaces, and it was
#
all dark-colored and saturated with water. There were some slight
#
flurries of snow during the days that I worked there; but for the most
#
part when I came out on to the railroad, on my way home, its yellow
#
sand-heap stretched away gleaming in the hazy atmosphere, and the
#
rails shone in the spring sun, and I heard the lark and pewee and
#
other birds already come to commence another year with us. They were
#
pleasant spring days, in which the winter of man's discontent was
#
thawing as well as the earth, and the life that had lain torpid
#
began to stretch itself. One day, when my axe had come off and I had
#
cut a green hickory for a wedge, driving it with a stone, and had
#
placed the whole to soak in a pond-hole in order to swell the wood,
#
I saw a striped snake run into the water, and he lay on the bottom,
#
apparently without inconvenience, as long as I stayed there, or more
#
than a quarter of an hour; perhaps because he had not yet fairly
#
come out of the torpid state. It appeared to me that for a like reason
#
men remain in their present low and primitive condition; but if they
#
should feel the influence of the spring of springs arousing them, they
#
would of necessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life. I had
#
previously seen the snakes in frosty mornings in my path with portions
#
of their bodies still numb and inflexible, waiting for the sun to thaw
#
them. On the 1st of April it rained and melted the ice, and in the
#
early part of the day, which was very foggy, I heard a stray goose
#
groping about over the pond and cackling as if lost, or like the
#
spirit of the fog.
#
 
#
  So I went on for some days cutting and hewing timber, and also studs
#
and rafters, all with my narrow axe, not having many communicable or
#
scholar-like thoughts, singing to myself,
#
 
#
        Men say they know many things;
#
 
#
        But lo! they have taken wings-
#
 
#
        The arts and sciences,
#
 
#
        And a thousand appliances;
#
 
#
        The wind that blows
#
 
#
        Is all that anybody knows.
#
 
#
I hewed the main timbers six inches square, most of the studs on two
#
sides only, and the rafters and floor timbers on one side, leaving the
#
rest of the bark on, so that they were just as straight and much
#
stronger than sawed ones. Each stick was carefully mortised or tenoned
#
by its stump, for I had borrowed other tools by this time. My days
#
in the woods were not very long ones; yet I usually carried my
#
dinner of bread and butter, and read the newspaper in which it was
#
wrapped, at noon, sitting amid the green pine boughs which I had cut
#
off, and to my bread was imparted some of their fragrance, for my
#
hands were covered with a thick coat of pitch. Before I had done I was
#
more the friend than the foe of the pine tree, though I had cut down
#
some of them, having become better acquainted with it. Sometimes a
#
rambler in the wood was attracted by the sound of my axe, and we
#
chatted pleasantly over the chips which I had made.
#
 
#
  By the middle of April, for I made no haste in my work, but rather
#
made the most of it, my house was framed and ready for the raising.
#
I had already bought the shanty of James Collins, an Irishman who
#
worked on the Fitchburg Railroad, for boards. James Collins' shanty
#
was considered an uncommonly fine one. When I called to see it he
#
was not at home. I walked about the outside, at first unobserved
#
from within, the window was so deep and high. It was of small
#
dimensions, with a peaked cottage roof, and not much else to be
#
seen, the dirt being raised five feet all around as if it were a
#
compost heap. The roof was the soundest part, though a good deal
#
warped and made brittle by the sun. Doorsill there was none, but a
#
perennial passage for the hens under the door-board. Mrs. C. came to
#
the door and asked me to view it from the inside. The hens were driven
#
in by my approach. It was dark, and had a dirt floor for the most
#
part, dank, clammy, and aguish, only here a board and there a board
#
which would not bear removal. She lighted a lamp to show me the inside
#
of the roof and the walls, and also that the board floor extended
#
under the bed, warning me not to step into the cellar, a sort of
#
dust hole two feet deep. In her own words, they were good boards
#
overhead, good boards all around, and a good window"- of two whole
#
squares originally, only the cat had passed out that way lately. There
#
was a stove, a bed, and a place to sit, an infant in the house where
#
it was born, a silk parasol, gilt-framed looking-glass, and a patent
#
new coffee-mill nailed to an oak sapling, all told. The bargain was
#
soon concluded, for James had in the meanwhile returned. I to pay four
#
dollars and twenty-five cents tonight, he to vacate at five tomorrow
#
morning, selling to nobody else meanwhile: I to take possession at
#
six. It were well, he said, to be there early, and anticipate
#
certain indistinct but wholly unjust claims on the score of ground
#
rent and fuel. This he assured me was the only encumbrance. At six I
#
passed him and his family on the road. One large bundle held their
#
all- bed, coffee-mill, looking-glass, hens- all but the cat; she
#
took to the woods and became a wild cat, and, as I learned
#
afterward, trod in a trap set for woodchucks, and so became a dead cat
#
at last.
#
 
