On the Duty of Civil Disobedience


by Henry David Thoreau


[1849, original title:  Resistance to Civil Government]


I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best
which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up
to more rapidly and systematically.  Carried out, it finally
amounts to this, which also I believe--"That government is
best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared
for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.
Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments
are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.
The objections which have been brought against a standing army,
and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail,
may also at last be brought against a standing government.
The standing army is only an arm of the standing government.
The government itself, which is only the mode which the people
have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused
and perverted before the people can act through it.  Witness the
present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals
using the standing government as their tool; for in the outset,
the people would not have consented to this measure.

This American government--what is it but a tradition,
though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself
unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its
integrity?  It has not the vitality and force of a single
living man; for a single man can bend it to his will.  It is
a sort of wooden gun to the people themselves.  But it is
not the less necessary for this; for the people must have
some complicated machinery or other, and hear its din, to
satisfy that idea of government which they have.
Governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed
upon, even impose on themselves, for their own advantage.
It is excellent, we must all allow.  Yet this government
never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity
with which it got out of its way.  _It_ does not keep the 
country free.  _It_ does not settle the West.  _It_ does not
educate.  The character inherent in the American people has
done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done
somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in
its way.  For government is an expedient, by which men would
fain succeed in letting one another alone; and, as has been
said, when it is most expedient, the governed are most let
alone by it.  Trade and commerce, if they were not made of
india-rubber, would never manage to bounce over obstacles
which legislators are continually putting in their way;
and if one were to judge these men wholly by the effects of
their actions and not partly by their intentions, they would
deserve to be classed and punished with those mischievious
persons who put obstructions on the railroads.

But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those
who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not
_at once_ no government, but at once a better government.
Let every man make known what kind of government would command
his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.

After all, the practical reason why, when the power is
once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted,
and for a long period continue, to rule is not because they
are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems
fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the
strongest.  But a government in which the majority rule in
all cases can not be based on justice, even as far as men
understand it.  Can there not be a government in which the
majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but
conscience?--in which majorities decide only those questions
to which the rule of expediency is applicable?  Must the
citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign
his conscience to the legislator?  Why has every man a
conscience then?  I think that we should be men first, and
subjects afterward.  It is not desirable to cultivate a
respect for the law, so much as for the right.  The only
obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any
time what I think right.  It is truly enough said that a
corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of
conscientious men is a corporation _with_ a conscience.
Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their
respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the
agents on injustice.  A common and natural result of an
undue respect for the law is, that you may see a file of
soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates,
powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over
hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against
their common sense and consciences, which makes it very
steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart.
They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in
which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined.
Now, what are they?  Men at all?  or small movable forts and
magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power?
Visit the Navy Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an
American government can make, or such as it can make a man
with its black arts--a mere shadow and reminiscence of
humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already,
as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniment,
though it may be,

    "Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,
     As his corse to the rampart we hurried;
     Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
     O'er the grave where our hero was buried."

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly,
but as machines, with their bodies.  They are the standing army,
and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc.
In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the
judgement or of the moral sense; but they put themselves
on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men
can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well.
Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt.
They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs.
Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens.
Others--as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers,
and office-holders--serve the state chiefly with their heads;
and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as
likely to serve the devil, without _intending_ it, as God.
A very few--as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the
great sense, and _men_--serve the state with their consciences
also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and
they are commonly treated as enemies by it.  A wise man will
only be useful as a man, and will not submit to be "clay,"
and "stop a hole to keep the wind away," but leave that
office to his dust at least:

    "I am too high born to be propertied,
     To be a second at control,
     Or useful serving-man and instrument
     To any sovereign state throughout the world."

He who gives himself entirely to his fellow men appears
to them useless and selfish; but he who gives himself
partially to them in pronounced a benefactor and philanthropist.

How does it become a man to behave toward the American
government today?  I answer, that he cannot without disgrace
be associated with it.  I cannot for an instant recognize
that political organization as _my_ government which is the
_slave's_ government also.

