Civil Disobedience

Civil Disobedience

I completely agree with the saying, “That government is best which governs least.” I would like to see this idea put into action more quickly and thoroughly. If you take this idea to its furthest point, it means, “That government is best which governs not at all.” I also believe this. When people are ready for it, that’s the kind of government they will have.

Government, even at its best, is just a tool that we hope is useful. But most governments are usually not helpful, and all governments are sometimes unhelpful. People have many strong reasons to object to a permanent army. These same reasons can also be used against a permanent government. The permanent army is just one part of the permanent government. The government itself is just the method people have chosen to carry out their own will. But it can easily be misused and corrupted before the people can act through it. Look at the current Mexican War, for example. This war is the work of a relatively small number of people who are using the permanent government as their tool. At the beginning, the people themselves would not have approved of this war.

The Nature of the American Government

What is this American government? It’s like a tradition, even though it’s not very old. It tries to pass itself on to future generations without losing its good qualities. But every moment, it seems to lose some of its honesty and integrity. It doesn’t have the energy and power of a single living person. In fact, a single individual can force the government to do what they want. To the people, the government is like a toy gun made of wood. If they ever try to use it seriously against each other, as if it were a real gun, it would definitely break. But this doesn’t mean it isn’t necessary. People feel they need to have some kind of complicated system. They need to hear its noise to satisfy their idea of what a government should be.

Governments show how easily people can be taken advantage of, or even how they can fool themselves for their own supposed benefit. We must all agree that government is an excellent idea in theory. Yet, this American government has never, by itself, helped any project get started. The only way it has helped is by quickly getting out of the way.

• It does not keep the country free.
• It does not settle the West.
• It does not educate.

The inherent character of the American people has achieved all these things. And they might have achieved even more if the government had not sometimes interfered. Government is a tool that people hope will help them leave one another alone. And as mentioned, when government is most useful, it leaves the people it governs alone the most. Trade and business are like rubber; if they weren’t so flexible, they could never bounce over the obstacles that lawmakers constantly put in their path. If we were to judge these lawmakers solely by the results of their actions, and not partly by their intentions, they would deserve to be classified and punished with those who deliberately block railroads.

A Call for Better Government

But, speaking practically and as a citizen, I am different from those who call themselves “no-government men.” I am not asking for no government immediately. Instead, I am asking for a better government immediately. Let every person make it known what kind of government would earn their respect. That would be one step towards actually getting such a government.

Majority Rule and Conscience

Why does the majority get to rule once power is in the hands of the people? And why do they continue to rule for a long time?

• It’s not because they are most likely to be right.
• It’s not because this seems fairest to the minority.
• It’s because they are physically the strongest.

But a government where the majority rules in all cases cannot be based on justice, at least not as people understand it. Can’t there be a government where conscience, not the majority, decides what is right and wrong? A government where majorities only decide on issues where practical usefulness is the most important factor? Must a citizen, even for a moment or in the smallest way, give up their conscience to the lawmaker? If so, why does every person have a conscience? I believe we should be human beings first, and subjects of the government second. It is more important to develop respect for what is right than to develop respect for the law. The only obligation I have a right to take on is to do what I think is right at any time.

It’s often said, and it’s true, that an organization or company has no conscience. But an organization made up of conscientious people is an organization with a conscience. Laws have never made people even a tiny bit more just. In fact, because of their respect for the law, even well-meaning people are daily made into agents of injustice. A common and natural result of too much respect for the law is this: you might see a line of soldiers—colonel, captain, corporal, privates, young ammunition carriers, and all—marching in perfect order over hills and valleys to war. They march against their wills, yes, against their common sense and their consciences. This makes marching very difficult indeed, and it causes their hearts to pound. They have no doubt that the business they are involved in is a terrible one; they all naturally prefer peace. So, what are they? Are they men at all? Or are they small, movable forts and weapons storage, serving some unethical person in power? Visit the Navy Yard and look at a marine. He is the kind of man an American government can create. Or rather, he is what it can turn a man into with its dark, manipulative methods—a mere shadow and a distant memory of humanity. He is a man laid out alive and standing, and already, one might say, buried under arms with funeral honors, even if:

Not a drum was heard, nor a funeral note, As his corse to the ramparts we hurried; Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot O’er the grave where our hero we buried.

Serving the State: Machines vs. Men

The great majority of men serve the state in this way: not primarily as men, but as machines, using their bodies. They are the standing army, the militia, jailers, constables, and citizen posses. In most cases, they do not freely use their judgment or their moral sense at all. Instead, they lower themselves to the level of wood, earth, and stones. And perhaps wooden men could be manufactured that would serve the same purpose just as well. Such men deserve no more respect than men made of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same kind of worth as horses and dogs. Yet, people like these are commonly considered good citizens.

Others, like most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders, serve the state chiefly with their minds. And since they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending to, as they are to serve God.

A very few people—like heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the truest sense, and genuine men—serve the state with their consciences as well. Because of this, they necessarily resist the state for the most part. And the state commonly treats them as enemies. A wise man will only be useful as a man. He will not allow himself to be molded like “clay” or used to “stop a hole to keep the wind away.” He would leave that kind of task to his physical remains after death:

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

Someone who gives himself entirely to his fellow human beings often appears useless and selfish to them. But someone who gives himself only partially to them is called a benefactor and a philanthropist.

Association with the American Government

How should a man behave toward this American government today? I answer that he cannot be associated with it without disgrace. I cannot for an instant recognize a political organization as my government if it is also the government of enslaved people.

The Right to Revolution

All people recognize the right of revolution. That is, they have the right to refuse loyalty to the government and to resist it when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unbearable. But almost everyone says that such is not the case now. However, they think it was the case in the Revolution of 1775. If someone were to tell me that this was a bad government because it taxed certain foreign goods brought to its ports, it is most probable that I would not make a big fuss about it. I can do without those goods. All machines have their friction (small problems), and possibly this government does enough good to balance out the evil. In any case, it is a great evil to make a big stir about it. But when the friction comes to have its own machine—when oppression and robbery are organized systems—I say, let us not have such a machine any longer. In other words, when one-sixth of the population of a nation that has promised to be a refuge of liberty are slaves, and when a whole country is unjustly invaded and conquered by a foreign army and subjected to military law, I think it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty even more urgent is the fact that the country being invaded is not our own. Instead, ours is the invading army.

Expediency vs. Justice

Paley, a common authority for many on moral questions, in his chapter on the “Duty of Submission to Civil Government,” reduces all civil obligation to expediency (what is practical or convenient). He goes on 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,” he says, “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, Paley says, every man shall judge for himself. But Paley appears never to have thought about those cases where the rule of expediency does not apply. These are cases in which a people, as well as an individual, must do justice, no matter what it costs. If I have unjustly snatched a wooden plank from a drowning man, I must return it to him, even if I drown myself. This, according to Paley, would be inconvenient. But he who would save his life in such a case (by keeping the plank unjustly) shall lose it (his moral life, his integrity). The American people must stop holding slaves and stop making war on Mexico, even if it costs them their existence as a people.

The Hypocrisy of Massachusetts

In their actions, nations agree with Paley. But does anyone think that Massachusetts is doing what is truly right at this current moment?

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

Practically speaking, the opponents of reform in Massachusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians in the South. They are a hundred thousand merchants and farmers right here. These locals are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity. They are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to Mexico, no matter the cost. I do not argue with distant enemies. I argue with those who, near at home, cooperate with and do the bidding of those far away. Without these local collaborators, the distant enemies would be harmless. We are used to saying that the majority of people are unprepared for change. But improvement is slow because the few who are supposedly more enlightened are not significantly wiser or better than the many. It is not so important that many people should be as good as you. It is more important that there be some absolute goodness somewhere. For that goodness will spread and influence the whole, like yeast in dough. There are thousands who, in their opinion, are opposed to slavery and to the war. Yet, in effect, they do nothing to put an end to them.

• They consider themselves followers of Washington and Franklin, but they sit with their hands in their pockets.
• They say they do not know what to do, and so they do nothing.
• They even put the question of freedom after the question of free trade.
• They quietly read the stock market prices along with the latest news from Mexico after dinner. And, perhaps, they fall asleep over both.

What is the current value of an honest man and a patriot today? They hesitate, they regret, and sometimes they sign petitions. But they do nothing earnest or effective. They will wait, well-intentioned, for others to fix the evil, so that they may no longer have to regret it. At most, they give only a cheap vote, a weak show of support, and a casual “good luck” to the right, as it goes by them. There are nine hundred and ninety-nine supporters of virtue for every one truly virtuous man. But it is easier to deal with the real owner of something than with its temporary guardian.

The Nature of Voting

All voting is a kind of game, like checkers or backgammon. It has a slight moral aspect to it, a kind of playing with right and wrong, with moral questions. Betting naturally goes along with it. The character of the voters is not truly at stake. I cast my vote, perhaps, as I think is right. But I am not deeply concerned that that right should win. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Therefore, the obligation of voting never goes beyond what is merely practical or convenient. Even voting for the right thing is doing nothing for it. It is only weakly expressing to others your desire that it should win. A wise man will not leave what is right to the mercy of chance. Nor will he wish for it to win through the power of the majority. There is very little virtue in the actions of large groups of men. When the majority finally votes for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is very little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. At that point, they themselves will be the only slaves (enslaved by their own indifference). Only the vote of a person who asserts his own freedom by his vote can truly speed up the abolition of slavery.

The Lack of True Men

I hear about a convention to be held in Baltimore, or elsewhere. Its purpose is to select a candidate for the Presidency. It is made up mostly of editors and men who are politicians by profession. But I think, what does their decision matter to any independent, intelligent, and respectable man? Will we not still have the benefit of his wisdom and honesty, regardless? Can we not count on some independent votes? Are there not many individuals in the country who do not attend conventions? But no. I find that the so-called respectable man has immediately drifted from his independent position. He despairs of his country, when his country actually has more reason to despair of him. He quickly adopts one of the candidates chosen by the convention as the only available one. This proves that he himself is available for any purposes of a demagogue (a leader who appeals to popular desires and prejudices rather than using rational argument). His vote is worth no more than that of any unprincipled foreigner or a native person who has been bought. Oh, for a man who is truly a man! A man, as my neighbor says, who has a backbone you cannot pass your hand through! Our statistics are wrong: the population has been counted as too large. How many true men are there per thousand square miles in this country? Hardly one. Does America not offer any reason for real men to settle here? The American has shrunk into an “Odd Fellow”—meaning a conformist who is known for being overly social but lacking in intellect and cheerful self-reliance.

• His first and main concern, on coming into the world, is to see that the charity houses are in good repair.
• Before he has even legally become an adult, he is collecting money for the support of widows and orphans that might exist.
• In short, he ventures to live only by the aid of the mutual insurance company, which has promised to bury him decently.

Personal Responsibility and Complicity

It is not a man’s absolute duty to dedicate himself to eliminating every wrong, even the most enormous ones. He may still properly have other concerns that engage him. But it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it. If he gives it no further thought, he must not give it his practical support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and thoughts, I must first see, at least, that I am not pursuing them while benefiting from another man’s suffering (sitting on his shoulders). I must get off him first, so that he may pursue his own thoughts too. See what gross inconsistency is tolerated. I have heard some of my townsmen say, “I should like to see 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 same men have each, directly by their allegiance to the government, and so indirectly, at least, by their money, provided a substitute (paid for someone else to do these things). The soldier who refuses to serve in an unjust war is applauded by those who do not refuse to support the unjust government that makes the war. He is applauded by those whose own actions and authority he disregards and sets at nothing. It is as if the State were regretful enough to hire someone to punish it while it continued its wrongdoing, but not regretful enough to stop its wrongdoing for a moment. Thus, under the name of order and civil government, we are all ultimately made to pay respect to and support our own meanness. After the first blush of sin (the initial shame), comes indifference. And from immoral, the action becomes, as it were, unmoral (neither moral nor immoral), and not quite unnecessary to the life which we have created for ourselves.

True Support and True Reform

The slight criticism that true patriotism sometimes faces is something that noble-minded people are most likely to experience. Those who disapprove of the character and actions of a government, but still give it their loyalty and support, are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters. And so, they frequently become the most serious obstacles to reform. Some people are petitioning the State to dissolve the Union, or to disregard the demands of the President. Why do they not dissolve it themselves—the union between themselves and the State—and refuse to pay their share of taxes into its treasury? Do they not stand in the same relation to the State, that the State does to the Union? And have not the same reasons that prevented the State from resisting the Union also prevented them from resisting the State?

From Opinion to Action

How can a man be satisfied to merely have an opinion and enjoy it? Is there any enjoyment in it, if his opinion is that he is being wronged? If your neighbor cheats you out of a single dollar, you do not rest satisfied with knowing that you are cheated, or with saying that you are cheated, or even with petitioning him to pay you what he owes. Instead, you take effective steps at once to get the full amount back and to ensure that you are never cheated again. Action from principle—understanding what is right and then doing it—changes things and relationships. It is essentially revolutionary. It does not fit completely with anything that already existed. It not only divides states and churches, it divides families. Yes, it even divides the individual, separating the diabolical (evil) in him from the divine (good).

Responding to Unjust Laws

Unjust laws exist. So, what should we do?

• Shall we be content to obey them?
• Or shall we try to change them, and obey them only until we have succeeded?
• Or shall we break them immediately?

Most people living under a government like this think they should wait. They believe they must first persuade the majority to change the unjust laws. They think that if they were to resist, the solution (the remedy) would be worse than the original problem (the evil). But it is the government’s own fault that the solution seems worse than the problem. The government makes it worse.

• Why isn’t the government more willing to expect the need for reform and prepare for it?
• Why doesn’t it appreciate its wise minority—those few who see problems early and clearly?
• Why does it complain and resist before it is even harmed?
• Why doesn’t it encourage its citizens to be alert, to point out its faults, and to act in better ways than the government might want them to?
• Why does it always seem to punish great moral teachers (like Christ), silence those with revolutionary scientific ideas (like Copernicus), challenge religious reformers (like Luther), and label founding patriots (like Washington and Franklin) as rebels?

The Government’s Blind Spot

You would think that a government would have carefully considered the possibility of people deliberately and practically denying its authority. It seems like this is the one offense the government never prepared for. If it had prepared, why hasn’t it established a definite, suitable, and fair punishment for it?

• If a man with no property refuses just once to earn a small sum for the State (like paying a minor tax), he is put in prison. His jail time is not limited by any law I know of. It is decided only by the judgment of those who put him there.
• But if he were to steal a very large amount of money from the State, he would soon be allowed to go free again.

Responding to Injustice

If an injustice is just a minor, unavoidable side effect of how government works—like friction in a machine—then let it be. Perhaps the problem will smooth itself out over time. Eventually, the machine (the government system) itself will wear out. If the injustice has a specific mechanism within the system that causes it—like a spring, a pulley, a rope, or a crank that exists only for that unjust purpose—then perhaps you might consider if trying to fix it would be worse than the injustice itself. But if the injustice is of such a kind that it requires you to be the one who treats another person unfairly, then I say: break the law. Let your life be a “counter-friction”—a force that works against the machine to stop it. What I have to do, no matter what, is to make sure that I do not lend myself to the wrongdoing that I condemn.

Flawed Official Channels for Change

As for using the methods the State provides for fixing these problems, I don’t know of any that actually work. They take too much time, and a person’s life will be over before any change happens. I have other things to do with my life. I came into this world not primarily to make it a good place to live in, but simply to live in it, whether it is good or bad. A person doesn’t have to do everything, but they must do something. And just because a person cannot do everything, it doesn’t mean they should do something wrong. It is not my job to be petitioning the governor or the legislature any more than it is their job to be petitioning me. And if they don’t listen to my petition, what should I do then? But in the current situation (regarding issues like slavery and the war), the State has provided no way to fix the core problem. Its very Constitution is the evil. This may sound harsh, stubborn, and unwilling to compromise. But it is the kindest and most considerate way to treat the spirit of truth and justice—the only spirit that can appreciate or deserves such directness. All true positive change is like this; it’s like birth and death, which are powerful events that shake the body.

A Call to Abolitionists

I do not hesitate to say this: those who call themselves abolitionists (people working to end slavery) should immediately and effectively withdraw all their support from the government of Massachusetts. This includes withdrawing their personal support and their financial support (through property and taxes). They should not wait until they make up a majority of one before they allow what is right to succeed through their actions. I think it is enough if they have God (or moral rightness) on their side, without waiting for that extra person to join them. Moreover, any person who is more morally right than their neighbors already makes up a “majority of one.”

Confronting the State Through the Tax-Gatherer

I meet this American government, or its representative, the State government, directly and face-to-face only once a year. This happens in the form of its tax collector. This is the only way a person in my situation necessarily meets the government. And when it comes, it clearly says, “Recognize me; accept my authority.” In the current state of affairs, the simplest, most effective, and absolutely essential way to deal with this demand—and to express your dissatisfaction and lack of love for the government—is to deny its authority right then and there. My civil neighbor, the tax collector, is the actual person I have to deal with. After all, my quarrel is with men, not with pieces of paper (laws or documents). He has voluntarily chosen to be an agent of the government. How will he ever truly understand what he is and what he does as a government officer, or as a human being? He will only understand when he is forced to consider whether he should treat me—his neighbor, for whom he has respect—as a neighbor and a well-meaning man, or as a madman and someone who disturbs the peace. He must see if he can overcome this obstacle to his neighborly feelings without his thoughts or speech becoming as harsh and impulsive as his actions.

I know this very well:

• If one thousand men,
• If one hundred men,
• If ten men whom I could name—
• If only ten honest men—
• Yes, if just one HONEST man in this State of Massachusetts, who has stopped participating in slavery, were to actually withdraw from this partnership with the government and be locked up in the county jail for it, it would mean the abolition of slavery in America.

It doesn’t matter how small the beginning may seem. What is done well once is done forever. But we prefer to just talk about it; we say that talking is our mission. Reform has many newspapers supporting it, but not one person truly acting for it. Consider my respected neighbor, the State’s ambassador. He will spend his days in the Council Chamber discussing the question of human rights. What if, instead of being threatened with prisons in Carolina (for opposing slavery), he were to become a prisoner in Massachusetts? Massachusetts is so eager to push the sin of slavery onto its sister states (though at present, it can only find a minor issue of inhospitality to argue with them about). If this respected man were jailed here, the Legislature would certainly not ignore the subject of slavery the following winter.

The True Place for a Just Man

Under a government that imprisons anyone unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. Today, the only place Massachusetts has provided for its freer and less hopeless spirits is in its prisons. The State puts them out and locks them out, by its own actions, just as these individuals have already separated themselves from the State by their principles. It is there—in prison—that people seeking justice should find these just individuals. This includes:

• The fugitive slave.
• The Mexican prisoner on parole.
• The Native American who comes to speak about the wrongs done to his people.