#
  I took down this dwelling the same morning, drawing the nails, and
#
removed it to the pond-side by small cartloads, spreading the boards
#
on the grass there to bleach and warp back again in the sun. One early
#
thrush gave me a note or two as I drove along the woodland path. I was
#
informed treacherously by a young Patrick that neighbor Seeley, an
#
Irishman, in the intervals of the carting, transferred the still
#
tolerable, straight, and drivable nails, staples, and spikes to his
#
pocket, and then stood when I came back to pass the time of day, and
#
look freshly up, unconcerned, with spring thoughts, at the
#
devastation; there being a dearth of work, as he said. He was there to
#
represent spectatordom, and help make this seemingly insignificant
#
event one with the removal of the gods of Troy.
#
 
#
  I dug my cellar in the side of a hill sloping to the south, where
#
a woodchuck had formerly dug his burrow, down through sumach and
#
blackberry roots, and the lowest stain of vegetation, six feet
#
square by seven deep, to a fine sand where potatoes would not freeze
#
in any winter. The sides were left shelving, and not stoned; but the
#
sun having never shone on them, the sand still keeps its place. It was
#
but two hours' work. I took particular pleasure in this breaking of
#
ground, for in almost all latitudes men dig into the earth for an
#
equable temperature. Under the most splendid house in the city is
#
still to be found the cellar where they store their roots as of old,
#
and long after the superstructure has disappeared posterity remark its
#
dent in the earth. The house is still but a sort of porch at the
#
entrance of a burrow.
#
 
#
  At length, in the beginning of May, with the help of some of my
#
acquaintances, rather to improve so good an occasion for
#
neighborliness than from any necessity, I set up the frame of my
#
house. No man was ever more honored in the character of his raisers
#
than I. They are destined, I trust, to assist at the raising of
#
loftier structures one day. I began to occupy my house on the 4th of
#
July, as soon as it was boarded and roofed, for the boards were
#
carefully feather-edged and lapped, so that it was perfectly
#
impervious to rain, but before boarding I laid the foundation of a
#
chimney at one end, bringing two cartloads of stones up the hill
#
from the pond in my arms. I built the chimney after my hoeing in the
#
fall, before a fire became necessary for warmth, doing my cooking in
#
the meanwhile out of doors on the ground, early in the morning:
#
which mode I still think is in some respects more convenient and
#
agreeable than the usual one. When it stormed before my bread was
#
baked, I fixed a few boards over the fire, and sat under them to watch
#
my loaf, and passed some pleasant hours in that way. In those days,
#
when my hands were much employed, I read but little, but the least
#
scraps of paper which lay on the ground, my holder, or tablecloth,
#
afforded me as much entertainment, in fact answered the same purpose
#
as the Iliad.
#
 
#
  It would be worth the while to build still more deliberately than
#
I did, considering, for instance, what foundation a door, a window,
#
a cellar, a garret, have in the nature of man, and perchance never
#
raising any superstructure until we found a better reason for it
#
than our temporal necessities even. There is some of the same
#
fitness in a man's building his own house that there is in a bird's
#
building its own nest. Who knows but if men constructed their
#
dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and
#
families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be
#
universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so
#
engaged? But alas! we do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their
#
eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveller
#
with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we forever resign the
#
pleasure of construction to the carpenter? What does architecture
#
amount to in the experience of the mass of men? I never in all my
#
walks came across a man engaged in so simple and natural an occupation
#
as building his house. We belong to the community. It is not the
#
tailor alone who is the ninth part of a man; it is as much the
#
preacher, and the merchant, and the farmer. Where is this division
#
of labor to end? and what object does it finally serve? No doubt
#
another may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable
#
that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.
#
 