All men recognize the right of revolution; that is,
the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist,
the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are
great and unendurable.  But almost all say that such is not
the case now.  But such was the case, they think, in the
Revolution of '75.  If one were to tell me that this was a
bad government because it taxed certain foreign commodities
brought to its ports, it is most probable that I should
not make an ado about it, for I can do without them.
All machines have their friction; and possibly this does
enough good to counter-balance the evil.  At any rate, it is
a great evil to make a stir about it.  But when the friction
comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are
organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer.
In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation
which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves,
and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a
foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it
is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.
What makes this duty the more urgent is that fact that the
country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.

Paley, a common authority with many on moral questions,
in his chapter on the "Duty of Submission to Civil
Government," resolves all civil obligation into expediency;
and he proceeds to say that "so long as the interest of the
whole society requires it, that is, so long as the established
government cannot be resisted or changed without public
inconvenience, it is the will of God . . . that the
established government be obeyed--and no longer.  This
principle being admitted, the justice of every particular
case of resistance is reduced to a computation of the
quantity of the danger and grievance on the one side, and of
the probability and expense of redressing it on the other."
Of this, he says, every man shall judge for himself.
But Paley appears never to have contemplated those cases
to which the rule of expediency does not apply, in which
a people, as well as an individual, must do justice, cost
what it may.  If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a
drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself.
This, according to Paley, would be inconvenient.
But he that would save his life, in such a case, shall lose it.
This people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war
on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.

In their practice, nations agree with Paley; but does
anyone think that Massachusetts does exactly what is right
at the present crisis?

    "A drab of stat,
     a cloth-o'-silver slut,
     To have her train borne up,
     and her soul trail in the dirt."

Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in
Massachusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians at the
South, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here,
who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than
they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to
the slave and to Mexico, _cost what it may_.  I quarrel not
with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home,
co-operate with, and do the bidding of, those far away, and
without whom the latter would be harmless.  We are
accustomed to say, that the mass of men are unprepared; but
improvement is slow, because the few are not as materially
wiser or better than the many.  It is not so important that
many should be good as you, as that there be some absolute
goodness somewhere; for that will leaven the whole lump.
There are thousands who are _in opinion_ opposed to slavery
and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end
to them; who, esteeming themselves children of Washington
and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets,
and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing; who
even postpone the question of freedom to the question of
free trade, and quietly read the prices-current along with
the latest advices from Mexico, after dinner, and, it may
be, fall asleep over them both.  What is the price-current
of an honest man and patriot today?  They hesitate, and they
regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in
earnest and with effect.  They will wait, well disposed, for
other to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to
regret.  At most, they give up only a cheap vote, and a
feeble countenance and Godspeed, to the right, as it goes by
them.  There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of
virtue to one virtuous man.  But it is easier to deal with
the real possessor of a thing than with the temporary
guardian of it.

All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or
backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with
right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally
accompanies it.  The character of the voters is not staked.
I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not
vitally concerned that that right should prevail.  I am
willing to leave it to the majority.  Its obligation,
therefore, never exceeds that of expediency.  Even _voting
for the right_ is _doing_ nothing for it.  It is only
expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail.
A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance,
nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority.
There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.
When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of
slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery,
or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished
by their vote.  _They_ will then be the only slaves.  Only _his_
vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own
freedom by his vote.