They 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. In a slave-state, prison is the only house where a free man can live with honor. If any people think that their influence would be lost in prison, or that their voices would no longer trouble the State, or that they would not be like an enemy within its walls, they are mistaken. They do not understand how much stronger truth is than error. They do not realize how much more eloquently and effectively a person can fight injustice after they have experienced a little of it themselves.

Cast your whole vote. This means not just a strip of paper, but your entire influence.

• A minority is powerless as long as it conforms to the majority; at that point, it is not even truly a minority.
• But a minority becomes irresistible when it blocks the system with its whole weight.

If the government faces a choice between keeping all just men in prison or giving up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate about which to choose (it will choose to give up war and slavery). If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody action. Paying the taxes, which enables the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood, would be the violent action. This refusal to pay taxes is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if such a thing is possible. If the tax collector, or any other public official, 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 citizen has refused allegiance, and the official has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished. But even suppose blood should flow. Is there not a sort of bloodshed 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.

Property, Wealth, and Moral Ground

I have thought more about the imprisonment of the person who disobeys, rather than the government taking their goods—though both actions would serve the same purpose for the State. This is because those who stand up for the purest form of right, and are therefore most dangerous to a corrupt State, usually have not spent much time accumulating property. The State provides little service to such people. Even a small tax often seems outrageously high to them, particularly if they are forced to earn that money through special labor with their hands. If there were someone who lived entirely without using money, the State itself would hesitate to demand it from him. But the rich man—not to make any unfair comparison—is always loyal to the institution that makes him rich. Absolutely speaking:

• The more money a person has, the less virtue they tend to have.
• Money comes between a man and his goals, and gets those things for him.
• It was certainly no great virtue to simply obtain money.
• Money puts to rest many questions that a person would otherwise be forced to think about and answer.
• The only new question money introduces is the hard but ultimately unnecessary one: how to spend it.

Thus, a person’s moral foundation is pulled out from under their feet. The opportunities for truly living are reduced as what are called “the means” (wealth) increase. The best thing a rich man can do for his own personal development is to try to carry out the plans and dreams he had when he was poor. Christ answered the Herodians according to their situation. “Show me the tribute-money,” he said. And one of them took a penny out of his pocket. He implied: If you use money that has Caesar’s image on it (government-issued money), and which Caesar has made official and valuable—that is, if you are citizens of the State and gladly enjoy the advantages of Caesar’s government—then pay him back some of his own when he demands it. “Render therefore to Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and to God those things which are God’s.” This advice left them no wiser than before as to which things belonged to Caesar and which to God, because they did not really want to know.

Fear, Comfort, and True Cost

When I talk with the freest-thinking of my neighbors, I notice something. No matter what they say about the size and seriousness of the moral questions we face, and no matter how much they say they care for public peace, it all comes down to this:

• They feel they cannot give up the protection of the existing government.
• They are terrified of what disobedience would mean for their property and their families.

For my own part, I would not like to think that I ever rely on the protection of the State. But, if I deny the authority of the State when it presents its tax bill, it will soon take and waste all my property. It will also harass me and my children endlessly. This is hard. This makes it impossible for a man to live honestly and, at the same time, comfortably in outward, material ways. It will not be worthwhile to accumulate property, because that would be sure to be taken away again. You would have to rent a place or live as a squatter somewhere. You would raise only a small crop and eat it quickly. You would have to live within yourself and depend only on yourself, always ready to leave, and not have many possessions or commitments. A man can even grow rich in a country like Turkey, if he is willing to be a completely obedient subject of the Turkish government in all respects. Confucius said, “If a State is governed by the principles of reason, poverty and misery are subjects of shame. If a State is not governed by the principles of reason, riches and honors are the subjects of shame.” No: until I want the protection of Massachusetts to be extended to me in some distant southern port where my liberty is endangered, or until I am focused solely on building up an estate at home through peaceful business, I can afford to refuse allegiance to Massachusetts, and her right to my property and my life. It costs me less in every sense to face the penalty for disobedience to the State than it would to obey. If I were to obey, I would feel as if I were worth less as a person.

A Personal Stand Against Unjust Taxes

Some years ago, the State approached me on behalf of the church. It commanded me to pay a certain sum to support a clergyman. My father used to attend his preaching, but I never did. “Pay it,” the State said, “or be locked up in jail.” I refused to pay. But, unfortunately, another man decided to pay it for me. I did not see why the schoolmaster should be taxed to support the priest, and not the priest the schoolmaster. I was not the State’s schoolmaster; I supported myself by voluntary payments from those I taught. I did not see why the lyceum (the local lecture hall) should not be able to present its own tax bill, and have the State back its demand, just like the church did. However, at the request of the town officials (the selectmen), I agreed to write down a statement something like this: “Know all men by these presents, that I, Henry Thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society which I have not joined.” I gave this statement to the town clerk, and he still has it. The State, having learned that I did not wish to be considered a member of that church, has never made a similar demand on me since. However, at the time, it did say that it had to stick to its original assumption (that I was a member). If I had known how to name them all, I would have officially signed off from all the societies I never actually signed up for. But I did not know where to find a complete list.

A Night in Jail

I have paid no poll tax (a general tax on individuals) for six years. I was put into jail once on this account, for one night. As I stood there considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution. It treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. I wondered why it had finally concluded that this was the best use it could put me to. I wondered why it had never thought to make use of my services in some way. I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one for them to climb or break through before they could get to be as free as I was (free in spirit). I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed like a great waste of stone and mortar. I felt as if I alone, of all my townsmen, had truly paid my tax (by acting on principle). They plainly did not know how to treat me. They behaved like people who are poorly raised or ill-mannered. In every threat and in every compliment, there was a mistake. They thought that my chief desire was simply to be on the other side of that stone wall. I could not help but smile to see how diligently they locked the door on my meditations (my thoughts). My thoughts, however, followed them right out of the jail without any problem or delay. My thoughts were really all that was dangerous about me. Since they could not reach my mind, they had resolved to punish my body. This is just like boys who, if they cannot get at some person against whom they have a grudge, will abuse that person’s dog instead.

The State vs. The Individual

Thus, the State never intentionally confronts a man’s intellect or his moral sense. It only confronts his body, his physical senses. It is not armed with superior intelligence or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe and live in my own way. Let us see who is strongest. What real force does a multitude of people have? The only people who can truly force me are those who obey a higher law than I do. The masses try to force me to become like them. I do not hear of men being truly forced by large groups to live this way or that against their nature. What sort of life would that be? When I meet a government that essentially says to me, “Your money or your life,” why should I be in a hurry to give it my money? The government may be in a very difficult situation and not know what to do. I cannot help that. It must help itself, just as I do for myself. It is not worthwhile to whine or complain about it. I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society. I am not the son of the engineer who designed it. I observe that when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, one does not remain inactive to make way for the other. Instead, both obey their own laws. They sprout and grow and flourish as best they can, until one, perhaps, overshadows and destroys the other. If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies. And so does a man.

Inside the Jail

The night in prison was new and interesting enough. When I entered, the prisoners, in their shirt-sleeves, were enjoying a chat and the evening air in the doorway. But the jailer said, “Come, boys, it is time to lock up.” And so they dispersed, and I heard the sound of their steps returning into the hollow-sounding rooms. My roommate was introduced to me by the jailer as “a first-rate fellow and a clever man.” When the door was locked, he showed me where to hang my hat and how he managed things there. The rooms were whitewashed once a month. This one, at least, was the whitest, most simply furnished, and probably the neatest apartment in the town. He naturally wanted to know where I came from and what brought me there. When I had told him, I asked him in my turn how he came to be there. I presumed him to be an honest man, of course; and, as the world goes, I believe he was. “Why,” said he, “they accuse me of burning a barn; but I never did it.” As far as I could discover, he had probably gone to bed in a barn when drunk and smoked his pipe there. And so a barn was burnt. He had the reputation of being a clever man. He had been there for about three months waiting for his trial to begin and would have to wait about that much longer. But he was quite settled in and contented since he got his food for free and thought that he was well treated.

He used one window, and I the other. I saw that if one stayed there long, his main activity would be to look out the window. I had soon read all the pamphlets that were left there. I examined where former prisoners had broken out and where a grate (metal bars) had been sawed off. I also heard the history of the various people who had occupied that room. I found that even here, in jail, there was a history and local gossip that never circulated beyond the walls of the jail. This is probably the only house in town where poems are written. These poems are afterward printed in a circular form (passed around informally) but not officially published. I was shown quite a long list of verses. They were composed by some young men who had been caught trying to escape. They took their revenge by writing and singing these poems.

I questioned my fellow prisoner as much as I could, getting all the information I could, because I was afraid I would never see him again. But at length, he showed me which bed was mine and left me to blow out the lamp.

It was like traveling into a far country, a place I had never expected to see, to lie there in jail for one night.

It felt as if I had never before truly heard the town clock strike. I seemed to never have really noticed the evening sounds of the village. This was because, in the jail cell, we slept with the windows open, and these windows were behind the iron bars. It was like seeing my hometown, Concord, in the dim light of the Middle Ages. Our Concord River seemed to transform into a historic European river like the Rhine, and I imagined knights and castles. The voices I heard in the streets sounded like those of old townspeople from centuries ago. I was an unwilling observer and listener to everything said and done in the kitchen of the nearby village inn. This was a completely new and rare experience for me. It gave me a much closer view of my hometown. I felt like I was truly inside it in a new way. I had never really seen its institutions, like the jail, up close before. The jail is one of Concord’s special institutions because it is a county seat (a “shire town,” an administrative center). I began to understand what the people living there were really all about.

Jail Routine and Release

In the morning, our breakfasts were passed to us through a hole in the cell door. They came in small, rectangular tin pans designed to fit through the opening. Each pan held a pint of chocolate, some brown bread, and an iron spoon. When the jailers came to collect the pans, I was inexperienced enough to try to return the bread I hadn’t eaten. But my cellmate quickly grabbed it. He told me I should save it for lunch or dinner.

When I came out of prison—because someone had interfered and paid the tax for me—I did not notice that great physical changes had occurred in the town common. It wasn’t like the stories of someone who goes into prison as a youth and comes out as a shaky, gray-headed old man. And yet, in my eyes, a significant change had come over the scene—the town, the State, and the country. This change was greater than any that the mere passing of time could bring about. I saw the State in which I lived more distinctly than ever before. I saw to what extent the people I lived among could be trusted as good neighbors and friends.

• I realized their friendship was only reliable in good times (“summer weather only”).
• They were not deeply committed to doing what is right.
• Their prejudices and unthinking beliefs made them seem like a different type of people from me, as distinct as if they had entirely different cultural backgrounds.
• In their supposed sacrifices for humanity, they took no real risks, not even risks to their property.
• After all, they were not so noble. They would treat a thief with the same harshness the thief had shown them. They hoped to save their souls by following certain outward religious practices, saying a few prayers, and occasionally walking a narrow path of conventional morality, even if it was ultimately useless.

This may be judging my neighbors too harshly. I believe that most of them are not even aware that their village has an institution like the jail.

It used to be a custom in our village that when a poor debtor was released from jail, his acquaintances would greet him. They would look at him through their crossed fingers, mimicking the bars of a jail window, and ask, “How are you doing?” My neighbors did not greet me this way. Instead, they first looked at me, and then they looked at one another, as if I had returned from a long journey. I was put into jail as I was on my way to the shoemaker’s to get a shoe that had been mended. When I was let out the next morning, I went to finish my errand. After putting on my mended shoe, I joined a group of friends who were going to pick huckleberries. They were impatient for me to lead them. In half an hour—for the horse was quickly harnessed to the wagon—I was in the midst of a huckleberry field. It was on one of our highest hills, two miles away. And in that setting, the State was nowhere to be seen.

This is the whole history of “My Prisons.”

Refusing Allegiance

I have never refused to pay the highway tax (for roads). I want to be a good neighbor just as much as I want to be a “bad subject” (a disobedient citizen). As for supporting schools, I am currently doing my part to educate my fellow countrymen through my work. I do not refuse to pay the poll tax because of any specific item listed on the tax bill. I simply wish to refuse allegiance to the State. I want to withdraw from it and stand apart from it effectively. I do not care to trace the course of my dollar, even if I could, to see if it ends up buying a man (a slave) or a musket to shoot someone with. The dollar itself is innocent. But I am concerned about tracing the effects of my allegiance to the State. In fact, in my own way, I quietly declare war on the State. However, I will still make whatever use of it and get whatever advantages from it that I can, as is usual in such cases.

If others pay the tax demanded of me because they sympathize with the State, they are only doing what they have already done in their own case. Or rather, they are enabling injustice to an even greater extent than the State itself requires. If they pay the tax out of a mistaken concern for the individual being taxed—to save that person’s property or prevent them from going to jail—it is because they have not wisely considered how much they are letting their private feelings interfere with the public good.

Personal Integrity and Action

This, then, is my current position. But a person cannot be too much on guard in such a situation. They must ensure their actions are not biased by stubbornness or by too much concern for the opinions of other people. Let a person make sure that they do only what belongs to themselves and to the present moment.

Sometimes I think: “These people mean well; they are only ignorant. They would do better if they knew how. Why should you cause your neighbors the pain of having to treat you in a way they are not inclined to?” But then I think again: This is no reason why I should do as they do, or allow others to suffer much greater pain of a different kind (such as the suffering of slaves). Again, I sometimes say to myself: Many millions of men, without anger, without ill-will, without any personal feeling, demand only a few shillings from you. Their system (their constitution) makes it impossible for them to take back or change their current demand. And you have no way to appeal to any other millions of people. So why expose yourself to this overwhelming, unthinking (brute) force? You do not stubbornly resist cold and hunger, the winds and the waves. You quietly submit to a thousand similar necessities. You do not deliberately put your head into the fire. But, precisely because I see this force (the government and the majority) not as entirely an unthinking force, but partly as a human force, I react differently. I consider that I have relationships with those millions as millions of fellow human beings, not as mere unthinking objects or non-living things. Because of this, I see that an appeal is possible:

1. First, an appeal can be made instantly from them to their Creator (or a higher moral authority).
2. Secondly, an appeal can be made from them to their own consciences.

But if I deliberately put my head into a fire, there is no appeal I can make to the fire or to the Maker of fire. I would only have myself to blame. If I could convince myself that I have any right to be satisfied with men as they currently are, and to treat them accordingly—and not, in some respects, according to my own demands and expectations of what they and I ought to be—then, like a good Muslim and fatalist (one who believes events are predetermined), I would try to be satisfied with things as they are and say it is the will of God. And, above all, there is this key difference between resisting this human-led force and resisting a purely brute or natural force: I can resist this human force with some effect. But I cannot expect, like Orpheus in the myths, to change the nature of rocks and trees and beasts with my resistance.

Seeking Conformity, Finding Higher Standards

I do not wish to quarrel with any man or nation. I do not wish to split hairs, make overly fine distinctions, or set myself up as better than my neighbors. I seek, rather, I may say, even an excuse for conforming to the laws of the land. I am only too ready to conform to them. Indeed, I have reason to suspect myself on this point. Each year, as the tax-gatherer comes around, I find myself inclined to review the actions and positions of the national and state governments, and the spirit of the people, to discover a pretext for conformity. I believe that the State will soon be able to take all my work of this sort out of my hands (meaning, the state will become so obviously flawed that no pretext for conformity will be findable, or it will suppress such questioning). Then I shall be no better a patriot than my fellow-countrymen (who may not question).

• Seen from a lower point of view, the Constitution, with all its faults, is very good.
• The law and the courts are very respectable.
• Even this State and this American government are, in many respects, very admirable and rare things, for which we should be thankful, as many have described them.
• But seen from a point of view a little higher, they are what I have described them (flawed and unjust in key areas).
• Seen from a higher perspective still, and from the highest, who can say what they truly are, or whether they are worth looking at or thinking about at all?

However, the government does not concern me much, and I shall give it the fewest possible thoughts. It is not for many moments that I live under a government, even in this world. If a man is free in his thoughts, free in his imagination, and free in his daydreams—so that what is not real never appears real to him for long—then unwise rulers or reformers cannot fatally interrupt him.

Limits of Statesmen and Conventional Wisdom

I know that most men think differently from me. But those whose lives are professionally dedicated to the study of these or similar subjects satisfy me as little as anyone else. Statesmen and legislators, standing so completely within the institution of government, never see it distinctly and objectively. They talk of “moving society,” but they have no resting place outside of it from which to gain perspective. They may be men of certain experience and discrimination. They have no doubt invented ingenious and even useful systems, for which we sincerely thank them. But all their cleverness and usefulness lie within certain, not very wide, limits. They tend to forget that the world is not truly governed by policy and expediency (practical convenience). Daniel Webster, for example, never goes behind the surface of government. Therefore, he cannot speak with real authority about its fundamental nature. His words are wisdom to those legislators who are not considering any essential reform in the existing government. But for thinkers, and for those who legislate for all time, he never once even glances at the real subject. I know of people whose serene and wise reflections on this theme would soon reveal the limits of Webster’s mental range and openness to ideas. Yet, compared with the cheap declarations of most reformers, and the still cheaper wisdom and eloquence of politicians in general, Webster’s words are often the only sensible and valuable ones, and we can thank Heaven for him in that regard. Comparatively, he is always strong, original, and, above all, practical. Still, his defining quality is not wisdom, but prudence (cautiousness). The lawyer’s truth is not Truth in an absolute sense, but consistency, or a consistent expediency. True Truth is always in harmony with itself and is not chiefly concerned with revealing a type of justice that can coexist with wrongdoing. Webster well deserves to be called, as he has been, the Defender of the Constitution. There are really no actions he takes but defensive ones. He is not a leader, but a follower. His leaders are the men of 1787 (who wrote the Constitution). He says, “I have never made an effort, and never propose to make an effort; I have never countenanced an effort, and never mean to countenance an effort, to disturb the arrangement as originally made, by which the various States came into the Union.” Still thinking of the approval the Constitution gives to slavery, he says, “Because it was a part of the original compact—let it stand.” Despite his special sharpness and ability, he is unable to take a fact out of its merely political relations and see it as it truly is, to be dealt with by pure intellect. For instance, he cannot clearly address what a man in America today ought to do about slavery. Instead, he ventures, or is driven, to make a desperate answer like the following, while claiming to speak with absolute conviction and as a private individual. (What new and strange code of social duties could one possibly infer from this?) Webster states: “The manner in which the governments of those States where slavery exists are to regulate it, is for their own consideration, under their responsibility to their constituents, to the general laws of priority, humanity, and justice, and to God. Associations formed elsewhere, springing from a feeling of humanity, or any other cause, have nothing whatever to do with it. They have never received any encouragement from me, and they never will.”