#
  True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have
#
heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making
#
architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence a
#
beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps
#
from his point of view, but only a little better than the common
#
dilettantism. A sentimental reformer in architecture, he began at
#
the cornice, not at the foundation. It was only how to put a core of
#
truth within the ornaments, that every sugarplum, in fact, might
#
have an almond or caraway seed in it- though I hold that almonds are
#
most wholesome without the sugar- and not how the inhabitant, the
#
indweller, might build truly within and without, and let the ornaments
#
take care of themselves. What reasonable man ever supposed that
#
ornaments were something outward and in the skin merely- that the
#
tortoise got his spotted shell, or the shell-fish its
#
mother-o'-pearl tints, by such a contract as the inhabitants of
#
Broadway their Trinity Church? But a man has no more to do with the
#
style of architecture of his house than a tortoise with that of its
#
shell: nor need the soldier be so idle as to try to paint the
#
precise color of his virtue on his standard. The enemy will find it
#
out. He may turn pale when the trial comes. This man seemed to me to
#
lean over the cornice, and timidly whisper his half truth to the
#
rude occupants who really knew it better than he. What of
#
architectural beauty I now see, I know has gradually grown from within
#
outward, out of the necessities and character of the indweller, who is
#
the only builder- out of some unconscious truthfulness, and nobleness,
#
without ever a thought for the appearance and whatever additional
#
beauty of this kind is destined to be produced will be preceded by a
#
like unconscious beauty of life. The most interesting dwellings in
#
this country, as the painter knows, are the most unpretending,
#
humble log huts and cottages of the poor commonly; it is the life of
#
the inhabitants whose shells they are, and not any peculiarity in
#
their surfaces merely, which makes them picturesque; and equally
#
interesting will be the citizen's suburban box, when his life shall be
#
as simple and as agreeable to the imagination, and there is as
#
little straining after effect in the style of his dwelling. A great
#
proportion of architectural ornaments are literally hollow, and a
#
September gale would strip them off, like borrowed plumes, without
#
injury to the substantials. They can do without architecture who
#
have no olives nor wines in the cellar. What if an equal ado were made
#
about the ornaments of style in literature, and the architects of
#
our bibles spent as much time about their cornices as the architects
#
of our churches do? So are made the belles-lettres and the
#
beaux-arts and their professors. Much it concerns a man, forsooth, how
#
a few sticks are slanted over him or under him, and what colors are
#
daubed upon his box. It would signify somewhat, if, in any earnest
#
sense, he slanted them and daubed it; but the spirit having departed
#
out of the tenant, it is of a piece with constructing his own
#
coffin- the architecture of the grave- and "carpenter" is but
#
another name for "coffin-maker." One man says, in his despair or
#
indifference to life, take up a handful of the earth at your feet, and
#
paint your house that color. Is he thinking of his last and narrow
#
house? Toss up a copper for it as well. What an abundance of leisure
#
be must have! Why do you take up a handful of dirt? Better paint
#
your house your own complexion; let it turn pale or blush for you.
#
An enterprise to improve the style of cottage architecture! When you
#
have got my ornaments ready, I will wear them.
#
 
#
  Before winter I built a chimney, and shingled the sides of my house,
#
which were already impervious to rain, with imperfect and sappy
#
shingles made of the first slice of the log, whose edges I was obliged
#
to straighten with a plane.
#
 
#
  I have thus a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide by
#
fifteen long, and eight-feet posts, with a garret and a closet, a
#
large window on each side, two trap-doors, one door at the end, and
#
a brick fireplace opposite. The exact cost of my house, paying the
#
usual price for such materials as I used, but not counting the work,
#
all of which was done by myself, was as follows; and I give the
#
details because very few are able to tell exactly what their houses
#
cost, and fewer still, if any, the separate cost of the various
#
materials which compose them:
#
 
#
  Boards................................$  8.03 1/2, (mostly shanty
#
 
#
                                                         boards.)
#
 
#
  Refuse shingles for roof and sides....   4.00
#
 
#
  Laths.................................   1.25
#
 
#
  Two second-hand windows with glass....   2.43
#
 
#
  One thousand old brick................   4.00
#
 
#
  Two casks of lime.....................   2.40 (That was high.)
#
 
#
  Hair..................................   0.31 (More than I needed.)
#
 
#
  Mantle-tree iron......................   0.15
#
 
#
  Nails.................................   3.90
#
 
#
  Hinges and screws.....................   0.14
#
 
#
  Latch.................................   0.10
#
 
#
  Chalk.................................   0.01
#
 
#
  Transportation........................   1.40 (I carried a good
#
 
#
                                                 part on my back.)
#
 
#
                                          -----
#
 
#
  In all................................$ 28.12 1/2
#
 
#
  These are all the materials, excepting the timber, stones, and sand,
#
which I claimed by squatter's right. I have also a small woodshed
#
adjoining, made chiefly of the stuff which was left after building the
#
house.
#
 