I hear of a convention to be held at Baltimore, or
elsewhere, for the selection of a candidate for the
Presidency, made up chiefly of editors, and men who are
politicians by profession; but I think, what is it to any
independent, intelligent, and respectable man what decision
they may come to?  Shall we not have the advantage of this
wisdom and honesty, nevertheless?  Can we not count upon
some independent votes?  Are there not many individuals in
the country who do not attend conventions?  But no:  I find
that the respectable man, so called, has immediately drifted
from his position, and despairs of his country, when his
country has more reasons to despair of him.  He forthwith
adopts one of the candidates thus selected as the only
_available_ one, thus proving that he is himself _available_
for any purposes of the demagogue.  His vote is of no more
worth than that of any unprincipled foreigner or hireling
native, who may have been bought.  O for a man who is a man,
and, as my neighbor says, has a bone in his back which you
cannot pass your hand through! Our statistics are at fault:
the population has been returned too large.  How many _men_
are there to a square thousand miles in the country?
Hardly one.  Does not America offer any inducement for men
to settle here?  The American has dwindled into an Odd
Fellow--one who may be known by the development of his organ
of gregariousness, and a manifest lack of intellect and
cheerful self-reliance; whose first and chief concern, on
coming into the world, is to see that the almshouses are in
good repair; and, before yet he has lawfully donned the
virile garb, to collect a fund to the support of the widows
and orphans that may be; who, in short, ventures to live
only by the aid of the Mutual Insurance company, which has
promised to bury him decently.

It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to
devote himself to the eradication of any, even to most
enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns
to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his
hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to
give it practically his support.  If I devote myself to
other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at
least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's
shoulders.  I must get off him first, that he may pursue his
contemplations too.  See what gross inconsistency is tolerated.
I have heard some of my townsmen say, "I should like to
have them order me out to help put down an insurrection
of the slaves, or to march to Mexico--see if I would go";
and yet these very men have each, directly by their
allegiance, and so indirectly, at least, by their money,
furnished a substitute.  The soldier is applauded who
refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse
to sustain the unjust government which makes the war;
is applauded by those whose own act and authority he disregards
and sets at naught; as if the state were penitent to that
degree that it hired one to scourge it while it sinned, but
not to that degree that it left off sinning for a moment.
Thus, under the name of Order and Civil Government, we are
all made at last to pay homage to and support our own meanness.
After the first blush of sin comes its indifference; and from
immoral it becomes, as it were, unmoral, and not quite unnecessary
to that life which we have made.

The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most
disinterested virtue to sustain it.  The slight reproach to
which the virtue of patriotism is commonly liable, the noble
are most likely to incur.  Those who, while they disapprove
of the character and measures of a government, yield to it
their allegiance and support are undoubtedly its most
conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious
obstacles to reform.  Some are petitioning the State to
dissolve the Union, to disregard the requisitions of the
President.  Why do they not dissolve it themselves--the
union between themselves and the State--and refuse to pay
their quota into its treasury?  Do not they stand in the same
relation to the State that the State does to the Union?  And
have not the same reasons prevented the State from resisting
the Union which have prevented them from resisting the State?

How can a man be satisfied to entertain an opinion merely,
and enjoy _it_?  Is there any enjoyment in it, if his
opinion is that he is aggrieved?  If you are cheated out of
a single dollar by your neighbor, you do not rest satisfied
with knowing you are cheated, or with saying that you are
cheated, or even with petitioning him to pay you your due;
but you take effectual steps at once to obtain the full
amount, and see to it that you are never cheated again.
Action from principle, the perception and the performance of
right, changes things and relations; it is essentially
revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything
which was.  It not only divided States and churches, it
divides families; ay, it divides the _individual_, separating
the diabolical in him from the divine.

Unjust laws exist:  shall we be content to obey them, or
shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have
succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?  Men,
generally, under such a government as this, think that they
ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to
alter them.  They think that, if they should resist, the
remedy would be worse than the evil.  But it is the fault of
the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil.
_It_ makes it worse.  Why is it not more apt to anticipate and
provide for reform?  Why does it not cherish its wise minority?
Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt?  Why does it not
encourage its citizens to put out its faults, and _do_ better 
than it would have them?  Why does it always crucify Christ and
excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington
and Franklin rebels?

One would think, that a deliberate and practical denial
of its authority was the only offense never contemplated by
its government; else, why has it not assigned its definite,
its suitable and proportionate, penalty?  If a man who has
no property refuses but once to earn nine shillings for the
State, he is put in prison for a period unlimited by any law
that I know, and determined only by the discretion of those
who put him there; but if he should steal ninety times nine
shillings from the State, he is soon permitted to go at
large again.