The Journey Towards True Truth

Those who know of no purer sources of truth, who have traced its stream no higher, stand by the Bible and the Constitution. They wisely drink from these sources with reverence and humility. But those who see where truth merely trickles into this lake or that pool will gird up their loins once more. They will continue their pilgrimage toward truth’s very fountainhead.

The Need for True Legislators

No person with a true genius for legislation (lawmaking) has yet appeared in America. Such individuals are rare in the history of the world. There are orators, politicians, and eloquent men by the thousand. But the speaker who is capable of settling the much-disputed questions of the day has not yet opened his mouth to speak. We love eloquence for its own sake, not for any truth it may utter or any heroism it may inspire. Our legislators have not yet learned the comparative value to a nation of:

• Free trade versus true freedom.
• National unity versus moral rightness (rectitude). They have no genius or talent for the relatively humble questions of taxation and finance, commerce and manufacturing, and agriculture. If we were left solely to the wordy cleverness of legislators in Congress for our guidance, uncorrected by the timely experience and effective complaints of the people, America would not long keep her rank among the nations. For eighteen hundred years (though perhaps I have no right to say it) the New Testament has been written. Yet where is the legislator who has wisdom and practical talent enough to make use of the light which it sheds on the science of legislation?

Towards a More Perfect State

The authority of government, even such as I am willing to submit to, is still an impure one. (I will cheerfully obey those who know and can do better than I. In many things, I will even obey those who neither know nor can do so well.) To be strictly just, government must have the sanction and consent of the governed. It can have no pure right over my person and property beyond what I grant to it. The progress from an absolute monarchy to a limited monarchy, and from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual. But is democracy, as we know it, the last possible improvement in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man more fully? There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State recognizes the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I please myself with imagining a State, at last, which can afford to be just to all men and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor. Such a State would not even think it inconsistent with its own peace if a few people were to live apart from it—not meddling with it, nor embraced by it—who nevertheless fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow human beings. A State which bore this kind of fruit (individual freedom and integrity) and allowed it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State. I have also imagined this more perfect State, but I have not yet seen it anywhere.

Slavery in Massachusetts

Slavery in Massachusetts AN ADDRESS, Delivered at the Anti-Slavery Celebration at Framingham, July 4th, 1854

A Misguided Meeting in Concord

I recently attended a town meeting in Concord. I expected to speak, as one of many, about the issue of slavery here in Massachusetts. But I was surprised and disappointed. I found that my townspeople had gathered to discuss the future of Nebraska, not Massachusetts. What I had to say about our local situation would have been completely off-topic. I had thought our own house was on fire, not some distant prairie. Several Massachusetts citizens are now in prison for trying to rescue an enslaved person from the state’s own grasp. Yet, not one speaker at that meeting expressed regret for this. Not one even mentioned it. Their only concern seemed to be about some wild lands a thousand miles away. The people of Concord are not prepared to defend their own principles right here at home (our “own bridges”). Instead, they only talk of taking a stand in the distant lands beyond the Yellowstone River. It’s as if our local heroes—our Buttricks, Davises, and Hosmers (names from Concord’s Revolutionary past)—are retreating to those far-off concerns. I fear they won’t have a symbolic Lexington Common (a place of initial revolutionary struggle) to stand on against the enemy they face here. There is not one enslaved person in Nebraska. Yet, Massachusetts is deeply complicit with the enslavement of perhaps a million people throughout the nation through its enforcement of unjust laws.

Politicians and Half-Measures

Those who have been trained in politics consistently fail to face the facts, both now and always. Their solutions are merely half-measures and temporary fixes. They delay the day of real solutions indefinitely. Meanwhile, the debt of injustice keeps growing. The Fugitive Slave Law was not the main topic of discussion on that occasion. However, I learned that at a later, adjourned meeting, my townspeople faintly resolved something. They said that because the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had been rejected by one of the parties, “Therefore… the Fugitive Slave Law must be repealed.” But this is not the right reason to repeal an evil law. The only fact the politician seems to face is that there is less honor among thieves than they supposed. They don’t face the fact that these laws and compromises make them thieves in the first place by robbing people of their freedom.

As I had no opportunity to express my thoughts at that meeting, will you allow me to do so here?

Justice on Trial

Once again, the Boston Court House is full of armed men. They are holding a MAN prisoner and putting him on trial to determine if he is not actually a SLAVE. Does anyone really think that Justice or God is waiting for the decision of Commissioner Loring (the official in charge of this case)? For him to sit there, still trying to decide this question, is simply to make himself look ridiculous. This question has already been decided from eternity to eternity. The uneducated enslaved man himself, and the crowd around, have long since heard and agreed with that eternal decision: a man cannot be property. We might be tempted to ask:

• From whom did he receive his official position?
• Who is he, to have received it?
• What strange new laws does he obey?
• What past decisions (precedents) does he consider authoritative? The very existence of such a judge in such a case is an insult to decency. We do not ask him to make up his mind. We ask him to pack his bags and leave.

The Silent Governor

I listen to hear the voice of a Governor, the Commander-in-Chief of the forces of Massachusetts. Instead, I hear only the creaking of crickets and the hum of insects that now fill the summer air. The Governor’s great achievement is to review the troops on parade days. I have seen him on horseback, with his hat off, listening to a chaplain’s prayer. By chance, that is all I have ever seen of a Governor. I think I could manage to get along without one. If he is not of the least use in preventing me from being kidnapped under the Fugitive Slave Law, then what important use is he likely to be to me? When freedom is most endangered, he stays in the deepest obscurity, saying nothing. A distinguished clergyman once told me that he chose his profession because it offered the most leisure time for literary pursuits. I would recommend the profession of Governor to him.

Three years ago, when the tragedy of Thomas Sims (an enslaved man returned to slavery from Boston) took place, I said to myself: There is such an officer, if not such a man, as the Governor of Massachusetts. What has he been doing for the last two weeks? Has he been working as hard as he could just to stay neutral during this moral earthquake? It seemed to me that no sharper ridicule could have been aimed at him, no more cutting insult offered, than what actually happened: the complete absence of any inquiry about him during that crisis. The worst and the most I happen to know of him is that he did not use that opportunity to make himself known in a worthy way. He could at least have resigned his position on principle and gained lasting fame for it. It appeared that people had forgotten there even was such a man, or such an office. Yet, no doubt, he was busy trying to fill the role of governor all the while. He was no Governor of mine. He did not govern me.

But at last, in the current case (of Anthony Burns), the Governor was heard from. After he and the United States Government had perfectly succeeded in robbing a poor, innocent black man of his liberty for life—and, as much as they could, of his Creator’s image in his soul—the Governor made a speech to his accomplices at a celebratory dinner!

State Law vs. Inhumanity

I have read a recent law of this State. It makes it a crime for ‘any officer of the Commonwealth’ (Massachusetts) to ‘detain, or aid in the… detention,’ anywhere within its borders, ‘of any person, for the reason that he is claimed as a fugitive slave.’ Also, it was widely known that a legal order (a writ of replevin) to take the fugitive slave out of the custody of the United States Marshal could not be served. This was because there was not enough official force available to help the officer serve it.

I had thought that the Governor was, in some sense, the chief executive officer of the State. I thought it was his business, as Governor, to see that the laws of the State were carried out. And, as a man, he should take care that in doing so, he did not break the laws of humanity. But when there is any especially important use for him, he is useless, or worse than useless. He allows the laws of the State to go unenforced. Perhaps I do not know what the duties of a Governor are. But if being a Governor requires a person to subject himself to so much public shame without any solution, if it means putting a restraint on my own moral courage, then I shall take care never to be Governor of Massachusetts. I have not read much of the laws of this Commonwealth. It is not profitable reading. They do not always say what is true, and they do not always mean what they say. What I am concerned to know is this: that man’s (the Governor’s) influence and authority were on the side of the slaveholder, not the slave. They were on the side of the guilty, not the innocent. They were on the side of injustice, not justice. I never saw the man I am speaking of. Indeed, I did not even know he was Governor until this event occurred. I heard of him and Anthony Burns at the same time. And that, undoubtedly, is how most people will hear of him. That is how far I am from being governed by him. I do not mean that it was anything to his discredit that I had not heard of him before. I only mean that I heard what I did hear when I did. The worst I will say of him is that he proved to be no better than the majority of his voters would likely prove to be in such a situation. In my opinion, he was not equal to the occasion.

Military for Oppression, Not Protection

The entire military force of the State is at the service of a Mr. Suttle, a slaveholder from Virginia. It is there to help him catch a man whom he calls his property. But not a single soldier is offered to save a citizen of Massachusetts from being kidnapped under the Fugitive Slave Law! Is this what all these soldiers and all this training for the past seventy-nine years have been for? Have they been trained merely to help rob Mexico and to carry fugitive slaves back to their masters?

These very nights, I have heard the sound of a drum in our streets. There were men still training. For what purpose? I could, with an effort, pardon the roosters of Concord for still crowing, for perhaps they had not been mistreated that morning. But I could not excuse this drumming of the ‘trainers.’ The enslaved man was carried back by exactly such men as these—by the soldier. The best you can say about such a soldier in this context is that he is a fool made conspicuous by a colorful uniform.

Hypocritical Celebrations of Liberty

Three years ago, just a week after the authorities of Boston gathered to carry a perfectly innocent man back into slavery—a man they knew to be innocent—the inhabitants of Concord had the bells rung and the cannons fired. This was to celebrate their liberty, and the courage and love of liberty of their ancestors who fought at the Concord Bridge during the Revolution. It was as if those three million ancestors had fought for the right to be free themselves, but also for the right to hold three million other people in slavery. Nowadays, men wear a fool’s cap and call it a liberty cap. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some people who, if they were tied to a whipping-post with only one hand free, would use that hand to ring the bells and fire the cannons to celebrate their “liberty.” So, some of my townsmen took the liberty to ring bells and fire cannons. That was the extent of their freedom. When the sound of the bells died away, their liberty died away also. When the gunpowder was all used up, their liberty went off with the smoke.

The joke could not be any more absurd, unless the inmates of the prisons were to pay for all the gunpowder used in such salutes. And then they would hire the jailers to do the firing and ringing for them, while they enjoyed it from behind their cell bars.

This is what I thought about my neighbors.

Every humane and intelligent inhabitant of Concord, when he or she heard those bells and cannons in 1851, did not think with pride of the events of April 19th, 1775 (the start of the Revolution). Instead, they thought with shame of the events of April 12th, 1851 (the return of Thomas Sims to slavery). But now we have half-buried that old shame under a new one (the case of Anthony Burns).

Massachusetts on Trial

Massachusetts sat waiting for Mr. Loring’s decision as if that decision could in any way affect her own guilt. Her crime—the most obvious and fatal crime of all—was allowing him to be the judge in such a case. It was really the trial of Massachusetts herself. Every moment that she hesitated to set this man free, every moment that she now hesitates to make amends for her crime, she is convicted. The true Commissioner on her case is God—not Edward G. Loring, whom some might jokingly call Edward G. God, but simply God Himself.

I wish my countrymen to consider this: whatever human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can ever commit the least act of injustice against the most obscure individual without having to pay the penalty for it. A government that deliberately enacts injustice, and persists in it, will eventually become the laughing-stock of the world.

The True Nature of Slavery

Much has been said about American slavery. But I think that we do not even yet realize what slavery truly is. If I were to seriously propose to Congress that we should make mankind into sausages, I have no doubt that most of the members would smile at my proposition. If any believed me to be serious, they would think I proposed something much worse than Congress had ever done. But if any of them tell me that to make a man into a sausage would be much worse—would be any worse—than to make him into a slave, or than it was to enact the Fugitive Slave Law, I will accuse him of foolishness. I will accuse him of intellectual incapacity, of making a distinction where there is no real difference. The one proposition is just as reasonable, or unreasonable, as the other. Both are horrific.

Trampling an Unjust Law

I hear a good deal said about trampling this Fugitive Slave Law under foot. Why, one need not go out of his way to do that. This law does not rise to the level of the head or of reason. Its natural habitat is in the dirt. It was born and bred, and it has its life only in the dust and mire, on a level with the feet. He who walks with freedom, and does not timidly avoid confronting every venomous reptile, will inevitably tread on it and so trample it under foot—and Webster, its maker, along with it, like a dung beetle and its ball of dung.

Recent events will be valuable as a criticism of how justice is administered in our midst. Or, rather, they will show what the true sources of justice are in any community. It has come to this: the friends of liberty, the friends of the enslaved, have shuddered when they understood that an enslaved person’s fate was left to the legal courts of the country to be decided. Free men have no faith that justice will be awarded in such a case. The judge may decide this way or that; it is a kind of accident, at best. It is clear that such a judge is not a competent authority in so important a case. It is no time, then, to be judging according to his past decisions (precedents), but to establish a precedent of justice for the future. I would much rather trust the sentiment of the people. In their collective vote or action, you would get something of some value, at least, however small. But in the other case (the court), you only get the restricted judgment of an individual, which is of no real significance, no matter which way it goes.

Courts, Constitutions, and Higher Justice

It is, to some extent, fatal to the courts when the people are compelled to go behind them (to seek justice elsewhere). I do not wish to believe that the courts were made only for fair weather and for very polite, civil cases. But think of leaving it to any court in the land to decide whether more than three million people—in this case, a sixth part of a nation—have a right to be freemen or not! But it has been left to the so-called courts of justice, even to the Supreme Court of the land. And, as you all know, recognizing no authority but the Constitution (which permitted slavery), it has decided that these three million people are, and shall continue to be, slaves. Such judges as these are merely the inspectors of a pick-lock’s and a murderer’s tools. They only tell him whether his tools are in working order or not, and there they think their responsibility ends. There was a prior case on the list of things to be judged, a moral case which they, as judges supposedly appointed by God, had no right to skip. If that case—the case of the murderer himself (the institution of slavery or the slaveholder)—had been justly settled, they would have been saved from this humiliation.

The law will never make men free. It is men who have got to make the law free. They are the true lovers of law and order who observe the higher moral law when the government breaks it.

Among human beings, the judge whose words truly seal a man’s fate furthest into eternity is not the one who merely pronounces the verdict of human law. It is he, whoever he may be, who, from a love of truth, and unprejudiced by any custom or man-made law, utters a true opinion or sentence concerning that person. He it is that truly sentences him. Whoever has discerned truth has received his commission from a higher source than the chief justice in the world, who can perhaps only discern human law. Such a truth-seer finds himself constituted as a judge of the judge. It is strange that it should be necessary to state such simple truths.

City vs. Country: Sources of Moral Opinion

I am more and more convinced that, with reference to any public question, it is more important to know what the country (rural areas, common people) thinks of it than what the city thinks. The city does not think much. On any moral question, I would rather have the opinion of a small town like Boxboro’ than of Boston and New York put together. When the former speaks, I feel as if somebody had truly spoken, as if humanity still exists, and a reasonable being had asserted its rights. It’s as if some unprejudiced men among the country’s hills had at length turned their attention to the subject and by a few sensible words redeemed the reputation of the human race. When, in some obscure country town, the farmers come together to a special town meeting to express their opinion on some subject which is troubling the land, that, I think, is the true Congress, and the most respectable one that is ever assembled in the United States.

It is clear that there are, in this Commonwealth at least, two parties, becoming more and more distinct: the party of the city and the party of the country. I know that the country can be narrow-minded and petty enough, but I am glad to believe that there is a slight difference in her favor. But as yet, the country party has few, if any, ways to express itself. The editorials which its people read, like the news, come from the cities on the coast. Let us, the inhabitants of the country, cultivate self-respect. Let us not send to the city for anything more essential than our manufactured cloths and groceries. Or, if we read the opinions of the city, let us also entertain opinions of our own.

The Corrupting Influence of the Press

Among measures to be adopted, I would suggest making as earnest and vigorous an assault on the Press as has already been made, and with effect, on the Church. The Church has much improved within a few years; but the Press is almost, without exception, corrupt. I believe that, in this country, the press exerts a greater and a more harmful influence than the Church did in its worst period. We are not a particularly religious people, but we are a nation of politicians. We do not care much for the Bible, but we do care for the newspaper. At any meeting of politicians—like that at Concord the other evening, for instance—how out of place it would be to quote from the Bible! How appropriate it would be to quote from a newspaper or from the Constitution! The newspaper is a Bible which we read every morning and every afternoon, standing and sitting, riding and walking. It is a Bible which every man carries in his pocket, which lies on every table and counter, and which the mail and thousands of “missionaries” (news carriers) are continually distributing. It is, in short, the only book which America has printed, and which America reads. So wide is its influence. The editor is a preacher whom you voluntarily support. Your “tax” for this is commonly one cent daily, and it costs nothing for “pew hire” (a fee for church seating). But how many of these preachers preach the truth? I repeat the testimony of many an intelligent foreigner, as well as my own convictions, when I say that probably no country was ever ruled by so mean a class of tyrants as, with a few noble exceptions, are the editors of the periodical press in this country. And as they live and rule only by their servility, and by appealing to the worst, and not the better nature of man, the people who read them are in the condition of the dog that returns to his own vomit.

The Liberator and The Commonwealth were the only papers in Boston, as far as I know, which made themselves heard in condemnation of the cowardice and meanness of the authorities of that city, as shown in 1851.

The other newspapers, with hardly any exceptions, insulted the common sense of the country. They did this by the way they referred to and spoke about the Fugitive Slave Law and the return of the enslaved man, Thomas Simms. For the most part, they did this, one would say, because they thought it would win them the approval of their patrons (their wealthy supporters or advertisers). They were not aware that a sounder, more moral sentiment was widespread in the heart of Massachusetts. I am told that some of these newspapers have improved recently. However, they are still overwhelmingly “time-serving”—meaning they primarily aim to please those currently in power or popular opinion. Such is the reputation they have earned.

But, thankfully, this kind of “preacher” (the newspaper editor) can be reached even more easily by the reformer’s actions than a corrupt priest could in the past. The free people of New England only have to stop buying and reading these newspapers. They only have to withhold their pennies to shut down a large number of them at once. A person whom I respect told me that he bought a copy of Mitchell’s Citizen (a pro-slavery newspaper) on the train and then immediately threw it out the window. But wouldn’t his contempt have been expressed more effectively if he had not bought it at all?

Are the people who read and support newspapers like the Boston Post, Mail, Journal, Advertiser, Courier, and Times truly Americans? Are they New Englanders? Are they inhabitants of historic towns like Lexington, Concord, and Framingham, known for their fight for liberty? Are these newspapers the true flags of our Union? I am not a regular newspaper reader, so I may be forgetting to name the worst offenders.