#
  I intend to build me a house which will surpass any on the main
#
street in Concord in grandeur and luxury, as soon as it pleases me
#
as much and will cost me no more than my present one.
#
 
#
  I thus found that the student who wishes for a shelter can obtain
#
one for a lifetime at an expense not greater than the rent which he
#
now pays annually. If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse
#
is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself; and my
#
shortcomings and inconsistencies do not affect the truth of my
#
statement. Notwithstanding much cant and hypocrisy- chaff which I find
#
it difficult to separate from my wheat, but for which I am as sorry as
#
any man- I will breathe freely and stretch myself in this respect,
#
it is such a relief to both the moral and physical system; and I am
#
resolved that I will not through humility become the devil's attorney.
#
I will endeavor to speak a good word for the truth. At Cambridge
#
College the mere rent of a student's room, which is only a little
#
larger than my own, is thirty dollars each year, though the
#
corporation had the advantage of building thirty-two side by side
#
and under one roof, and the occupant suffers the inconvenience of many
#
and noisy neighbors, and perhaps a residence in the fourth story. I
#
cannot but think that if we had more true wisdom in these respects,
#
not only less education would be needed, because, forsooth, more would
#
already have been acquired, but the pecuniary expense of getting an
#
education would in a great measure vanish. Those conveniences which
#
the student requires at Cambridge or elsewhere cost him or somebody
#
else ten times as great a sacrifice of life as they would with
#
proper management on both sides. Those things for which the most money
#
is demanded are never the things which the student most wants.
#
Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while
#
for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating
#
with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made.
#
The mode of founding a college is, commonly, to get up a
#
subscription of dollars and cents, and then, following blindly the
#
principles of a division of labor to its extreme- a principle which
#
should never be followed but with circumspection- to call in a
#
contractor who makes this a subject of speculation, and he employs
#
Irishmen or other operatives actually to lay the foundations, while
#
the students that are to be are said to be fitting themselves for
#
it; and for these oversights successive generations have to pay. I
#
think that it would be better than this, for the students, or those
#
who desire to be benefited by it, even to lay the foundation
#
themselves. The student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement
#
by systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an
#
ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience
#
which alone can make leisure fruitful. "But," says one, "you do not
#
mean that the students should go to work with their hands instead of
#
their heads?" I do not mean that exactly, but I mean something which
#
he might think a good deal like that; I mean that they should not play
#
life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this
#
expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could
#
youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of
#
living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as
#
mathematics. If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and
#
sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common course, which is
#
merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor, where
#
anything is professed and practised but the art of life;- to survey
#
the world through a telescope or a microscope, and never with his
#
natural eye; to study chemistry, and not learn how his bread is
#
made, or mechanics, and not learn how it is earned; to discover new
#
satellites to Neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, or to
#
what vagabond he is a satellite himself; or to be devoured by the
#
monsters that swarm all around him, while contemplating the monsters
#
in a drop of vinegar. Which would have advanced the most at the end of
#
a month- the boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore which
#
he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for
#
this- or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the
#
Institute in the meanwhile, and had received a Rodgers penknife from
#
his father? Which would be most likely to cut his fingers?... To my
#
astonishment I was informed on leaving college that I had studied
#
navigation!- why, if I had taken one turn down the harbor I should
#
have known more about it. Even the poor student studies and is
#
taught only political economy, while that economy of living which is
#
synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in our
#
colleges. The consequence is, that while he is reading Adam Smith,
#
Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably.
#
 