If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of
the machine of government, let it go, let it go:  perchance
it will wear smooth--certainly the machine will wear out.
If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a
crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider
whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if
it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent
of injustice to another, then I say, break the law.  Let
your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine.  What I
have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself
to the wrong which I condemn.

As for adopting the ways of the State has provided for
remedying the evil, I know not of such ways.  They take too
much time, and a man's life will be gone.  I have other
affairs to attend to.  I came into this world, not chiefly
to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it,
be it good or bad.  A man has not everything to do, but
something; and because he cannot do _everything_, it is
not necessary that he should be doing _something_ wrong. It is
not my business to be petitioning the Governor
or the Legislature any more than it is theirs to petition me;
and if they should not hear my petition, what should I do then?
But in this case the State has provided no way:  its very
Constitution is the evil.  This may seem to be harsh and
stubborn and unconcilliatory; but it is to treat with the
utmost kindness and consideration the only spirit that can
appreciate or deserves it.  So is all change for the better,
like birth and death, which convulse the body.

I do not hesitate to say, that those who call themselves
Abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw
their support, both in person and property, from the
government of Massachusetts, and not wait till they
constitute a majority of one, before they suffer the right
to prevail through them.  I think that it is enough if they
have God on their side, without waiting for that other one.
Moreover, any man more right than his neighbors constitutes
a majority of one already.

I meet this American government, or its representative,
the State government, directly, and face to face, once a
year--no more--in the person of its tax-gatherer; this is
the only mode in which a man situated as I am necessarily
meets it; and it then says distinctly, Recognize me; and
the simplest, the most effectual, and, in the present
posture of affairs, the indispensablest mode of treating
with it on this head, of expressing your little satisfaction
with and love for it, is to deny it then.  My civil
neighbor, the tax-gatherer, is the very man I have to deal
with--for it is, after all, with men and not with parchment
that I quarrel--and he has voluntarily chosen to be an agent
of the government.  How shall he ever know well that he is
and does as an officer of the government, or as a man,
until he is obliged to consider whether he will treat me,
his neighbor, for whom he has respect, as a neighbor and
well-disposed man, or as a maniac and disturber of the peace,
and see if he can get over this obstruction to his
neighborliness without a ruder and more impetuous thought or
speech corresponding with his action.  I know this well,
that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I
could name--if ten _honest_ men only--ay, if _one_ HONEST man,
in this State of Massachusetts, _ceasing to hold slaves_, were
actually to withdraw from this co-partnership, and be locked
up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of
slavery in America.  For it matters not how small the
beginning may seem to be:  what is once well done is done
forever.  But we love better to talk about it:  that we say
is our mission.  Reform keeps many scores of newspapers in
its service, but not one man.  If my esteemed neighbor, the
State's ambassador, who will devote his days to the
settlement of the question of human rights in the Council
Chamber, instead of being threatened with the prisons of
Carolina, were to sit down the prisoner of Massachusetts,
that State which is so anxious to foist the sin of slavery
upon her sister--though at present she can discover only an
act of inhospitality to be the ground of a quarrel with
her--the Legislature would not wholly waive the subject of
the following winter.

Under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true
place for a just man is also a prison.  The proper place
today, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for
her freer and less despondent spirits, is in her prisons, to
be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as
they have already put themselves out by their principles.
It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican
prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs
of his race should find them; on that separate but more free
and honorable ground, where the State places those who are
not _with_ her, but _against_ her--the only house in a slave
State in which a free man can abide with honor.  If any
think that their influence would be lost there, and their
voices no longer afflict the ear of the State, that they
would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know
by how much truth is stronger than error, nor how much more
eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has
experienced a little in his own person.  Cast your whole
vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.
A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority;
it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when
it clogs by its whole weight.  If the alternative is to keep
all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the
State will not hesitate which to choose.  If a thousand men
were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be
a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them,
and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent
blood.  This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable
revolution, if any such is possible.  If the tax-gatherer,
or any other public officer, asks me, as one has done, "But
what shall I do?" my answer is, "If you really wish to do
anything, resign your office."  When the subject has refused
allegiance, and the officer has resigned from office, then
the revolution is accomplished.  But even suppose blood
should flow. Is there not a sort of blood shed when the
conscience is wounded?  Through this wound a man's real
manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an
everlasting death.  I see this blood flowing now.