Could slavery itself suggest a more complete eagerness to serve and obey than some of these newspapers display? Is there any dirt that their conduct does not lick, making it even fouler with their own slime? I do not know if the Boston Herald is still in existence, but I remember seeing it on the streets when Simms was carried off. Did it not play its part well—did it not serve its master (pro-slavery interests) faithfully? How could it have sunk any lower? How can a man stoop lower than he already is? How can he do more than put his lowest parts in place of his head? Than make his head his lowest extremity? When I have picked up such a paper, metaphorically holding it with my cuffs turned up as if it were filthy, I have imagined hearing the gurgling of the sewer through every column. I have felt that I was handling a paper picked out of the public gutters. It seemed like a page from the “gospel” of the gambling-house, the cheap tavern, and the brothel, all in harmony with the “gospel” of the Merchants’ Exchange (the world of business).

The Attitude of Massachusetts

The majority of men in the North, South, East, and West are not men of principle. If they vote, they do not send representatives to Congress on missions of humanity. While their Black brothers and sisters are being whipped and hanged for loving liberty—and here I could describe all that slavery implies and is—these voters are mainly concerned with the mismanagement of material things like wood, iron, stone, and gold. Their attitude is like saying to the Government: “Do what you will with my wife and children, my mother and brother, my father and sister! I will obey your commands to the letter.” “It will indeed grieve me if you hurt them, if you deliver them to overseers to be hunted by hounds or to be whipped to death. But nevertheless, I will peacefully pursue my chosen profession on this fair earth. Perhaps, one day, when I have put on mourning for their deaths, I will have persuaded you to relent (be more merciful).” Such is the attitude, such are the unspoken words, of Massachusetts.

Rather than act this way, I do not need to say what extreme measures I might consider—what match I would light, what unjust system I would try to blow up. But, because I love my life, I would side with the light (justice and truth). I would let the dark earth of injustice roll away from under me, calling my mother and my brother to follow.

I would remind my countrymen that they are to be human beings first. They should be “Americans” only at a late and convenient hour, when it doesn’t conflict with their humanity. No matter how valuable law may be to protect your property, even to keep your body and soul together, it is worthless if it does not also keep you and humanity together.

Judges as Tools

I am sorry to say that I doubt there is a judge in Massachusetts who is prepared to resign his office and earn his living innocently, whenever his job requires him to pass sentence under a law that is clearly contrary to the law of God (moral law). I am compelled to see that these judges, by their character, put themselves on the exact same level as a marine (a soldier) who fires his musket in any direction he is ordered to. They are just as much tools, and just as little men. Certainly, they are not more to be respected because their master (the unjust system) enslaves their understanding and their consciences, instead of their bodies.

The judges and lawyers—simply in their professional roles, I mean—and all men who prioritize expediency (what is convenient or politically advantageous) try these cases by a very low and incompetent standard. They do not consider whether the Fugitive Slave Law is right. They only consider whether it is what they call “constitutional.”

• Is virtue constitutional, or is vice?
• Is fairness (equity) constitutional, or is injustice (iniquity)? In important moral and vital questions like this, it is just as irrelevant to ask whether a law is constitutional as it is to ask whether it is profitable. These men persist in being the servants of the worst of men, and not the servants of humanity. The question is not whether you or your grandfather, seventy years ago, entered into an agreement to serve evil, and whether that service is therefore now due. The real question is whether you will not now, for once and at all, serve God (Goodness)—in spite of your own past moral failures or those of your ancestors. You can do this by obeying that eternal and only just CONSTITUTION which He, and not any Jefferson or Adams, has written in your very being (your conscience).

The Fallacy of Expediency

The bottom line is this: if the majority votes to declare the devil as God, the minority will live and behave accordingly. They will trust that sometime or other, perhaps by a deciding vote from some leader, they may reinstate God. This is the highest principle I can understand from my neighbors’ actions, or the best I can invent for them. These men act as if they believe they could safely slide downhill morally a little way—or even a good way—and would surely, eventually, come to a place where they could begin to slide up again. This is expediency: choosing the course that offers the slightest obstacles, which is always a downhill one. But there is no such thing as accomplishing a righteous reform by using expediency. There is no such thing as sliding uphill. In morals, the only “sliders” are backsliders (those who lose moral ground).

Thus, we steadily worship Mammon (wealth and materialism)—our Schools, our State, and our Church. And on the Seventh Day (Sunday), we curse God with a loud, hypocritical racket from one end of the Union to the other.

Will mankind never learn that political strategy is not morality? Will they never learn that strategy never secures any moral right, but only considers what is expedient? It leads to choosing the “available” candidate, who is invariably aligned with evil (the “devil”). And then, what right do his supporters have to be surprised when this devil does not behave like an angel of light? What is wanted are men, not of political strategy, but of integrity (probity)—men who recognize a higher law than the Constitution or the decision of the majority. The fate of the country does not depend on how you vote at the polls; the worst man is as strong as the best at that game. It does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot box once a year. It depends on what kind of man you are when you step out of your chamber into the street every morning.

Massachusetts’s True Shame

What should concern Massachusetts is not the Nebraska Bill, nor the Fugitive Slave Bill. It should be her own complicity in slavery and her own servile obedience to pro-slavery forces. Let the State dissolve her union with the slaveholder. She may wriggle and hesitate, and ask permission to read the Constitution once more. But she can find no respectable law or precedent that sanctions the continuance of such a Union for an instant.

Let each inhabitant of the State dissolve his own union with her, as long as she delays doing her duty.

The events of the past month teach me to distrust Fame. I see that she does not make fine distinctions, but cheers crudely. She does not consider the simple heroism of an action itself, but only its apparent consequences. She praises until she is hoarse the easy achievement of the Boston Tea Party. But she will be comparatively silent about the braver and more selflessly heroic attack on the Boston Court House (by abolitionists trying to free Anthony Burns), simply because it was unsuccessful!

Covered with disgrace, the State has sat down calmly to try, for their lives and liberties, the very men who attempted to do its moral duty for it. And this is called justice! Those who have shown that they can behave particularly well (the abolitionist rescuers) may perhaps be put under bonds to ensure their “good behavior.” Those whom truth now requires to plead guilty (to breaking an unjust law) are, of all the inhabitants of the State, the most outstandingly innocent. While the Governor, the Mayor, and countless officers of the Commonwealth are free, the champions of liberty are imprisoned.

Only they are guiltless who commit the “crime” of showing contempt for such an unjust Court. It is the duty of every man to see that his influence is on the side of justice. Let the courts themselves establish their own character by their actions. My sympathies in this case are wholly with the accused, and wholly against the accusers and their judges. Justice is sweet and musical; but injustice is harsh and discordant. The judge still sits there, like someone mechanically grinding a street organ. But it produces no music; we hear only the sound of the handle being turned. He believes that all the music resides in the handle, and the crowd tosses him their pennies just as before, not noticing the absence of true harmony.

Do you suppose that this Massachusetts, which is now doing these things, is anything but base and servile? It hesitates to honor these brave men. Some of its lawyers, and perhaps even some judges, may feel driven to take refuge in some poor legal quibble so they do not completely outrage their instinctive sense of justice. Do you suppose that such a State is the champion of liberty?

Show me a free State, and a court that is truly a court of justice, and I will fight for them, if need be. But show me Massachusetts as it is, and I refuse her my allegiance and express my contempt for her courts.

The Devaluation of Life

The effect of a good government is to make life more valuable. The effect of a bad one is to make it less valuable. We can afford for our railroads and all other merely material investments to lose some of their value. That only compels us to live more simply and economically. But suppose that the value of life itself should be diminished! How can we make fewer demands on man and nature, how can we live more economically with respect to virtue and all noble qualities, than we already do? For the last month, I have lived with the sense of having suffered a vast and indefinite loss. I think that every man in Massachusetts capable of feeling patriotism must have had a similar experience. At first, I did not know what was wrong with me. At last, it occurred to me that what I had lost was a country. I had never respected the Government near which I lived. But I had foolishly thought that I might manage to live here, minding my private affairs, and forget it. For my part, my old and worthiest pursuits have lost, I cannot say how much of their attraction. I feel that my investment in life here is worth many percent less since Massachusetts last deliberately sent an innocent man, Anthony Burns, back to slavery. I lived before, perhaps, in the illusion that my life passed somewhere only between heaven and hell. But now I cannot persuade myself that I do not live wholly within hell. The site of that political organization called Massachusetts is, to me, morally covered with volcanic ash and cinders, like the infernal regions Milton described in his poetry. If there is any hell more unprincipled than our rulers, and we, the ruled, I feel curious to see it. Life itself being worth less, all things connected with it, which support it, are worth less. Suppose you have a small library, with pictures to adorn the walls—a garden laid out around you—and you contemplate scientific and literary pursuits. Then you discover all at once that your home, with all its contents, is located in hell. And the local justice of the peace has a cloven foot and a forked tail, like a demon. Do not these things suddenly lose their value in your eyes?

I feel that, to some extent, the State has fatally interfered with my lawful business and my life. It has not only interrupted me when I was passing through Court Street on errands. It has interrupted me, and every man, on his onward and upward path—a path on which he had trusted he would soon leave Court Street (with its injustice) far behind. What right did the State have to remind me of Court Street? I have found that foundation, which even I had relied on as solid, to be hollow.

I am surprised to see men going about their business as if nothing had happened. I say to myself—“Unfortunates! They have not heard the news (of our moral state).” I am surprised that the man whom I just met on horseback should be so eager to overtake his newly-bought cows that are running away. After all, all property is insecure now. Even if they do not run away again, they may be taken away from him when he gets them back. Fool! Does he not know that his seed-corn is worth less this year—that all good harvests fail as you approach the empire of hell? No prudent man will build a storehouse under these circumstances, or engage in any peaceful enterprise which requires a long time to accomplish. Art is as long as ever, but life is more interrupted and less available for a man’s proper pursuits. This is not an era of peace. We have used up all our inherited freedom. If we would save our lives (our moral integrity), we must fight for them.

Nature’s Purity vs. Man’s Baseness

I walk toward one of our ponds, but what does the beauty of nature mean when men are morally corrupt? We walk to lakes to see our serenity reflected in them; when we are not serene, we do not go to them. Who can be serene in a country where both the rulers and the ruled are without principle? The remembrance of my country spoils my walk. My thoughts are like murder to the State, and I involuntarily find myself plotting against her.

But it happened the other day that I found a white water lily; a season I had waited for had arrived. It is the emblem of purity. It bursts up so pure and fair to the eye, and so sweet to the scent, as if to show us what purity and sweetness reside in, and can be extracted from, the slime and muck of earth. I think I have plucked the first one that has opened for a mile around. What confirmation of our hopes is in the fragrance of this flower! Because of it, I shall not so soon despair of the world, notwithstanding slavery, and the cowardice and want of principle of Northern men. It suggests what kind of natural laws have prevailed longest and widest, and still prevail. It suggests that the time may come when man’s deeds may smell as sweet as this flower. Such is the odor which the plant emits. If Nature can still compound this fragrance annually, I shall believe her still young and full of vigor, her integrity and genius unimpaired. And I will believe that there is virtue even in man, too—in those who are fitted to perceive and love it. It reminds me that Nature has been partner to no Missouri Compromise. I scent no compromise in the fragrance of the water lily. It is not a Nymphœa Douglassii (a lily named in a way that connects it to human affairs or political compromises, rather than representing pure, uncompromised nature). In this flower, what is sweet, pure, and innocent is wholly separated from what is obscene and harmful. I do not detect in this flower the time-serving indecision of a Massachusetts Governor, nor of a Boston Mayor. So, behave in such a way that the “odor” of your actions may enhance the general sweetness of the atmosphere. Then, when we behold or smell a flower, we may not be reminded how inconsistent your deeds are with it. For all odor is but one form of advertisement of a moral quality; and if fair actions had not been performed, the lily would not smell sweet. The foul slime stands for the laziness and vice of man, the decay of humanity; the fragrant flower that springs from it stands for the purity and courage which are immortal.

Slavery and servility have produced no sweet-scented flower annually to charm the senses of men, for they have no real life. They are merely a decaying and a death, offensive to all healthy nostrils. We do not complain that they live, but that they do not get buried. Let the living bury them; even these dead evils are good for manure.

A Plea for Captain John Brown

A Plea for Captain John Brown

I hope you will forgive me for being here. I do not wish to force my thoughts on you, but I feel forced myself to speak. Even though I know little about Captain Brown, I want to do my part. I want to correct the tone and statements made by newspapers and by people generally about his character and actions. It costs us nothing to be just and fair. We can at least express our sympathy for him and his companions, and our admiration for them. That is what I now plan to do.

Captain Brown’s Early Life and Principles

First, let’s talk about his history. I will try to leave out, as much as possible, what you have already read. I do not need to describe how he looked to you. Most of you have probably seen him and will not soon forget him. I am told that his grandfather, John Brown, was an officer in the American Revolution. Captain Brown himself was born in Connecticut around the beginning of this century. However, he moved with his father to Ohio when he was young. I heard him say that his father was a contractor. His father supplied beef to the army there during the War of 1812. Young John Brown went with his father to the army camp and helped him with this work. He saw a good deal of military life-perhaps more than if he had been a soldier himself. This was because he was often present at the officers’ meetings. Specifically, he learned from experience how armies are supplied and maintained in the field. He observed that this work requires at least as much experience and skill as leading soldiers in battle. He said that few people truly understood the cost, even just the financial cost, of firing a single bullet in war. In any case, he saw enough to become disgusted with military life. Indeed, it created in him a great hatred for it. It affected him so much that when he was about eighteen, he was tempted by an offer of a small office in the army. He not only declined that offer, but he also refused to participate in military training when he was called up. He was fined for this refusal. He then decided that he would never have anything to do with any war, unless it was a war for liberty.

Brown’s Involvement in Kansas

When the troubles in Kansas began over whether it would be a free or slave state, he sent several of his sons there. They went to strengthen the group of Free State men. He equipped them with such weapons as he had. He told them that if the troubles increased and if they needed him, he would follow to assist them with his actions and his advice. As you all know, he soon did this. And it was largely through his efforts, far more than anyone else’s, that Kansas was made a free state.

A Man of Observation

For part of his life, John Brown was a surveyor. At one time, he was also involved in wool-growing. He even went to Europe as an agent for that business. There, as everywhere, he kept his eyes open and made many original observations. For instance, he said that he saw why the soil of England was so rich, and why the soil of Germany (I think it was Germany) was so poor. He even thought about writing to some of the kings and queens about it. He believed it was because in England, the peasants live on the soil they cultivate. But in Germany, they are gathered into villages at night, away from the fields. It is a pity that he did not write a book about his observations.

Deep-Seated Opposition to Slavery

I should say that he was an old-fashioned man in his respect for the Constitution and in his faith in the permanence of this Union. He believed that slavery was completely opposed to these principles, and he was its determined enemy.

He was, by family background and birth, a New England farmer. He was a man of great common sense, deliberate and practical, as that class of people often is-only he was ten times more so. He was like the best of those who once stood at Concord Bridge, on Lexington Common, and on Bunker Hill during the Revolution. However, he was firmer in his stance and had higher principles than any I have chanced to hear of from that time. It was not some abolitionist lecturer who converted him to his views. His convictions were his own. Ethan Allen and John Stark, Revolutionary War heroes with whom he might be compared in some ways, fought on a lower and less important field. They could bravely face their country’s external enemies. But John Brown had the courage to face his own country when she was in the wrong. A writer from the West, trying to explain how Brown escaped so many dangers, said he was concealed under a “rural exterior.” This implies that in a prairie land, a hero should, by rights, only wear formal city clothes-a rather silly idea.

A Different Kind of Education

He did not go to the college called Harvard, good old Alma Mater though she is. He was not fed on the “pap” (soft, unchallenging learning) that is provided there. As he put it, “I know no more of grammar than one of your calves.” But he went to the great university of the West-the school of life and experience. There, he diligently pursued the study of Liberty, a subject for which he had shown an early fondness. After taking many “degrees” in this practical school, he finally began the public practice of Humanity in Kansas, as you all know. These were his “humanities”-his studies and actions on behalf of human beings-not any study of formal grammar. He would have ignored a misplaced Greek accent mark to help a falling man.

The Puritan Spirit

He was one of that class of people we hear a great deal about but rarely see: the Puritans. It would be useless to try to kill him. His spirit, like that of the Puritans of Cromwell’s time, died long ago but has reappeared here in him. Why should it not? Some of the Puritan stock are said to have come over and settled in New England. They were a class of people who did more than just celebrate their forefathers’ day and eat parched corn in remembrance of that time. They were neither Democrats nor Republicans in our modern sense. They were men of simple habits, straightforward, and prayerful. They did not think much of rulers who did not fear God. They did not make many compromises, nor did they seek out merely “available” or politically convenient candidates.

Principles in Camp

“In his camp,” as one person recently wrote, and as I have myself heard him state, “he permitted no profanity.” No man of loose morals was allowed to remain there, unless as a prisoner of war. “I would rather,” he said, “have smallpox, yellow fever, and cholera all together in my camp, than a man without principle.” He also said, “It is a mistake, sir, that our people make when they think that bullies are the best fighters, or that they are the fit men to oppose these Southerners. Give me men of good principles-God-fearing men-men who respect themselves. With a dozen of them, I will oppose any hundred such men as these ruffians led by Buford (a pro-slavery leader in Kansas).” He said that if someone offered to be a soldier under him and was quick to boast about what he could or would do if he could only see the enemy, he had little confidence in that person.

He was never able to find more than about twenty or so recruits whom he would accept. And there were only about a dozen, including his own sons, in whom he had perfect faith. When he was here some years ago, he showed a few people a little manuscript book-his “orderly book,” I think he called it. It contained the names of his company in Kansas and the rules by which they bound themselves. He stated that several of them had already sealed that contract with their blood. When someone remarked that, with the addition of a chaplain, it would have been a perfect Cromwellian troop (like the disciplined, religious soldiers of Oliver Cromwell), he observed that he would have been glad to add a chaplain to the list, if he could have found one who could fill that office worthily. It is easy enough, he implied, to find a chaplain for the United States army who might not be so worthy. I believe that he had prayers in his camp every morning and evening, nonetheless.

A Life of Discipline

He was a man of Spartan habits-simple, disciplined, and hardy. Even at sixty years old, he was careful about his diet when eating at your table. He would excuse himself by saying that he must eat sparingly and live on hard fare, as was proper for a soldier or someone preparing himself for difficult undertakings and a life of exposure to hardship.