#
  As with our colleges, so with a hundred "modern improvements"; there
#
is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The
#
devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early
#
share and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions
#
are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from
#
serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an
#
end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads
#
lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a
#
magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may
#
be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a
#
predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a
#
distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of
#
her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the
#
main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager
#
to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer
#
to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into
#
the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide
#
has the whooping cough. After all, the man whose horse trots a mile in
#
a minute does not carry the most important messages; he is not an
#
evangelist, nor does he come round eating locusts and wild honey. I
#
doubt if Flying Childers ever carried a peck of corn to mill.
#
 
#
  One says to me, "I wonder that you do not lay up money; you love
#
to travel; you might take the cars and go to Fitchburg today and see
#
the country." But I am wiser than that. I have learned that the
#
swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot. I say to my friend,
#
Suppose we try who will get there first. The distance is thirty miles;
#
the fare ninety cents. That is almost a day's wages. I remember when
#
wages were sixty cents a day for laborers on this very road. Well, I
#
start now on foot, and get there before night; I have travelled at
#
that rate by the week together. You will in the meanwhile have
#
earned your fare, and arrive there some time tomorrow, or possibly
#
this evening, if you are lucky enough to get a job in season.
#
Instead of going to Fitchburg, you will be working here the greater
#
part of the day. And so, if the railroad reached round the world, I
#
think that I should keep ahead of you; and as for seeing the country
#
and getting experience of that kind, I should have to cut your
#
acquaintance altogether.
#
 
#
  Such is the universal law, which no man can ever outwit, and with
#
regard to the railroad even we may say it is as broad as it is long.
#
To make a railroad round the world available to all mankind is
#
equivalent to grading the whole surface of the planet. Men have an
#
indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks
#
and spades long enough all will at length ride somewhere, in next to
#
no time, and for nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the depot,
#
and the conductor shouts "All aboard!" when the smoke is blown away
#
and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding,
#
but the rest are run over- and it will be called, and will be, "A
#
melancholy accident." No doubt they can ride at last who shall have
#
earned their fare, that is, if they survive so long, but they will
#
probably have lost their elasticity and desire to travel by that time.
#
This spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to
#
enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it
#
reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune
#
first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a
#
poet. He should have gone up garret at once. "What!" exclaim a million
#
Irishmen starting up from all the shanties in the land, "is not this
#
railroad which we have built a good thing?" Yes, I answer,
#
comparatively good, that is, you might have done worse; but I wish, as
#
you are brothers of mine, that you could have spent your time better
#
than digging in this dirt.
#
 
#
  Before I finished my house, wishing to earn ten or twelve dollars by
#
some honest and agreeable method, in order to meet my unusual
#
expenses, I planted about two acres and a half of light and sandy soil
#
near it chiefly with beans, but also a small part with potatoes, corn,
#
peas, and turnips. The whole lot contains eleven acres, mostly growing
#
up to pines and hickories, and was sold the preceding season for eight
#
dollars and eight cents an acre. One farmer said that it was "good for
#
nothing but to raise cheeping squirrels on." I put no manure
#
whatever on this land, not being the owner, but merely a squatter, and
#
not expecting to cultivate so much again, and I did not quite hoe it
#
all once. I got out several cords of stumps in plowing, which supplied
#
me with fuel for a long time, and left small circles of virgin
#
mould, easily distinguishable through the summer by the greater
#
luxuriance of the beans there. The dead and for the most part
#
unmerchantable wood behind my house, and the driftwood from the
#
pond, have supplied the remainder of my fuel. I was obliged to hire
#
a team and a man for the plowing, though I held the plow myself. My
#
farm outgoes for the first season were, for implements, seed, work,
#
etc., $14.72 1/2. The seed corn was given me. This never costs
#
anything to speak of, unless you plant more than enough. I got
#
twelve bushels of beans, and eighteen bushels of potatoes, beside some
#
peas and sweet corn. The yellow corn and turnips were too late to come
#
to anything. My whole income from the farm was
#
 
#
                                              $ 23.44
#
 
#
            Deducting the outgoes.............  14.72 1/2
#
 
#
                                                -----
#
 
#
            There are left....................$  8.71 1/2
#
 
#
beside produce consumed and on hand at the time this estimate was made
#
of the value of $4.50- the amount on hand much more than balancing a
#
little grass which I did not raise. All things considered, that is,
#
considering the importance of a man's soul and of today,
#
notwithstanding the short time occupied by my experiment, nay,
#
partly even because of its transient character, I believe that that
#
was doing better than any farmer in Concord did that year.