I have contemplated the imprisonment of the offender,
rather than the seizure of his goods--though both will serve
the same purpose--because they who assert the purest right,
and consequently are most dangerous to a corrupt State,
commonly have not spent much time in accumulating property.
To such the State renders comparatively small service, and a
slight tax is wont to appear exorbitant, particularly if
they are obliged to earn it by special labor with their hands.
If there were one who lived wholly without the use of money,
WALDEN, and ON THE DUTY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

By Henry David Thoreau


Contents

         WALDEN
              1. Economy
              2. Where I Lived, and What I Lived For
              3. Reading
              4. Sounds
              5. Solitude
              6. Visitors
              7. The Bean-Field
              8. The Village
              9. The Ponds
             10. Baker Farm
             11. Higher Laws
             12. Brute Neighbors
             13. House-Warming
             14. Inhabitants and Winter Visitors
             15. Winter Animals
             16. The Pond in Winter
             17. Spring
             18. Conclusion

        ON THE DUTY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE





Economy

When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived
alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had
built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts,
and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two
years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life
again.

I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers if
very particular inquiries had not been made by my townsmen concerning
my mode of life, which some would call impertinent, though they do not
appear to me at all impertinent, but, considering the circumstances,
very natural and pertinent. Some have asked what I got to eat; if I did
not feel lonesome; if I was not afraid; and the like. Others have been
curious to learn what portion of my income I devoted to charitable
purposes; and some, who have large families, how many poor children
I maintained. I will therefore ask those of my readers who feel no
particular interest in me to pardon me if I undertake to answer some of
these questions in this book. In most books, the I, or first person, is
omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is
the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all,
always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so
much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.
Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my
experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or
last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what
he has heard of other men's lives; some such account as he would send to
his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it
must have been in a distant land to me. Perhaps these pages are more
particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers,
they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will
stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to
him whom it fits.

I would fain say something, not so much concerning the Chinese and
Sandwich Islanders as you who read these pages, who are said to live
in New England; something about your condition, especially your outward
condition or circumstances in this world, in this town, what it is,
whether it is necessary that it be as bad as it is, whether it cannot
be improved as well as not. I have travelled a good deal in Concord;
and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have
appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways. What
I have heard of Bramins sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the
face of the sun; or hanging suspended, with their heads downward, over
flames; or looking at the heavens over their shoulders "until it becomes
impossible for them to resume their natural position, while from the
twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the stomach"; or
dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a tree; or measuring with
their bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires; or
standing on one leg on the tops of pillars--even these forms of
conscious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing than
the scenes which I daily witness. The twelve labors of Hercules were
trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken;
for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that
these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor. They have
no friend Iolaus to burn with a hot iron the root of the hydra's head,
but as soon as one head is crushed, two spring up.

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited
farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more
easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the
open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with
clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them
serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is
condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging
their graves as soon as they are born? They have got to live a man's
life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they
can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and
smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before
it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed,
and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and woodlot!
The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited
encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic
feet of flesh.

But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed
into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity,
they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which
moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is
a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not
before. It is said that Deucalion and Pyrrha created men by throwing
stones over their heads behind them:--

           Inde genus durum sumus, experiensque laborum,
           Et documenta damus qua simus origine nati.