A Man of Ideas and Action

He was a man of rare common sense and directness, both in speech and in action. Above all, he was a transcendentalist-a man of ideas and principles. That was what distinguished him. He did not act on whims or fleeting impulses, but carried out the purpose of a lifetime. I noticed that he did not overstate anything but always spoke within the bounds of truth. I remember particularly how, in his speech here, he referred to what his family had suffered in Kansas without ever giving the slightest outlet to his deeply suppressed anger and sorrow. He was like a volcano with an ordinary, small chimney flue. Also, when referring to the deeds of certain Border Ruffians (pro-slavery fighters in Kansas), he spoke rapidly, trimming his words like an experienced soldier who keeps a reserve of force and meaning. He said, “They had a perfect right to be hung.” He was not in the least a rhetorician (a showy speaker). He was not talking to “Buncombe” (just to please the crowd or his constituents). He had no need to invent anything. He only needed to tell the simple truth and communicate his own firm resolution. Therefore, he appeared incomparably strong. The eloquence usually heard in Congress and elsewhere seemed weak and insignificant by comparison. It was like comparing the speeches of Oliver Cromwell to those of an ordinary king.

Tact and Prudence in Action

As for his tact and prudence, I will merely say this: At a time when scarcely a man from the Free States was able to reach Kansas by any direct route, at least not without having his weapons taken from him, John Brown did something remarkable. Carrying what imperfect guns and other weapons he could collect, he openly and slowly drove an ox-cart through Missouri. He did this apparently in the role of a surveyor, with his surveying compass visible in the cart. In this way, he passed through enemy territory unsuspected. This gave him ample opportunity to learn the plans of the enemy. For some time after his arrival in Kansas, he continued to act as a surveyor. For instance, if he saw a group of ruffians on the prairie discussing, of course, the single topic that occupied their minds (slavery), he would perhaps take his compass and one of his sons. He would then proceed to survey an imaginary line right through the very spot where that group had assembled. When he came up to them, he would naturally pause and have some conversation with them. He would learn their news and, eventually, all their plans perfectly. Having thus completed his real survey (gathering intelligence), he would resume his imaginary one and continue his line until he was out of sight.

When I expressed surprise that he could live in Kansas at all, with a price set on his head, and with so many people, including the authorities, enraged against him, he explained it by saying, “It is perfectly well understood that I will not be taken.” For some years, much of the time, he had to hide in swamps. He suffered from poverty and from sickness, which was the result of exposure to the elements. He was befriended only by Native Americans and a few white people. But even though it might be known that he was lurking in a particular swamp, his foes usually did not dare to go in after him. He could even come out into a town where there were more Border Ruffians than Free State men and conduct some business, without staying long, and yet not be bothered. For, as he said, “No small handful of men were willing to undertake to capture me, and a large body could not be gathered together in time.”

The Harpers Ferry “Failure”

As for his recent failure at Harpers Ferry, we do not yet know all the facts about it. It was clearly far from being a wild and desperate attempt. His enemy, Mr. Vallandigham (a Congressman), was compelled to say that “it was among the best planned and executed conspiracies that ever failed.”

Not to mention his other successes, was it truly a failure, or did it show a lack of good management, to deliver a dozen human beings from bondage? He walked off with them by broad daylight, traveling for weeks if not months, at a leisurely pace, through one State after another, for half the length of the North. He was conspicuous to all parties, with a price set on his head. He even went into a courtroom on his way and told what he had done. By doing so, he convinced Missouri that it was not profitable to try to hold slaves in his neighborhood. And this success was not because the government officials were lenient, but because they were afraid of him.

Yet he did not foolishly attribute his success to “his star” or to any magic. He said, truthfully, that the reason why such greatly superior numbers of enemies recoiled before him was, as one of his prisoners confessed, because they lacked a cause. This “armor” of a just cause was something he and his party never lacked. When the time for fighting came, few men on the opposing side were found willing to lay down their lives in defense of what they knew to be wrong. They did not like the idea that this should be their last act in this world.

But let us move quickly to his last act, and its effects.

The North’s Unspoken Sympathy

The newspapers seem to ignore, or perhaps are really ignorant of, the fact that there are at least two or three individuals in every town throughout the North who think much as I, the present speaker, do about John Brown and his enterprise. I do not hesitate to say that they are an important and growing party. We aspire to be something more than stupid and timid possessions, pretending to read history and our Bibles, but disrespecting every house we live in and every day we breathe. Perhaps anxious politicians may try to prove that only seventeen white men and five Black men were involved in the recent enterprise at Harpers Ferry. But their very anxiety to prove this small number might suggest to themselves that not all is being told. Why do they still avoid the truth? They are so anxious because of a dim awareness of a fact they do not want to face directly: that at least a million of the free inhabitants of the United States would have rejoiced if Brown’s raid had succeeded. These people, at most, only criticize his tactics. Though we wear no black mourning bands, the thought of that man’s position and probable fate is spoiling many a man’s day here at the North, preventing other thoughts. If anyone who has seen him here can successfully pursue any other train of thought, I do not know what he is made of. If there is any such person who gets his usual amount of sleep, I will guarantee that he can fatten easily under any circumstances which do not touch his body or his wallet. I put a piece of paper and a pencil under my pillow, and when I could not sleep, I wrote in the dark.

Reactions to Brown’s Capture

On the whole, my respect for my fellow men-except for the idea that one great individual can outweigh a million ordinary ones-is not increasing these days. I have noticed the cold-blooded way in which newspaper writers and men generally speak of this event. It is as if an ordinary criminal-though one of unusual “pluck” (courage), as the Governor of Virginia is reported to have said, using the language of the cock-fighting pit, calling Brown “the gamest man he ever saw”-had been caught and were about to be hanged. John Brown was not dreaming of his foes when the governor thought he looked so brave; he was focused on his higher purpose. It turns any sweetness I have into bitterness to hear, or hear of, the remarks of some of my neighbors.

• When we first heard that he was dead (this was an early, incorrect report), one of my townsmen observed that “he died as the fool dieth.” This comment, forgive me, for an instant suggested a likeness between Brown dying and my neighbor living.
• Others, craven-hearted, said disparagingly that “he threw his life away,” because he resisted the government. Which way have they thrown their lives, I ask? These are the same sort of people who would praise a man for single-handedly attacking an ordinary band of thieves or murderers.
• I hear another ask, in a typically practical Yankee way, “What will he gain by it?” as if he expected Brown to fill his pockets by this enterprise. Such a person has no idea of gain beyond this worldly sense. If it does not lead to a “surprise” party, if he does not get a new pair of boots, or a vote of thanks, it must be a failure. “But he won’t gain any thing by it.” Well, no, I don’t suppose he could get paid a daily wage for being hanged, even if it were year-round. But then, he stands a chance to save a considerable part of his soul-and such a soul!-when you do not. No doubt you can get more in your market for a quart of milk than for a quart of blood, but that is not the market to which heroes carry their blood.

The Harvest of Heroism

Such people do not know that as the seed is, so is the fruit. In the moral world, when good seed is planted, good fruit is inevitable. It does not depend on our watering and cultivating. When you plant, or bury, a hero in his field, a crop of heroes is sure to spring up. This is a seed of such force and vitality that it does not ask our permission to germinate.

The momentary charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava, in obedience to a blundering command, proved what a perfect machine the soldier is. That charge has, properly enough, been celebrated by a poet laureate. But the steady, and for the most part successful, charge of this man, John Brown, for some years, against the legions of Slavery, in obedience to an infinitely higher command, is as much more memorable than that cavalry charge as an intelligent and conscientious man is superior to a machine. Do you think that that will go unsung?

Misguided Judgments and True Patriotism

“Served him right”-“A dangerous man”-“He is undoubtedly insane.” So they proceed to live their sane, wise, and altogether admirable lives. They read their Plutarch (ancient biographer of heroes) a little. But they chiefly pause at that feat of General Putnam, who was let down into a wolf’s den. In this way, they nourish themselves for brave and patriotic deeds they might perform someday. The Tract Society (a religious publishing group) could afford to print that story of Putnam. You might open the district schools with the reading of it, for there is nothing about Slavery or the Church in it-unless it occurs to the reader that some pastors are wolves in sheep’s clothing. Even the “American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions” might dare to protest against that kind of wolf. I have heard of various boards, and of American boards, but it happens that I never heard of this particular piece of “lumber” (useless organization) until lately. And yet I hear of Northern men, women, and children, by families, buying a “life membership” in such societies as these-a life-membership in the grave! You can get buried cheaper than that.

Our foes are in our midst and all about us. There is hardly a house that is not divided against itself. For our foe is the almost universal “woodenness” (lack of feeling and thought) of both head and heart. It is the want of vitality in man, which is the effect of our vice. And from this are born fear, superstition, bigotry, persecution, and slavery of all kinds. We are mere figureheads on a derelict ship, with livers (organs associated with baser functions) in the place of hearts. The curse is the worship of idols, which eventually changes the worshipper into a stone image himself. And the New Englander is just as much an idolater as any idol-worshipper elsewhere. This man, John Brown, was an exception, for he did not set up even a political graven image between himself and his God.

A church that can never be done with excommunicating Christ as long as it exists! (Meaning, a church that by its complicity with or silence on slavery continuously rejects the true spirit of Christ).

A Call for True Renewal

Away with your broad and flat churches, and your narrow and tall churches! It’s time to take a step forward. Invent a new style of essential structures, perhaps even a new way to deal with moral waste, instead of focusing on grand but empty buildings. Invent a “salt”—a purifying moral principle—that will truly save you and defend all of us from the stench of corruption.

The modern Christian is often a person who has agreed to say all the prayers in the official liturgy, provided you will let him go straight to bed and sleep quietly afterward. All his prayers seem to begin like a child’s: “Now I lay me down to sleep.” He is forever looking forward to the time when he shall go to his “long rest” (death). He has also consented to perform certain old, established charities, in his own fashion. But he does not wish to hear of any new or challenging forms of charity or justice. He doesn’t want any new clauses added to his moral contract to make it relevant to the present time. He piously shows the whites of his eyes (looking heavenward) on Sunday, but effectively shows his dark side, or ignores the dark realities like slavery affecting Black people, all the rest of the week. The evil here is not merely a lack of physical energy, but a stagnation of the spirit. Many people, no doubt, are well-intentioned. But they are sluggish by nature and by habit. They cannot imagine a person who is motivated by higher principles than they are. Accordingly, they declare this man, John Brown, insane. They do this because they know that they themselves could never act as he does, as long as they remained their usual selves.

The Strangeness of Our Neighbors

We dream of foreign countries, of other times, and of different races of men, placing them at a distance from us in history or space. But let some significant event like the present one occur right here among us. Then we often discover this same distance and this same strangeness between ourselves and our nearest neighbors. Suddenly, our neighbors can seem as foreign to us as people from Austria, China, or the South Sea Islands. Our crowded society all at once appears to have wide, empty spaces, looking clean and handsome to the eye, like a city of magnificent distances. We discover why it was that we never got beyond polite compliments and superficial conversations with them before. We become aware of a vast gulf between us and them, as great as the distance between a wandering Tartar and a Chinese town. The thoughtful man becomes a hermit even in the busy streets of the marketplace. Impassable seas suddenly seem to rise between us, or silent, empty plains stretch themselves out there. It is the difference in our fundamental makeup, our intelligence, and our faith—not physical rivers and mountains—that creates the true and uncrossable boundaries between individuals and between nations. Only those who are like-minded can truly meet us and understand us as equals.

The Press and Political Babble

I read all the newspapers I could get within a week after this event (John Brown’s raid). I do not remember seeing a single expression of sympathy for these men in them. I have since seen one noble statement in a Boston paper, but it was not an editorial (not the paper’s official opinion). Some large newspapers decided not to print the full report of Brown’s words, choosing to fill their pages with other material instead. It was as if a publisher should reject the manuscript of the New Testament and print the latest speech of a minor politician instead. The same newspaper that contained this important news about Brown was chiefly filled, in parallel columns, with reports of political conventions that were being held at the time. But the descent in importance from Brown’s words to those political reports was too steep. The political reports should have been spared this embarrassing contrast; they should have been printed in a special extra edition, at least. To turn from the voices and deeds of earnest men to the meaningless chatter (“cackling”) of political conventions! These office-seekers and speech-makers do not produce anything honest or valuable. They are like hens wearing their breasts bare upon an egg made of chalk—all show and no substance. Their great game is as trivial as a game of straws, or like that universal Native American gambling game of the platter, at which the players cried “hub, bub!” My advice to newspapers: Exclude the reports of religious and political conventions, and instead publish the words of a living, significant man.

But I object not so much to what the newspapers have omitted, as to what they have included. Even The Liberator (William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper) called Brown’s effort “a misguided, wild, and apparently insane effort.” As for the herd of other newspapers and magazines, I do not know a single editor in the country who will deliberately print anything which he knows will ultimately and permanently reduce the number of his subscribers. They do not believe that printing the challenging truth would be expedient (good for business). How then can they print truth? They argue, “If we do not say pleasant things, nobody will pay attention to us.” And so they act like some traveling auctioneers who sing a vulgar song in order to draw a crowd around them. Republican newspaper editors, who are obliged to get their articles ready for the morning edition and are accustomed to looking at everything through the dim twilight of politics, express no admiration for Brown, nor even true sorrow. Instead, they call these men “deluded fanatics”—“mistaken men”—“insane,” or “crazed.” This just shows what a “sane” group of editors we are blessed with—men who are certainly not “mistaken” about one thing: they know very well on which side their bread is buttered, at least.

Defining Positions and True Kinship

When a man performs a brave and humane deed, at once, on all sides, we hear people and political parties declaring, “I didn’t do it, nor did I support him in doing it, in any conceivable way. It can’t be fairly inferred from my past career that I had any connection to this.” I, for one, am not interested in hearing you define your position. I don’t know that I ever was, or ever shall be. I think it is mere egotism, or simply inappropriate at this time. You needn’t take so much pains to wash your skirts of him (to disassociate yourselves). No intelligent person will ever be convinced that he was any creation of yours. He went and came, as he himself informs us, “under the authority of John Brown and nobody else.” The Republican party does not realize how many people his “failure” will inspire to vote more correctly (more aligned with true justice) than the party might wish. They have counted the votes of Pennsylvania and other states, but they have not correctly counted Captain Brown’s vote—his moral impact. He has taken the wind out of their sails, the little momentum they had. They may as well stop their course and make repairs.

What if he did not belong to your particular group or clique? Even if you may not approve of his methods or all his principles, at least recognize his magnanimity (his greatness of spirit and courage). Would you not like to claim a kinship with him in that noble quality, even if in no other way he is like you, or likely to be like you? Do you think you would lose your reputation by doing so? What you might seem to lose in petty social standing, you would gain in true moral worth.

If these people who rush to condemn or distance themselves do not mean all this, then they are not speaking the truth and are not saying what they truly believe. They are simply up to their old manipulative tricks.

“It was always conceded to him,” says one who calls Brown crazy, “that he was a conscientious man, very modest in his demeanor, apparently inoffensive, until the subject of Slavery was introduced, when he would exhibit a feeling of indignation unparalleled.”

Humanity Overboard

Imagine the slave ship on her way, crowded with its dying victims. New cargoes of human beings are being added in mid-ocean. A small crew of slaveholders, supported by a large body of complicit passengers, is smothering four million people under the hatches. And yet, the politician asserts that the only proper way to achieve their deliverance is by “the quiet diffusion of the sentiments of humanity,” without any “outbreak.” As if sentiments of humanity were ever found unaccompanied by corresponding deeds! As if you could just disperse these sentiments, all finished to order, the pure article, as easily as sprinkling water with a watering pot, and so lay the dust of injustice. What is that sound I hear being cast overboard? It is the bodies of the dead who have found their deliverance in death. That is the way we are currently “diffusing” humanity, and its sentiments along with it.

Prominent and influential newspaper editors, accustomed to dealing with politicians (men of an infinitely lower moral grade), say in their ignorance that John Brown acted “on the principle of revenge.” They do not know the man. They must enlarge their own understanding to even conceive of him. I have no doubt that the time will come when they will begin to see him as he truly was. They have to conceive of a man of faith and of religious principle. He was not a politician, nor was he acting out of unthinking savagery. He was a man who did not wait until he was personally interfered with or thwarted in some harmless business before he gave his life to the cause of the oppressed.

Brown: A True Representative

If a figure like Walker (a Southern pro-slavery politician or adventurer) may be considered the representative of the South, I wish I could say that Brown was the representative of the North. He was a superior man. He did not value his bodily life in comparison with ideal things. He did not recognize unjust human laws but resisted them as his conscience bid him. For once, we are lifted out of the triviality and dust of politics into the region of truth and true manhood. No man in America has ever stood up so persistently and effectively for the dignity of human nature, knowing himself to be a man and the equal of any and all governments. In that sense, he was the most American of us all. He needed no babbling lawyer, making false issues, to defend him. He was more than a match for all the judges that American voters, or office-holders of whatever grade, can create. He could not have been tried by a jury of his peers, because his peers did not exist. When a man stands up serenely against the condemnation and vengeance of mankind, rising above them literally by his whole being—even if he were, until recently, the vilest murderer who has since settled that matter with himself—the spectacle is a sublime one. Didn’t you know it, you so-called Liberators, you Tribunes, you Republicans? In comparison, we become criminal. Do yourselves the honor to recognize him. He needs none of your respect.

As for the Democratic newspapers (which largely supported slavery or compromised with it), they are not human enough in their reporting to affect me at all. I do not feel indignation at anything they may say.

I am aware that I am anticipating a little. At the last accounts, John Brown was still alive in the hands of his foes. But that being the case, I have all along found myself thinking and speaking of him as if he were already physically dead, as his execution seemed certain.

A Statue for Brown

I do not generally believe in erecting statues to those who still live in our hearts, whose bones have not yet crumbled in the earth around us. But I would rather see the statue of Captain Brown in the Massachusetts State House yard than that of any other man whom I know. I rejoice that I live in this age—that I am his contemporary.

What a contrast it is when we turn to that political party (likely the Republicans) which is so anxiously trying to shuffle him and his plot out of its way! It is looking around for some “available” slaveholder, perhaps, to be its candidate for office—or at least for someone who will execute the Fugitive Slave Law, and all those other unjust laws which John Brown took up arms to annul!

The “Insanity” of Principle

Insane! A father and six sons, and one son-in-law, and several more men besides—at least as many as twelve disciples—all supposedly struck with insanity at once! Meanwhile, the “sane” tyrant (the slaveholding system) holds his four million slaves with a firmer grip than ever. And a thousand “sane” newspaper editors, his supporters, are busy “saving their country” and their own positions (“their bacon”)! His efforts in Kansas were called just as insane. Ask the tyrant who his most dangerous foe is: the sane man who compromises, or the insane man who acts on unwavering principle. Do the thousands who know him best, who rejoiced at his deeds in Kansas and gave him material aid there, think him insane? Such a use of this word “insane” is merely a figure of speech for most who persist in using it. And I have no doubt that many of the rest have already silently retracted their words.