Or, as Raleigh rhymes it in his sonorous way,--

  "From thence our kind hard-hearted is, enduring pain and care,
   Approving that our bodies of a stony nature are."

So much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle, throwing the
stones over their heads behind them, and not seeing where they fell.

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere
ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and
superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be
plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and
tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure
for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the
manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market.
He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well
his ignorance--which his growth requires--who has so often to use his
knowledge? We should feed and clothe him gratuitously sometimes, and
recruit him with our cordials, before we judge of him. The finest
qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only
by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one
another thus tenderly.

Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes,
as it were, gasping for breath. I have no doubt that some of you who
read this book are unable to pay for all the dinners which you have
actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing or are
already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen
time, robbing your creditors of an hour. It is very evident what mean
and sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been whetted by
experience; always on the limits, trying to get into business and trying
to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called by the Latins aes
alienum, another's brass, for some of their coins were made of brass;
still living, and dying, and buried by this other's brass; always
promising to pay, promising to pay, tomorrow, and dying today,
insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many modes,
only not state-prison offenses; lying, flattering, voting, contracting
yourselves into a nutshell of civility or dilating into an atmosphere of
thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let
you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import
his groceries for him; making yourselves sick, that you may lay up
something against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an old
chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more safely, in the
brick bank; no matter where, no matter how much or how little.

I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, as to
attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called Negro
Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both
North and South. It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to
have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver
of yourself. Talk of a divinity in man! Look at the teamster on the
highway, wending to market by day or night; does any divinity stir
within him? His highest duty to fodder and water his horses! What is his
destiny to him compared with the shipping interests? Does not he drive
for Squire Make-a-stir? How godlike, how immortal, is he? See how he
cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal
nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a
fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with
our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which
determines, or rather indicates, his fate. Self-emancipation even in the
West Indian provinces of the fancy and imagination--what Wilberforce
is there to bring that about? Think, also, of the ladies of the land
weaving toilet cushions against the last day, not to betray too green
an interest in their fates! As if you could kill time without injuring
eternity.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called
resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you
go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the
bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair
is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of
mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is
a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief
end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it
appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living
because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is
no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun
rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of
thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What
everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to
be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted
for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What
old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds
for old people, and new deeds for new. Old people did not know enough
once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; new
people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the
globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the
phrase is. Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor
as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. One may
almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by
living. Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the
young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have
been such miserable failures, for private reasons, as they must
believe; and it may be that they have some faith left which belies that
experience, and they are only less young than they were. I have lived
some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first
syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have
told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything to the purpose.
Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does
not avail me that they have tried it. If I have any experience which I
think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my Mentors said nothing
about.

One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it
furnishes nothing to make bones with"; and so he religiously devotes a
part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of
bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with
vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite
of every obstacle. Some things are really necessaries of life in some
circles, the most helpless and diseased, which in others are luxuries
merely, and in others still are entirely unknown.

The whole ground of human life seems to some to have been gone over by
their predecessors, both the heights and the valleys, and all things to
have been cared for. According to Evelyn, "the wise Solomon prescribed
ordinances for the very distances of trees; and the Roman praetors have
decided how often you may go into your neighbor's land to gather the
acorns which fall on it without trespass, and what share belongs to that
neighbor." Hippocrates has even left directions how we should cut our
nails; that is, even with the ends of the fingers, neither shorter nor
longer. Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which presume to have
exhausted the variety and the joys of life are as old as Adam. But man's
capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can
do by any precedents, so little has been tried. Whatever have been thy
failures hitherto, "be not afflicted, my child, for who shall assign to
thee what thou hast left undone?"

We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests; as, for instance,
that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once a system of
earths like ours. If I had remembered this it would have prevented some
mistakes. This was not the light in which I hoed them. The stars are the
apexes of what wonderful triangles! What distant and different beings in
the various mansions of the universe are contemplating the same one at
the same moment! Nature and human life are as various as our several
constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another? Could
a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's
eyes for an instant? We should live in all the ages of the world in an
hour; ay, in all the worlds of the ages. History, Poetry, Mythology!--I
know of no reading of another's experience so startling and informing as
this would be.