Read his admirable answers to Senator Mason and others who interrogated him. How they are dwarfed and defeated by the contrast! On one side, there is half-brutish, half-timid questioning. On the other, there is truth, clear as lightning, crashing into their obscene temples of power. His interrogators are made to stand with historical figures of injustice like Pontius Pilate, Gessler, and the Inquisition. How ineffectual their speech and action are! And what an empty void their silence reveals! They are but helpless tools in this great moral work. It was no mere human power that gathered them to confront this preacher of righteousness.

Why have Massachusetts and the North sent a few supposedly “sane” representatives to Congress in recent years? To declare with effect what kind of sentiments? All their speeches put together and boiled down—and probably they themselves will confess it—do not match for manly directness and force, and for simple truth, the few casual remarks of “crazy” John Brown, spoken on the floor of the Harpers Ferry engine house. This is the man whom you are about to hang, to send to the other world—though he will not be going there to represent you. No, he was not our representative in any sense. He was too fair a specimen of a man to represent the likes of us (who are compromised and timid). Who, then, were his constituents (his true supporters)? If you read his words with understanding, you will find out. In his case, there is no idle eloquence, no formally prepared or first-time public speech, no compliments to the oppressor. Truth is his inspirer, and earnestness is the polisher of his sentences. He could afford to lose his Sharpe’s rifles, as long as he retained his faculty of speech—a Sharpe’s rifle of infinitely surer and longer range.

And the New York Herald reports the conversation “verbatim” (word for word)! It does not know of what undying words it is made the vehicle.

I have no respect for the insight of any man who can read the report of that conversation and still call the principal person in it insane. Brown’s words have the ring of a saner sanity than that of ordinary discipline, everyday habits, or a securely established organization. Take any sentence of it— “Any questions that I can honorably answer, I will; not otherwise. So far as I am myself concerned, I have told everything truthfully. I value my word, sir.” The few who talk about his supposed vindictive spirit, while they really admire his heroism, have no standard by which to detect a noble man. They have no pure substance to combine with his pure gold; instead, they mix their own impurities with it.

The Testimony of His Captors

It is a relief to turn from these slanders to the testimony of John Brown’s more truthful, but frightened, jailers and hangmen. Governor Wise of Virginia speaks far more justly and appreciatively of him than any Northern editor, politician, or public personage that I have happened to hear from. I know that you can afford to hear his words again on this subject. Governor Wise says: “They are themselves mistaken who take him to be a madman… He is cool, collected, and indomitable, and it is but just to him to say, that he was humane to his prisoners… And he inspired me with great trust in his integrity as a man of truth.” Wise also calls Brown “a fanatic, vain and garrulous (talkative),” (I leave that part of the judgment to Mr. Wise,) “but firm, truthful, and intelligent. His men, too, who survive, are like him…” Colonel Washington (one of Brown’s hostages) says that Brown “was the coolest and firmest man he ever saw in defying danger and death. With one son dead by his side, and another shot through, he felt the pulse of his dying son with one hand, and held his rifle with the other, and commanded his men with the utmost composure, encouraging them to be firm, and to sell their lives as dear as they could. Of the three white prisoners, Brown, Stephens, and Coppic, it was hard to say which was most firm.”

These are almost the first Northern men whom the slaveholder has learned to respect!

The testimony of Mr. Vallandingham (the Congressman), though less valuable, is of the same general meaning: “It is vain to underrate either the man or his conspiracy… He is the farthest possible remove from the ordinary ruffian, fanatic, or madman.”

The Government Unmasked

“All is quiet at Harper’s Ferry,” say the journals. What is the character of that calm which follows when the law of the land and the slaveholder prevail? I regard this event as a touchstone—a test designed to bring out, with glaring distinctness, the true character of this government. We needed this event to help us see the government by the light of history. The government also needed to see itself. When a government puts forth its strength on the side of injustice, as ours does to maintain Slavery and kill the liberators of the enslaved, it reveals itself as a merely brute force, or worse, a demonic force. It is like the head of the Plug Uglies (a notorious violent gang). It is more obvious than ever that tyranny rules. I see this government as effectively allied with oppressive European powers like France and Austria in crushing mankind. There sits a tyrant (the slave system) holding four million slaves in chains; here comes their heroic liberator (John Brown). This most hypocritical and diabolical government looks up from its seat, built upon those gasping four million, and inquires with an assumption of innocence, “What do you assault me for? Am I not an honest man? Cease agitation on this subject, or I will make a slave of you, too, or else hang you.”

We talk about a representative government; but what a monster of a government is that where the noblest faculties of the mind, and the whole heart of the people, are not represented. It is like a semi-human tiger or ox, stalking over the earth, with its heart taken out and the top of its brain shot away. Heroes have fought well on their stumps when their legs were shot off, but I never heard of any good done by such a government as that.

The only government that I recognize—and it matters not how few are at the head of it, or how small its army—is that power that establishes justice in the land, never that which establishes injustice. What shall we think of a government to which all the truly brave and just men in the land are enemies, standing between it and those whom it oppresses? A government that pretends to be Christian and yet crucifies a million Christs every day through its support of slavery!

The True Source of Treason

Treason! Where does such “treason” actually begin? I cannot help thinking of you, governments, as you truly deserve. Can you dry up the fountains of human thought and conscience? High treason, when it is resistance to tyranny here on earth, has its origin in, and is first committed by, that very Power that makes and forever recreates mankind (God, or the fundamental moral law). When you have caught and hanged all these human rebels, you have accomplished nothing but your own guilt, for you have not struck at the true source of this “rebellion.” You presume to contend with a foe against whom West Point cadets and rifled cannon have no power. Can all the art of the cannon-founder tempt matter (the metal itself) to turn against its maker? Is the form in which the founder thinks he casts it more essential than the inherent constitution of the metal and of himself?

The United States holds a coffle (a chained line) of four million slaves. The nation is determined to keep them in this condition; and Massachusetts is one of the confederated overseers helping to prevent their escape. Such are not all the inhabitants of Massachusetts, but such are those who rule and are obeyed here. It was Massachusetts, as well as Virginia, that put down this “insurrection” at Harpers Ferry. She sent the marines there, and she will have to pay the penalty for her sin.

When Government Fails, Citizens Act

Suppose there is a society in this State that, out of its own pocket and generosity, saves all the fugitive slaves who run to us. Imagine this group also protects our Black fellow citizens and leaves all other work to the so-called “Government.” Is that government not quickly losing its purpose? Is it not becoming an object of contempt to mankind? If private citizens are obliged to perform the duties of government—to protect the weak and dispense justice—then the government becomes merely a hired man, or a clerk, performing menial or indifferent services. Of course, a government whose existence makes a “Vigilant Committee” (a citizens’ group taking on government roles) necessary is only a shadow of a real government. What should we think even of an Eastern judge (a Cadi) if a secret vigilant committee had to operate behind the scenes to ensure justice? But such is the character of our Northern States generally; each has its Vigilant Committee. And, to a certain extent, these crazy, ineffective governments recognize and accept this relationship. They seem to say, virtually, “We’ll be glad to work for you on these terms, just don’t make a big noise about it.” And so the government, its salary being insured, withdraws into the back shop. It takes the constitution with it and spends most of its labor on trying to repair that document. When I hear it at work sometimes, as I pass by, it reminds me, at best, of those farmers who in winter try to earn a little extra money by making barrels (the coopering business). And what kind of spirit is their barrel (the constitution, their government) made to hold? These governments speculate in stocks and bore holes in mountains, but they are not competent to lay out even a decent highway. The only truly free road, the Underground Railroad, is owned and managed by the Vigilant Committee. They have tunneled under the whole breadth of the land. Such a government is losing its power and respectability as surely as water runs out of a leaky vessel. Its true functions are being taken over by those who can effectively contain and direct moral action.

The Few, The Brave, The Hanged

I hear many people condemn these men because they were so few in number. But when were the good and the brave ever in a majority? Would you have had John Brown wait until that time came? Bah! As if you and I would have suddenly joined his cause then! The very fact that he had no disorganized rabble or troop of hired followers around him would alone distinguish him from ordinary heroes. His company was small indeed, because few could be found worthy enough to pass his muster (meet his standards). Each one who laid down his life there for the poor and oppressed was a picked man, chosen out of many thousands, if not millions. Each was apparently a man of principle, of rare courage, and devoted to humanity, ready to sacrifice his life at any moment for the benefit of his fellow human beings. It may be doubted if there were as many more men who were their equals in these respects in all the country—I speak of his followers only. For their leader, John Brown, no doubt scoured the land far and wide, seeking to increase his troop. These few alone were ready to step between the oppressor and the oppressed. Surely, they were the very best men you could select to be hanged. That was the greatest compliment this country could pay them. They were ripe for her gallows. This country has tried for a long time, she has hanged a good many, but she never found the “right” ones (men of such pure principle) before.

When I think of him, and his six sons, and his son-in-law—not to list all the others—enlisted for this fight; when I think of them proceeding coolly, reverently, and humanely to their work, for months, if not years, sleeping and waking with this cause on their minds, thinking about it through summer and winter, without expecting any reward but a good conscience, while almost all of America stood ranked on the other side—I say again, it affects me as a sublime spectacle. If he had had any newspaper advocating “his cause,” any official publication, as the phrase is, monotonously and wearisomely playing the same old tune, and then passing around the collection hat, it would have been fatal to his effectiveness. If he had acted in any way so as to be left alone by the government, he might have been suspected of compromise. It was the fact that the tyrant (slavery) must give way to him, or he to the tyrant, that distinguished him from all the reformers of the day that I know. There was no middle ground for him.

The Right to Interfere

It was John Brown’s particular doctrine that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder in order to rescue the enslaved person. I agree with him. They who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but no others do. Such people will be more shocked by the slaveholder’s life of oppression than by his death. I shall not be quick to think a man is mistaken in his method if he is the one who most quickly succeeds in liberating the slave. I speak for the enslaved when I say that I prefer the philanthropy (love of humanity) of Captain Brown to that philanthropy which neither shoots my oppressor nor liberates me. At any rate, I do not think it is quite sane for one to spend his whole life merely talking or writing about this matter, unless he is continuously inspired—and I have not done so. A man may have other affairs to attend to. I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be unavoidable for me. We preserve the so-called peace of our community by deeds of petty violence every day. Look at the policeman’s club and handcuffs! Look at the jail! Look at the gallows! Look at the chaplain of the regiment blessing the army! We are merely hoping to live safely on the outskirts of this provisional army that maintains the current order. So we defend ourselves and our chicken coops, and in doing so, we maintain slavery. I know that the majority of my countrymen think that the only righteous use that can be made of Sharpe’s rifles and revolvers is to fight duels with them when we are insulted by other nations, or to hunt Native Americans, or shoot fugitive slaves with them, or the like. I think that, for once, the Sharpe’s rifles and the revolvers were employed in a righteous cause. The tools were in the hands of one who could use them.

The same righteous indignation that is said to have cleared the temple once (referring to Jesus driving out the moneylenders) will clear it again. The question is not about the weapon, but the spirit in which you use it.

Living and Dying Meaningfully

This event makes me aware that there is such a fact as death—the possibility of a man truly dying a meaningful death. It seems as if no man had ever truly died in America before, because in order to die meaningfully, you must first have truly lived. I don’t believe in the significance of the hearses, coffin cloths, and funerals that most people have. In many cases, there was no real “death” because there had been no real, vibrant “life”; those people merely rotted or sloughed off, pretty much as they had rotted or sloughed along in their unexamined lives. When they passed, no temple’s veil was rent (no great spiritual event occurred); only a hole was dug somewhere. Let the spiritually dead bury their physically dead. The best of them simply ran down like a clock. Figures like Franklin and Washington—they were let off without truly “dying” in this profound sense; they were merely “missing” one day from the world. I hear a good many people pretend that they are going to die, or that they have already died, for all I know. Nonsense! I’ll challenge them to do it—to die a death that has meaning. They haven’t got enough true life in them. They’ll just decompose like fungi, and a hundred eulogists will mop the spot where they left off. Only half a dozen or so people have truly “died” (lived and died in a way that profoundly impacts humanity) since the world began. Do you think that you are going to die, sir (addressing the reader)? No! There’s no hope of that for you yet. You haven’t learned your life’s lesson. You’ve got to stay after school (metaphorically). We make a needless fuss about capital punishment—about taking lives—when, in many cases, there is no true “life” (in this deep, principled sense) to take. Memento mori! (Remember you must die!) We don’t understand that sublime sentence which some worthy person once had carved on his gravestone. We’ve interpreted it in a groveling and sniveling sense; we’ve wholly forgotten how to die a death of consequence.

But be sure you do die, nevertheless—in that significant sense. Do your life’s work, and finish it. If you know how to begin your work with purpose, you will know when to end it with purpose.

These men, in teaching us how to die, have at the same time taught us how to live. If this man’s acts and words do not create a moral revival, it will be the severest possible satire on the acts and words that supposedly do create revivals. John Brown’s story is the best news that America has ever heard. It has already quickened the feeble pulse of the North. It has infused more generous and courageous blood into her veins and heart than any number of years of what is called commercial and political prosperity could. How many a man who was lately contemplating suicide now has something to live for, inspired by Brown’s example!

One writer says that Brown’s peculiar “monomania” (intense, single-minded focus) made him “dreaded by the Missourians as a supernatural being.” Sure enough, a hero in the midst of us cowards is always so dreaded. He is just that—something extraordinary. He shows himself superior to ordinary nature. He has a spark of divinity in him.

“Unless above himself he doth erect himself, How poor a thing is man!”

Newspaper editors also argue that it is proof of his insanity that he thought he was appointed by a higher power to do the work he did—that he did not doubt himself for a moment! They talk as if it were impossible that a man could be “divinely appointed” in these days to do any work whatever. They act as if vows and religion were outdated in connection with any man’s daily work—as if the agent to abolish Slavery could only be somebody appointed by the President, or by some political party. They talk as if a man’s death for his cause were a failure, and his continued life, be it of whatever character, were a success.

When I reflect on the cause to which this man, John Brown, devoted himself, and how religiously he did so; and then when I reflect on the causes to which his judges and all who condemn him so angrily and fluently devote themselves, I see that they are as far apart as the heavens and the earth.

The sum of it is, our “leading men” are a harmless kind of folk. They know well enough that they were not divinely appointed, but merely elected by the votes of their party.

Whose safety requires that Captain Brown be hanged? Is it essential for any Northern man? Is there no recourse but to cast these principled men also to the Minotaur (the monstrous institution of slavery)? If you do not wish it, say so distinctly. While these things are being done, beauty stands veiled, and music is a screeching lie. Think of him—of his rare qualities! He is such a man as it takes ages to make, and ages to understand; no mock hero, nor the representative of any party. He is a man such as the sun may not rise upon again in this morally darkened land. To whose making went the costliest material, the finest adamant (unbreakable substance); sent to be the redeemer of those in captivity. And the only use to which you can put him is to hang him at the end of a rope! You who pretend to care for Christ crucified, consider what you are about to do to him who offered himself to be the savior of four million enslaved men and women.

Any man knows in his conscience when he is justified, and all the clever arguments in the world cannot enlighten him further on that point. The murderer always knows that he is justly punished. But when a government takes the life of a man without the consent of that man’s conscience, it is an audacious government and is taking a step towards its own dissolution. Is it not possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong? Are laws to be enforced simply because they were made? Or because any number of men declare them to be good, even if they are not good? Is there any necessity for a man to be a tool to perform a deed of which his better nature disapproves? Is it the intention of lawmakers that good men shall ever be hanged? Are judges to interpret the law according to the letter, and not the spirit? What right have you to enter into an agreement with yourself that you will do thus or so, against the moral light within you? Is it for you to simply make up your mind—to form any resolution whatever—and not accept the deeper convictions that are forced upon you by conscience, convictions which often go beyond your everyday understanding? I do not believe in lawyers, or in that particular way of attacking or defending a man. In legal arguments, you descend to meet the judge on his own ground. And in cases of the highest moral importance, it is of no consequence whether a man breaks a human law or not. Let lawyers decide trivial cases. Businessmen can arrange such matters among themselves. If lawyers were the interpreters of the everlasting moral laws which rightfully bind mankind, that would be a different thing. But what we have is a counterfeiting law-factory (the U.S. legal system concerning slavery), standing half in slave territory and half in free territory! What kind of laws for free men can you expect from that?

A Plea for Brown’s Character, An Angel of Light

I am here to plead John Brown’s cause with you. I plead not for his physical life, but for his character—his immortal life. And so, his cause becomes your cause entirely; it is not his alone in the least. Some eighteen hundred years ago, Christ was crucified. This morning, perhaps, Captain Brown was hanged. These are the two ends of a chain which is not without its connecting links. He is not “Old Brown” any longer; he is an angel of light.

I see now that it was necessary that the bravest and most humane man in all the country should be hanged. Perhaps he saw it himself. I almost fear that I may yet hear of his being spared, doubting if a prolonged life, if any life at all for him now, could do as much good as his death will.

“Misguided!” “Garrulous (Talkative)!” “Insane!” “Vindictive!” So you critics write in your comfortable easy chairs. And this is how John Brown, wounded, responds from the floor of the Armory at Harpers Ferry, his words as clear as a cloudless sky, as true as the voice of nature itself: “No man sent me here; it was my own prompting and that of my Maker. I acknowledge no master in human form.”

And in what a sweet and noble tone he continues, addressing his captors who stand over him: “I think, my friends, you are guilty of a great wrong against God and humanity, and it would be perfectly right for any one to interfere with you so far as to free those you willfully and wickedly hold in bondage.”

And referring to his anti-slavery actions: “It is, in my opinion, the greatest service a man can render to God.”

“I pity the poor in bondage that have none to help them; that is why I am here; not to gratify any personal animosity, revenge, or vindictive spirit. It is my sympathy with the oppressed and the wronged, that are as good as you, and as precious in the sight of God.”

You people don’t recognize a true testament to faith and justice when you see it.

“I want you to understand that I respect the rights of the poorest and weakest of colored people, oppressed by the slave power, just as much as I do those of the most wealthy and powerful.”

“I wish to say furthermore, that you had better, all you people at the South, prepare yourselves for a settlement of that question (slavery), that must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it. The sooner you are prepared the better. You may dispose of me very easily. I am nearly disposed of now; but this question is still to be settled—this Negro question, I mean; the end of that is not yet.”

Brown’s Legacy

I foresee the time when the painter will paint that scene of John Brown’s stand, no longer needing to go to Rome for heroic subjects. The poet will sing of it; the historian will record it. And, along with the Landing of the Pilgrims and the Declaration of Independence, it will be an ornament of some future national gallery, when at least the present form of Slavery shall be no more here. We shall then be at liberty to weep for Captain Brown. Then, and not until then, we will take our “revenge”—the revenge of finally achieving the justice for which he died.