The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul
to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good
behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say
the wisest thing you can, old man--you who have lived seventy years, not
without honor of a kind--I hear an irresistible voice which invites me
away from all that. One generation abandons the enterprises of another
like stranded vessels.

I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may
waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere.
Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength. The
incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well-nigh incurable form of
disease. We are made to exaggerate the importance of what work we do;
and yet how much is not done by us! or, what if we had been taken sick?
How vigilant we are! determined not to live by faith if we can avoid it;
all the day long on the alert, at night we unwillingly say our prayers
and commit ourselves to uncertainties. So thoroughly and sincerely are
we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility
of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as
there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is a miracle to
contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.
Confucius said, "To know that we know what we know, and that we do not
know what we do not know, that is true knowledge." When one man has
reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, I
foresee that all men at length establish their lives on that basis.

Let us consider for a moment what most of the trouble and anxiety which
I have referred to is about, and how much it is necessary that we be
troubled, or at least careful. It would be some advantage to live
a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward
civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessaries of life
and what methods have been taken to obtain them; or even to look over
the old day-books of the merchants, to see what it was that men most
commonly bought at the stores, what they stored, that is, what are the
grossest groceries. For the improvements of ages have had but little
influence on the essential laws of man's existence; as our skeletons,
probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors.

By the words, necessary of life, I mean whatever, of all that man
obtains by his own exertions, has been from the first, or from long use
has become, so important to human life that few, if any, whether from
savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without it. To
many creatures there is in this sense but one necessary of life, Food.
To the bison of the prairie it is a few inches of palatable grass,
with water to drink; unless he seeks the Shelter of the forest or the
mountain's shadow. None of the brute creation requires more than Food
and Shelter. The necessaries of life for man in this climate may,
accurately enough, be distributed under the several heads of Food,
Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel; for not till we have secured these are
we prepared to entertain the true problems of life with freedom and a
prospect of success. Man has invented, not only houses, but clothes and
cooked food; and possibly from the accidental discovery of the warmth of
fire, and the consequent use of it, at first a luxury, arose the present
necessity to sit by it. We observe cats and dogs acquiring the same
second nature. By proper Shelter and Clothing we legitimately retain
our own internal heat; but with an excess of these, or of Fuel, that
is, with an external heat greater than our own internal, may not
cookery properly be said to begin? Darwin, the naturalist, says of the
inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, that while his own party, who were well
clothed and sitting close to a fire, were far from too warm, these naked
savages, who were farther off, were observed, to his great surprise, "to
be streaming with perspiration at undergoing such a roasting." So, we
are told, the New Hollander goes naked with impunity, while the European
shivers in his clothes. Is it impossible to combine the hardiness of
these savages with the intellectualness of the civilized man? According
to Liebig, man's body is a stove, and food the fuel which keeps up the
internal combustion in the lungs. In cold weather we eat more, in warm
less. The animal heat is the result of a slow combustion, and disease
and death take place when this is too rapid; or for want of fuel, or
from some defect in the draught, the fire goes out. Of course the vital
heat is not to be confounded with fire; but so much for analogy. It
appears, therefore, from the above list, that the expression, animal
life, is nearly synonymous with the expression, animal heat; for while
Food may be regarded as the Fuel which keeps up the fire within us--and
Fuel serves only to prepare that Food or to increase the warmth of our
bodies by addition from without--Shelter and Clothing also serve only to
retain the heat thus generated and absorbed.

The grand necessity, then, for our bodies, is to keep warm, to keep
the vital heat in us. What pains we accordingly take, not only with
our Food, and Clothing, and Shelter, but with our beds, which are our
night-clothes, robbing the nests and breasts of birds to prepare this
shelter within a shelter, as the mole has its bed of grass and leaves at
the end of its burrow! The poor man is wont to complain that this is a
cold world; and to cold, no less physical than social, we refer directly
a great part of our ails. The summer, in some climates, makes possible
to man a sort of Elysian life. Fuel, except to cook his Food, is
then unnecessary; the sun is his fire, and many of the fruits are
sufficiently cooked by its rays; while Food generally is more various,
and more easily obtained, and Clothing and Shelter are wholly or half
unnecessary. At the present day, and in this country, as I find by
my own experience, a few implements, a knife, an axe, a spade, a
wheelbarrow, etc., and for the studious, lamplight, stationery, and
access to a few books, rank next to necessaries, and can all be obtained
at a trifling cost. Yet some, not wise, go to the other side of the
globe, to barbarous and unhealthy regions, and devote themselves to
trade for ten or twenty years, in order that they may live--that is,
keep comfortably warm--and die in New England at last. The luxuriously
rich are not simply kept comfortably warm, but unnaturally hot; as I
implied before, they are cooked, of course a la mode.

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are
not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation
of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have
ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor. The ancient
philosophers, Chinese, Hindoo, Persian, and Greek, were a class than
which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich in inward. We
know not much about them. It is remarkable that we know so much of them
as we do. The same is true of the more modern reformers and benefactors
of their race. None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life
but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty.
Of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or
commerce, or literature, or art. There are nowadays professors of
philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because
it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have
subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as
to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence,
magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not
only theoretically, but practically. The success of great scholars and
thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly.
They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their
fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a noble race of men.
But why do men degenerate ever? What makes families run out? What is the
nature of the luxury which enervates and destroys nations? Are we sure
that there is none of it in our own lives? The philosopher is in
advance of his age even in the outward form of his life. He is not fed,
sheltered, clothed, warmed, like his contemporaries. How can a man be a
philosopher and not maintain his vital heat by better methods than other
men?

When a man is warmed by the several modes which I have described, what
does he want next? Surely not more warmth of the same kind, as more and
richer food, larger and more splendid houses, finer and more abundant
clothing, more numerous, incessant, and hotter fires, and the like.
When he has obtained those things which are necessary to life, there is
another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to
adventure on life now, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced.
The soil, it appears, is suited to the seed, for it has sent its radicle
downward, and it may now send its shoot upward also with confidence. Why
has man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in
the same proportion into the heavens above?--for the nobler plants are
valued for the fruit they bear at last in the air and light, far from
the ground, and are not treated like the humbler esculents, which,
though they may be biennials, are cultivated only till they have
perfected their root, and often cut down at top for this purpose, so
that most would not know them in their flowering season.

I do not mean to prescribe rules to strong and valiant natures, who will
mind their own affairs whether in heaven or hell, and perchance build
more magnificently and spend more lavishly than the richest, without
ever impoverishing themselves, not knowing how they live--if, indeed,
there are any such, as has been dreamed; nor to those who find their
encouragement and inspiration in precisely the present condition of
things, and cherish it with the fondness and enthusiasm of lovers--and,
to some extent, I reckon myself in this number; I do not speak to those
who are well employed, in whatever circumstances, and they know whether
they are well employed or not;--but mainly to the mass of men who are
discontented, and idly complaining of the hardness of their lot or of
the times, when they might improve them. There are some who complain
most energetically and inconsolably of any, because they are, as they
say, doing their duty. I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy,
but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross,
but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their
own golden or silver fetters.

If I should attempt to tell how I have desired to spend my life in years
past, it would probably surprise those of my readers who are somewhat
acquainted with its actual history; it would certainly astonish those
who know nothing about it. I will only hint at some of the enterprises
which I have cherished.

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to
improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the
meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the
present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities,
for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men's, and yet not
voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly
tell all that I know about it, and never paint "No Admittance" on my
gate.

I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle dove, and am still
on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them,
describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one
or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even
seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to
recover them as if they had lost them themselves.

To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible,
Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any
neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about 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 to-day; 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