Walking

Walking

I want to say something in support of Nature. I want to speak for absolute freedom and wildness. This is different from the limited freedom and culture found only in civilized society. I want to encourage us to see people as inhabitants of Nature, as a part of Nature itself, rather than just as members of society. I might make an extreme statement here, so that I can make an emphatic one. There are already enough people defending civilization. The minister, the school committee, and every one of you will take care of that.

The Art of Sauntering

In my whole life, I have met only one or two people who truly understood the art of Walking—that is, of taking meaningful walks. They had a special talent, you could say, for sauntering.

The word “sauntering” has a beautiful origin. It is said to come from the Middle Ages, from “idle people who roved about the country… and asked charity, under pretence of going à la Sainte Terre,” which means “to the Holy Land.” Eventually, children would exclaim, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” which became “Saunterer”—a Holy-Lander, someone on their way to a Holy Land. People who never truly seek a “Holy Land” in their walks, even if they pretend to, are indeed just idlers and vagabonds. But those who do go to such a place in their walks are saunterers in the good sense that I mean.

Some people, however, think the word comes from the French sans terre, meaning “without land” or “without a home.” In a good sense, this could mean not having one particular home but feeling equally at home everywhere. This feeling is the secret of successful sauntering. A person who sits still in a house all the time might be the greatest spiritual wanderer of all. But the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more a wanderer than a meandering river, which is always diligently seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first origin (from Sainte Terre), which is indeed the most probable. For every walk is a kind of crusade. Some inner “Peter the Hermit” (a leader of the First Crusade) preaches to us, urging us to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land (Nature, or spiritual truth) from the hands of those who do not value it (the “Infidels”).

Faint-Hearted Crusaders

It is true that we walkers nowadays are mostly faint-hearted crusaders. We do not undertake persevering, never-ending adventures. Our expeditions are just short tours. We come around again in the evening to the old fireside from which we set out. Half the walk is just retracing our steps. We should go forth on even the shortest walk, perhaps, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return. We should be prepared to send back only our embalmed hearts as relics to our desolate kingdoms (our homes left behind). If you are ready to leave father and mother, brother and sister, wife and child and friends, and never see them again; if you have paid your debts, made your will, and settled all your affairs, and if you are a truly free person—then you are ready for a walk.

Walkers: An Ancient, Honorable Order

To speak from my own experience, my companion (for I sometimes have one) and I enjoy imagining ourselves as knights of a new, or rather an old, order. We are not Equestrians or Chevaliers, not Ritters or Riders (all terms for knights on horseback). We are Walkers, a still more ancient and honorable class, I trust. The chivalric and heroic spirit which once belonged to the Rider on horseback now seems to reside in, or perhaps has flowed into, the Walker. He is not just a Knight, but a “Walker Errant”—a wandering walker, much like a knight-errant who roamed in search of adventure and to right wrongs. He is a sort of fourth estate, existing outside of the established institutions of Church, State, and the general People.

We have felt that we are almost the only ones around here who practice this noble art of walking. Though, to tell the truth, if you believe what they say, most of my townsmen would like to walk sometimes, as I do, but they claim they cannot. No amount of wealth can buy the necessary leisure, freedom, and independence. These qualities are the essential “capital” for this “profession” of walking. This ability comes only by the grace of God. It requires a direct permission from Heaven to become a true walker. You must be born into the family of Walkers. As the Latin saying goes, Ambulator nascitur, non fit (A walker is born, not made). Some of my townsmen, it is true, can remember and have described to me certain walks they took ten years ago. On these walks, they were so blessed as to lose themselves for half an hour in the woods. But I know very well that they have confined themselves to the main roads ever since, whatever pretensions they may make to belong to this select class of walkers. No doubt they were uplifted for a moment, as if by a memory of a previous state of existence, when even they were people of the forest, living as freely as outlaws.

Here is an old ballad that captures this spirit:

When he came to grene wode, In a mery mornynge, There he herde the notes small Of byrdes mery syngynge.

It is ferre gone, sayd Robyn, That I was last here; Me lyste a lytell for to shote At the donne dere.

The Daily Need to Saunter

I believe that I cannot preserve my health and spirits unless I spend at least four hours a day—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields. I must be absolutely free from all worldly commitments during this time. You could offer me a penny for my thoughts then, or a thousand pounds; their value to me is beyond money. When I am sometimes reminded that mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the morning but all the afternoon too—so many of them sitting with their legs crossed, as if legs were made for sitting upon and not for standing or walking upon—I think that they deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago.

I cannot stay in my room for a single day without feeling like I am acquiring some rust. Sometimes, when I have stolen away for a walk at the “eleventh hour” (very late), say four o’clock in the afternoon, too late to really redeem the day, when the shadows of night were already beginning to mix with the daylight, I have felt as if I had committed some sin that needed to be atoned for. I confess that I am astonished at the power of endurance—to say nothing of the moral insensibility—of my neighbors who confine themselves to shops and offices the whole day, for weeks and months, yes, and for years almost together. I do not know what kind of material they are made of, sitting there now at three o’clock in the afternoon as if it were three o’clock in the morning (a time more suited for rest or inactivity). Bonaparte (Napoleon) may talk of “three-o’clock-in-the-morning courage” (bravery shown at unusual, difficult times). But that is nothing compared to the “courage” it takes to sit down cheerfully at this hour in the afternoon, facing your own self—the self you have known all morning—and essentially trying to starve out a part of yourself (your need for freedom and nature) to which you are bound by such strong ties of sympathy. I wonder why, around this time of day—say between four and five o’clock in the afternoon, too late for the morning newspapers and too early for the evening ones—there is not a general explosion heard up and down the street. An explosion that would scatter a legion of old-fashioned, house-bred notions and whims to the four winds for an airing—and so the staleness of modern life might cure itself.

Confined Lives and Enduring Architecture

How women, who are confined to the house still more than men, endure it, I do not know. But I have reason to suspect that most of them do not endure it well at all. When, early on a summer afternoon, my companion and I have been shaking the dust of the village from our clothes, hurrying past those houses with purely classical (Doric or Gothic) fronts that have such an air of peaceful stillness about them, my companion sometimes whispers that probably, around these times, their occupants are all gone to bed for a nap. It is then that I appreciate the beauty and the glory of architecture. Architecture itself never “turns in” to rest. It forever stands out, upright and watchful, keeping guard over the slumbering people inside.

No doubt, temperament and, above all, age have a good deal to do with one’s ability to stay indoors. As a person grows older, their ability to sit still and follow indoor occupations increases. A person’s habits become more “vespertinal” (active in the evening) as the evening of life approaches. Eventually, they might come out only just before sundown and get all the walking they require in just half an hour.

Walking as Adventure, Not Mere Exercise

But the walking of which I speak has nothing in common with “taking exercise,” as it is called. It is not like sick people taking medicine at stated hours, or like swinging dumbbells or chairs. Instead, this walking is itself the main enterprise and adventure of the day. If you simply want to get exercise, go in search of the springs of life itself. Think of a man swinging dumbbells for his health, while those true springs of vitality are bubbling up in far-off pastures, completely unsought by him!

Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only animal that ruminates (chews its cud, or reflects deeply) while walking. When a traveler asked William Wordsworth’s servant to show him her master’s study, she answered, “Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.”

The Balance of Outdoor Life and Inner Sensibility

Living much out of doors, in the sun and wind, will no doubt produce a certain roughness of character. It will cause a thicker outer layer (cuticle) to grow over some of the finer qualities of our nature, as it does on the face and hands. In the same way, severe manual labor can rob the hands of some of their delicacy of touch. So, on the other hand, staying in the house too much may produce a softness and smoothness—not to say an overly thin skin—accompanied by an increased sensitivity to certain impressions. Perhaps we would be more susceptible to some influences important to our intellectual and moral growth if the sun had shone on us and the wind had blown on us a little less. And no doubt, it is a delicate matter to correctly proportion the “thick” and “thin” skin in one’s character. But I think that any such surface roughness (“scurf”) will fall off quickly enough. The natural remedy is to be found in the balance that night bears to day, winter to summer, and thought to experience. If we achieve this balance, there will be so much more fresh air and sunshine in our thoughts. The calloused palms of the laborer are familiar with finer kinds of self-respect and heroism—whose touch thrills the heart—than are the languid fingers of idleness. That person who lies in bed by day and thinks themselves pure and pale (“white”), far from the tan and calluses of real experience, is merely sentimental.

Walking in Spirit

When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods. What would become of us if we walked only in a manicured garden or an enclosed mall? Even some groups of ancient philosophers felt the need to bring the woods to themselves, since they did not go out to the woods. “They planted groves and walks of Plane trees,” where they took their outdoor walks (subdiales ambulationes) in porticos open to the air. Of course, it is no use to direct our physical steps to the woods if our spirit does not also go there. I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without truly getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk, I would gladly forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head, and I am not where my body is—I am, in a sense, out of my senses (disconnected from my immediate experience). In my walks, I want to return to my senses. What business do I have in the woods if I am thinking of something that is outside the woods? I suspect myself, and cannot help but shudder, when I find my mind so caught up even in what are called “good works”—for this distraction can sometimes happen.

The Unending Discovery of Local Walks

My vicinity offers many good walks. Though for so many years I have walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together, I have not yet exhausted them. An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can still find this any afternoon. Two or three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as discovering the far-off kingdom of Dahomey. There is, in fact, a sort of harmony discoverable between the possibilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles’ radius (or the limits of an afternoon walk) and the seventy years of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you; there will always be more to discover.

Man’s “Improvements” vs. True Paradise

Nowadays, almost all of man’s so-called improvements—such as the building of houses and the cutting down of forests and all large trees—simply deform the landscape and make it more and more tame and cheap. Oh, for a people who would begin by burning down fences and letting the forest stand! I once saw fences half-consumed by fire, their ends lost in the middle of the prairie. Nearby, some worldly miser with a surveyor was looking after his property boundaries. All around him, heaven had taken place on earth, but he did not see the angels going to and fro. Instead, he was looking for an old post-hole in the midst of paradise.

Finding Freedom Beyond Civilization’s Reach

I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, or any number of miles, commencing at my own door, without going by any house. I can do this without crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do. First, I walk along by the river, then the brook, and then through the meadow and along the wood-side. There are square miles in my vicinity which have no human inhabitants. From many a hill, I can see civilization and the homes of people far in the distance. The farmers and their works are scarcely more obvious in the landscape than woodchucks and their burrows. Man and his affairs—church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture, even politics (the most alarming of them all)—I am pleased to see how little space they actually occupy in the vastness of the landscape. Politics is just a narrow field, and that still narrower highway over there leads to it. I sometimes direct travelers that way. If you would go to the political world, follow the main road—follow that man going to market, keep his dust in your eyes, and it will lead you straight to it. For politics, too, has its specific place merely and does not occupy all of space. I pass from it as easily as from a bean-field into the forest, and it is forgotten. In one half-hour, I can walk off to some portion of the earth’s surface where a person does not stand from one year’s end to another. There, consequently, politics do not exist, for they are as fleeting and insignificant as a man’s cigar smoke.

The Village and Its Degeneracy

The village is the place to which the roads tend. It is a sort of expansion of the highway, much like a lake is an expansion of a river. It is the body of which roads are the arms and legs—a place where two, three, or four roads meet, a common thoroughfare and ordinary stopping point for travelers. The word “village” comes from the Latin villa. The Roman scholar Varro connected villa and via (a way or road) to the Latin verb veho (to carry). This is because the villa (a country house or estate) was the place to and from which things were carried. Those who earned their living by transporting goods with teams of animals were said to be engaged in carrying (vellaturam facere). From this root, apparently, also come the Latin word vilis (meaning cheap or common) and our English word “vile,” as well as “villain” (originally a peasant). This etymology suggests the kind of degeneracy or spiritual decline that villagers are liable to. They are worn out by the travel and commerce that constantly pass by and over them, while they themselves do not truly travel or explore in a meaningful way.

Some people do not walk at all. Others walk only on the highways. A few walk “across lots” (through fields and woods, off the beaten path). Roads are made for horses and for men of business. I do not travel on them much, comparatively, because I am not in a hurry to get to any tavern, grocery store, stable, or depot to which they lead. I am a good “horse” for travel in a general sense, but I do not choose to be a “roadster” (one who only travels on roads). The landscape painter uses the figures of men to mark a road in a painting. He would not use my figure in that way, as I am not typically found on the road. I walk out into a kind of Nature that the old prophets and poets—like Manu, Moses, Homer, and Chaucer—walked in. You may call this land America, but the true Nature I seek is not limited to the political entity of America. Neither Amerigo Vespucci, nor Columbus, nor any of the other so-called discoverers truly found this deeper, essential Nature. There is a truer account of it in mythology than in any history of America that I have seen.

However, there are a few old roads that one can still walk on with profit. It is as if they still lead somewhere meaningful, even though they are now nearly discontinued. There is the Old Marlborough Road. I don’t think it actually goes to the town of Marlborough anymore—unless the true “Marlborough” is simply the spiritual destination to which this old road carries me. I am bolder to speak of it here because I presume that there are one or two such old, forgotten roads in every town.

THE OLD MARLBOROUGH ROAD.

WHERE they once dug for money, But never found any; Where sometimes Martial Miles Singly files, And Elijah Wood, I fear for no good: No other man, Save Elisha Dugan,— O man of wild habits, Partridges and rabbits, Who hast no cares Only to set snares, Who liv’st all alone, Close to the bone, And where life is sweetest Constantly eatest. When the spring stirs my blood With the instinct to travel, I can get enough gravel On the Old Marlborough Road. Nobody repairs it, For nobody wears it; It is a living way, As the Christians say. Not many there be Who enter therein, Only the guests of the Irishman Quin. What is it, what is it, But a direction out there, And the bare possibility Of going somewhere? Great guide-boards of stone, But travellers none; Cenotaphs of the towns Named on their crowns. It is worth going to see Where you might be. What king Did the thing, I am still wondering; Set up how or when, By what selectmen, Couurgas or Lee, Clark or Darby? They’re a great endeavor To be something forever; Blank tablets of stone, Where a traveller might groan, And in one sentence Grave all that is known; Which another might read, In his extreme need. I know one or two Lines that would do, Literature that might stand All over the land, Which a man could remember Till next December, And read again in the spring, After the thawing. If with fancy unfurled You leave your abode, You may go round the world By the Old Marlborough Road.

The Future of Walking Grounds

At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property. The landscape is not “owned” in a restrictive way, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called “pleasure grounds,” in which a few people will take a narrow and exclusive kind of pleasure only. Fences will be multiplied, and mantraps and other devices will be invented to confine people to the public road. Then, walking over the surface of God’s earth will be interpreted as trespassing on some gentleman’s private grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us make the most of our opportunities, then, before these evil days come.

The Magnetism of Nature

What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to decide which way we will walk? I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature. If we unconsciously yield to it, this magnetism will direct us correctly. It is not an indifferent matter to us which way we walk. There is a right way; but we are very liable, from heedlessness and stupidity, to take the wrong one.

The Ideal Walk and the Path Within

We deeply desire to take that special walk. It’s a walk we’ve never actually taken in the physical world. This walk would perfectly symbolize the path we love to travel in our inner, ideal world. Sometimes, no doubt, we find it difficult to choose our physical direction because this ideal path does not yet exist clearly in our thoughts.

The Westward Instinct

When I go out of my house for a walk, still uncertain where I will direct my steps, I submit myself to my instinct to decide for me. It may seem strange and whimsical, but I find that I finally and inevitably head southwest. I walk toward some particular wood, meadow, deserted pasture, or hill in that direction. My inner “compass needle” is slow to settle. It varies a few degrees and does not always point exactly southwest, it is true. There are good reasons for this variation. But it always settles somewhere between west and south-southwest. The future seems to lie that way for me. The earth appears more unexhausted and richer on that side. The general outline of my walks would not be a circle, but more like a parabola. Or rather, it would resemble one of those cometary orbits which some have thought to be non-returning curves. In my case, this curve opens westward, and my house occupies the place of the sun in this orbit. Sometimes I turn round and round, undecided, for a quarter of an hour. Then, for the thousandth time, I decide that I will walk into the southwest or west. I only go eastward if I am forced to; but I go westward freely. No business calls me in that westward direction. It is hard for me to believe that I will find beautiful landscapes or sufficient wildness and freedom beyond the eastern horizon. I am not excited by the prospect of a walk eastward. But I believe that the forest I see on the western horizon stretches uninterruptedly towards the setting sun. I also believe that there are no towns or cities in it of enough consequence to disturb me. No matter where I live, on one side there is the city, and on that side is the wilderness. And I am always leaving the city more and more, and withdrawing deeper into the wilderness. I would not put so much stress on this personal fact if I did not believe that something like this is the prevailing tendency of my countrymen. I feel I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And the nation itself is moving in that westward direction. I might even say that mankind, as a whole, progresses from east to west. Within a few years, we have witnessed the phenomenon of a southeastward migration in the settlement of Australia. But this affects us as a backward movement. Judging from the moral and physical character of the first generation of Australians, it has not yet proved to be a successful experiment. The eastern Tartars (a historical term for various nomadic groups in Asia) think that there is nothing west beyond Tibet. “The world ends there,” they say; “beyond there is nothing but a shoreless sea.” They live in a place that is completely and utterly East.

We go eastward to understand history and to study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the human race. We go westward as if heading into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure. The Atlantic Ocean is like a Lethean stream (the river of forgetfulness in Greek mythology). In our passage over it, we had an opportunity to forget the Old World (Europe) and its institutions. If we Americans do not succeed in creating a better world this time, there is perhaps one more chance left for the human race before it arrives on the banks of the Styx (the river of the underworld, symbolizing a final end). That chance lies in the “Lethe of the Pacific,” the Pacific Ocean, which is three times as wide as the Atlantic and offers another chance for a new beginning.

I do not know how significant it is, or how much it is evidence of individual peculiarity, that a person’s own small walks should thus align with the general movement of the human race. But I know that something similar to the migratory instinct in birds and animals affects both nations and individuals, either constantly or from time to time. This instinct, in some instances, is known to have affected squirrels, driving them to a general and mysterious movement. Some say they were seen crossing the broadest rivers, each on its particular piece of bark, with its tail raised for a sail. They supposedly even bridged narrower streams with their dead bodies. Something like the restless excitement that affects domestic cattle in the spring (once attributed to a mythical “worm in their tails”) also affects nations and individuals. Not a flock of wild geese honks over our town without, to some extent, unsettling the value of real estate here. If I were a real estate broker, I should probably take that natural disturbance into account.

As Chaucer wrote in the prologue to the Canterbury Tales:

Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages, And palmeres for to seken strange strondes.

(Then people long to go on pilgrimages, And palmers (pilgrims) to seek strange shores.)

The Allure of the West

Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a West as distant and as beautiful as that into which the sun goes down. The sun appears to migrate westward daily and tempts us to follow it. He is the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow. We dream all night of those mountain ridges on the horizon, though they may be made only of vapor, which were last gilded by his rays. The mythical island of Atlantis, and the islands and gardens of the Hesperides (a legendary earthly paradise in Greek mythology), appear to have been the Great West of the ancient peoples, enveloped in mystery and poetry. Who has not seen in their imagination, when looking into the sunset sky, the gardens of the Hesperides, and the source of all those ancient fables?

Columbus felt this westward tendency more strongly than any before him. He obeyed it and found a New World for the Spanish kingdoms of Castile and Leon. The common people (“herd of men”) in those days sensed fresh pastures and new opportunities from afar.

As the poet Edmund Spenser wrote (or a similar sentiment found in Milton’s Lycidas):

And now the sun had stretched out all the hills, And now was dropped into the western bay; At last he (the shepherd/poet) rose, and twitched his mantle blue; To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new.

America’s Natural Richness: A Land for the Future

Where on the globe can there be found an area of equal size to that occupied by the bulk of our States, which is so fertile, so rich, and varied in its productions, and at the same time so habitable by Europeans, as this American continent is? The botanist Michaux, who knew only part of America, said that “the species of large trees are much more numerous in North America than in Europe; in the United States there are more than one hundred and forty species that exceed thirty feet in height; in France there are but thirty that attain this size.” Later botanists have more than confirmed his observations. The naturalist Alexander von Humboldt came to America to realize his youthful dreams of seeing tropical vegetation. He beheld it in its greatest perfection in the primitive forests of the Amazon, the most gigantic wilderness on earth, which he has so eloquently described. The geographer Arnold Guyot, himself a European, goes farther—farther than I am ready to follow him in all his claims. Yet, I agree when he says: “As the plant is made for the animal, as the vegetable world is made for the animal world, America is made for the man of the Old World… The man of the Old World sets out upon his way. Leaving the highlands of Asia, he descends from station to station towards Europe. Each of his steps is marked by a new civilization superior to the preceding, by a greater power of development. Arrived at the Atlantic, he pauses on the shore of this unknown ocean, the bounds of which he knows not, and turns upon his footprints for an instant.” Guyot continues that when this person from the Old World has exhausted the rich soil of Europe and reinvigorated himself, “then recommences his adventurous career westward as in the earliest ages.” So far Guyot.

From this western impulse coming into contact with the barrier of the Atlantic sprang the commerce and enterprise of modern times. The younger Michaux, in his “Travels West of the Alleghanies in 1802,” says that the common inquiry in the newly settled American West was, ” ‘From what part of the world have you come?’ As if these vast and fertile regions would naturally be the place of meeting and common country of all the inhabitants of the globe.”

To use an old Latin saying, I might state: Ex Oriente lux; ex Occidente FRUX. This means: From the East, light (knowledge, tradition); from the West, fruit (results, products, the future).

Sir Francis Head, an English traveler and a Governor-General of Canada, tells us that “in both the northern and southern hemispheres of the New World, Nature has not only outlined her works on a larger scale, but has painted the whole picture with brighter and more costly colors than she used in delineating and in beautifying the Old World.” He continues: “The heavens of America appear infinitely higher, the sky is bluer, the air is fresher, the cold is more intense, the moon looks larger, the stars are brighter, the thunder is louder, the lightning is more vivid, the wind is stronger, the rain is heavier, the mountains are higher, the rivers longer, the forests bigger, the plains broader.” This statement will do, at least, to set against the account of the French naturalist Buffon, who had a less favorable view of this part of the world and its productions.

The botanist Linnæus said long ago, “Nescio quæ facies læta, glabra plantis Americanis.” This means: “I know not what there is of joyous and smooth in the aspect of American plants.” And I think that in this country there are no, or at most very few, Africanæ bestiæ (large, dangerous African beasts), as the Romans called them. In this respect also, America is peculiarly fitted for human habitation. We are told that within three miles of the center of the East Indian city of Singapore, some of the inhabitants are annually carried off by tigers. But a traveler can lie down in the woods at night almost anywhere in North America without fear of dangerous wild animals.

These are encouraging testimonies. If the moon looks larger here than in Europe, probably the sun looks larger here as well. If the heavens of America appear infinitely higher, and the stars brighter, I trust that these facts are symbolic of the height to which the philosophy, poetry, and religion of her inhabitants may one day soar. At length, perhaps, the spiritual heaven will appear as much higher to the American mind, and the hints of truth that “star” that spiritual heaven will seem as much brighter. For I believe that climate does affect mankind in this way—just as there is something in mountain air that feeds the spirit and inspires. Will not people grow to greater perfection, intellectually as well as physically, under these American influences? Or is it unimportant how many foggy days (both literally and metaphorically) there are in a person’s life? I trust that we shall be more imaginative. Our thoughts will be clearer, fresher, and more ethereal, like our sky. Our understanding will be more comprehensive and broader, like our plains. Our intellect generally will be on a grander scale, like our thunder and lightning, our rivers, mountains, and forests. And our hearts shall even correspond in breadth, depth, and grandeur to our inland seas. Perhaps there will appear to the traveler something—he knows not what—of that joyous and serene (læta et glabra) quality in our very faces. Else, to what end does the world go on, and why was America discovered?

To Americans, I hardly need to say the famous line:

“Westward the star of empire takes its way.”

As a true patriot, I should be ashamed to think that Adam in paradise was, on the whole, more favorably situated than the backwoodsman in this country.

Our sympathies in Massachusetts are not confined to New England. Though we may be estranged from the South, we sympathize with the West. The West is the home of the “younger sons,” much like how, among the ancient Scandinavians, younger sons often took to the sea to find their inheritance. It is too late in history to be solely studying ancient languages like Hebrew; it is more important now to understand even the everyday slang of today, to be connected to the present moment.

The Rhine vs. The Mississippi: Old World Romance and New World Heroism

Some months ago, I went to see a panorama (a large, continuous painted scene) of the Rhine River. It was like a dream of the Middle Ages. I felt as if I floated down its historic stream, in something more than just imagination. I passed under bridges built by the Romans and repaired by later heroes. I went past cities and castles whose very names were music to my ears, and each of which was the subject of a legend. There were places like Ehrenbreitstein, Rolandseck, and Coblentz, which I knew only from history. The ruins were what interested me most. A hushed music seemed to come up from its waters and its vine-clad hills and valleys, like the sound of Crusaders departing for the Holy Land. I floated along under a spell of enchantment, as if I had been transported to an heroic age and was breathing an atmosphere of chivalry.

Soon after, I went to see a panorama of the Mississippi River. As I imagined working my way up that river in the light of modern day, I saw the steamboats stopping to load wood for fuel. I counted the rising cities along its banks. I gazed on the fresh ruins of Nauvoo (a former Mormon settlement). I beheld Native Americans moving west across the stream. And just as I had previously imagined looking up European rivers like the Moselle, I now imagined looking up the Ohio and the Missouri rivers. I heard the legends of places like Dubuque and Wenona’s Cliff. Still thinking more of the future than of the past or the present, I saw that this American river was a Rhine stream of a different kind. Here, the foundations of great “castles” were yet to be laid, and the famous bridges were yet to be thrown over the river. And I felt that this—our current time in America—was the heroic age itself, though we may not recognize it. For the true hero is commonly the simplest and most obscure of men.

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In Wildness is the Preservation of the World

The West of which I speak is just another name for the Wild. And what I have been preparing to say is this: in Wildness is the preservation of the world. Every tree sends its fibers forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plow fields and sail the seas for it. From the forest and wilderness come the natural tonics and barks which strengthen and refresh mankind. Our ancestors were “savages” (people living in a wild, untamed state). The story of Romulus and Remus (the legendary founders of Rome) being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable; it holds a deeper truth about drawing strength from wild nature. The founders of every State which has risen to greatness have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source. It was because the later children of the Roman Empire were not suckled by the wolf—were not nourished by this wild strength—that they were eventually conquered and displaced by the “children of the Northern forests” who were still connected to that wildness.

I believe in the forest and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows. We require an infusion of wildness in our lives, like needing the essence of hemlock-spruce or arborvitae in our tea. There is a difference between eating and drinking for strength and vitality, and doing so from mere gluttony. Certain hunter-gatherer peoples eagerly devour the raw marrow of large antelopes and other wild game as a matter of course. Some Native American peoples of the North eat raw the marrow of the Arctic reindeer, as well as various other parts, including the tips of the antlers as long as they are soft. And in this, perhaps, they are ahead of the fancy cooks of Paris. They get the vital nourishment that, in civilized cooking, often just goes to feed the fire (is discarded or overcooked). This kind of wild food is probably better than pen-raised beef and slaughterhouse pork for making a strong, vital person. Give me a wildness whose direct glance no civilization can endure—as if we truly lived on the raw marrow of wild animals, full of untamed energy.

There are certain quiet intervals, like those bordering the song of the wood thrush, to which I would gladly migrate—wild lands where no settler has yet squatted. I feel, in my thoughts, as if I am already acclimated to such places.

The African hunter Cummings tells us that the skin of the eland (a type of antelope), as well as that of most other antelopes just killed, emits the most delicious perfume of trees and grass. I would have every man be so much like a wild antelope, so much a part and parcel of Nature, that his very person should thus sweetly advertise our senses of his presence. His presence should remind us of those parts of Nature which he most frequents. I feel no desire to be satirical when I say that even when a trapper’s coat emits the odor of muskrat, it is a sweeter scent to me than that which commonly comes from the garments of a merchant or a scholar. When I go into their wardrobes and handle their clothes, I am reminded of no grassy plains or flowery meadows which they have frequented. Instead, I am reminded of dusty merchants’ exchanges and libraries.

A tanned skin is something more than just respectable; it suggests a life lived outdoors. Perhaps an olive complexion is a fitter color than pale white for a human being—a denizen (inhabitant) of the woods. “The pale white man!” I do not wonder that some indigenous peoples pitied him for his lack of connection to the sun and nature. The naturalist Darwin says, “A white man bathing by the side of a Tahitian was like a plant bleached by the gardener’s art, compared with a fine, dark green one, growing vigorously in the open fields.”

The poet Ben Jonson exclaims:

“How near to good is what is fair (beautiful)!”

So I would say:

How near to good is what is wild!

Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. When wildness is not yet subdued by man, its presence refreshes him. One who pressed forward incessantly and never rested from his labors, who grew fast and made infinite demands on life, would always find himself in a new country or wilderness, surrounded by the raw material of life. He would be climbing over the prostrate stems of primitive forest trees.

Hope in Swamps, Not Manicured Lawns

Hope and the future, for me, are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious (impenetrable) and quaking swamps. When, in the past, I have analyzed my partiality for some farm which I had thought about purchasing, I have frequently found that I was attracted solely by a few square rods of dense, impermeable, and unfathomable bog—a natural, untamed wet area in one corner of it. That wild bog was the jewel which dazzled me. I derive more of my true sustenance (spiritual and inspirational) from the swamps which surround my native town than from the cultivated gardens in the village. There are no richer flowerbeds (parterres) to my eyes than the dense beds of dwarf andromeda (Cassandra calyculata) which cover these tender, wet places on the earth’s surface. The science of botany cannot go farther than to tell me the names of the shrubs which grow there—the high-bush blueberry, panicled andromeda, lambkill, azalea, and rhodora—all standing in the quaking sphagnum moss. I often think that I should like to have my house front on this mass of dull red bushes. I would omit other flower plots and borders, transplanted spruce trees, and trimmed boxwood hedges, even graveled walks. I would want to have this fertile, wild spot right under my windows, not just a few imported wheelbarrow-fulls of soil brought in only to cover the sand which was thrown out when digging the cellar. Why not put my house, my parlor, behind this wild plot, instead of behind that meager assemblage of man-made curiosities, that poor apology for Nature and Art, which I call my front yard? It takes an effort to clear up the land and make a “decent” appearance when the carpenter and mason have departed, an effort done as much for the passerby as for the dweller within. The most tasteful front-yard fence was never an agreeable object of study to me. The most elaborate ornaments on it, like carved acorn-tops or similar things, soon wearied and disgusted me.

Choosing the Swamp: A Preference for the Wild

So, build the foundations of your house right up to the very edge of the swamp, then. (This might not be the best place for a dry cellar, of course.) Do this so that ordinary citizens have no easy access to your house from that wild and untamed side. Front yards are not truly made for walking in, but at most, for walking through. You could always use the back way to enter your home, coming from the wild.

Yes, though you may think I am perverse or intentionally contrary, if it were proposed to me to live in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that human art ever contrived, or else near a dismal swamp, I should certainly decide in favor of the swamp. How vain, then, have all your labors to create cultivated beauty been for me, fellow citizens!

My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness and wildness of the landscape. Give me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness! In the desert, pure air and solitude compensate for the lack of moisture and fertility. The traveler Sir Richard Burton says of the desert: “Your morale improves; you become frank and cordial, hospitable and single-minded… In the desert, spirituous liquors excite only disgust. There is a keen enjoyment in a mere animal existence.” They who have been traveling long on the steppes of Tartary (the vast plains of Central Asia) say: “On reentering cultivated lands, the agitation, perplexity, and turmoil of civilization oppressed and suffocated us; the air seemed to fail us, and we felt every moment as if about to die of asphyxia (lack of air).” When I would recreate myself—renew my spirit—I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable forest, and the swamp that, to the ordinary citizen, seems most dismal. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum (a holy of holies). There is the strength, the very marrow (essence) of Nature. The wild-wood covers the virgin, untouched earth—and the same soil that is good for trees is good for men. A man’s health requires him to have as many acres of wild meadow in his prospect (view and access) as his farm needs loads of muck (manure) for fertilizer. In these wild places are the strong meats on which his spirit feeds. A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it. A township where one primitive forest waves above, while another primitive forest rots below to enrich the soil—such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but also poets and philosophers for the coming ages. In such a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the true Reformer, living simply like John the Baptist, who ate locusts and wild honey.

The Strength of Wildness

To preserve wild animals generally implies creating a forest for them to dwell in or return to. So it is with human beings; we also need access to wildness for our well-being. A hundred years ago, people sold bark in our streets, peeled from the trees in our own woods. In the very appearance of those primitive and rugged trees, there was, I think, a kind of “tanning principle”—something that hardened and consolidated the fibers of men’s thoughts, making them tougher and more resilient. Ah! Already I shudder for these comparatively degenerate (less vigorous) days of my native village, when you cannot collect a load of bark of good thickness—and we no longer produce natural forest products like tar and turpentine from our local resources.

The great civilized nations—Greece, Rome, England—have been sustained by the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they now stand. They survive only as long as that foundational soil (both literal and metaphorical) is not exhausted. Alas for human culture! Little is to be expected of a nation when its vital topsoil (“vegetable mould”) is used up, and it is compelled to make manure from the bones of its ancestors (a desperate, unsustainable act). In such an exhausted culture, the poet sustains himself merely by his own internal reserves, his “superfluous fat,” with no fresh external inspiration. The philosopher is reduced to his very core, his “marrow-bones,” struggling for essential truths.

It is said to be the task of the American “to work the virgin soil,” and that “agriculture here already assumes proportions unknown everywhere else.” I think that the farmer displaces the Native American partly because he “redeems” the meadow (makes it agriculturally productive), and by doing so, makes himself stronger and, in some respects, more naturally connected to the land in a practical way. I was surveying for a man the other day a single straight line, one hundred and thirty-two rods long (about 726 yards or 664 meters), through a swamp. At its entrance might have been written the words which Dante read over the entrance to the infernal regions: “Leave all hope, ye that enter”—that is, hope of ever getting out again. At one time during this survey, I saw my employer actually up to his neck in water and swimming for his life in his own property, though it was still winter. He had another similar swamp which I could not survey at all because it was completely underwater. Nevertheless, with regard to a third swamp, which I did survey from a distance, he remarked to me, true to his practical instincts, that he would not part with it for any price, on account of the valuable mud it contained. And that man intends to put a girdling ditch around the whole swamp in the course of forty months, and so “redeem” it (make it usable for farming) by the magic of his spade. I refer to him only as an example of a certain type of person prevalent in our society.

The weapons with which we (as a people cultivating the land) have gained our most important victories, weapons which should be handed down as heirlooms from father to son, are not the sword and the lance. They are the tools of cultivation: the brush-clearing axe (“bush-whack”), the sod-cutter (“turf-cutter”), the spade, and the bog hoe. These tools are rusted with the “blood” (the rich, dark soil) of many a meadow, and begrimed with the dust of many a hard-fought field of labor. The very winds blew the Native American’s corn seeds into the meadow, pointing out a way of agriculture which he had not the tools or inclination to follow extensively. He had no better implement with which to entrench himself in the land than a simple clam-shell. But the farmer is armed with the plow and the spade.

Wildness in Literature and Thought

In Literature, it is only the wild that truly attracts us. Dullness is just another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized, free, and wild thinking in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Homer’s Iliad, in all the great Scriptures and Mythologies—ideas not learned in formal schools—that truly delights us. As the wild duck is swifter and more beautiful than the tame one, so is wild thought. Like a wild mallard duck, it wings its way above the fens (marshes) amid the falling dews, free and untamed. A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wildflower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible. It is like a flash of lightning, which perhaps shatters the very temple of established knowledge—it is not a mere taper (small candle) lit at the common hearthstone of the human race, which pales before the clear light of common day.

English literature, from the days of the medieval minstrels to the Lake Poets (like Wordsworth and Coleridge)—Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, and even Shakespeare included—does not breathe a completely fresh and, in this sense, truly wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting the classical influences of Greece and Rome. Its idea of wilderness is a cultivated “green-wood”; its idea of a wild man is a figure like Robin Hood (who, though an outlaw, operates within a social framework). There is plenty of gentle, appreciative love of Nature in English literature, but not so much of raw, untamed Nature herself. Its historical chronicles inform us when its wild animals became extinct, but not when the “wild man” in its people—the untamed human spirit—became extinct.

The science of Alexander von Humboldt is one thing; poetry is another. The poet today, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science and the accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys no fundamental advantage over an ancient poet like Homer when it comes to accessing essential truths.

Where is the literature that truly gives expression to Nature in its untamed state? A true poet would be someone who could command the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him. He would be someone who “nailed words to their primitive senses,” restoring their original power, like farmers driving stakes firmly into the ground in spring after the frost has heaved them up. He would derive his words fresh from their source as often as he used them, transplanting them to his page with the earth still adhering to their roots. His words would be so true, fresh, and natural that they would appear to expand like buds at the approach of spring, even if they lay half-smothered between two musty leaves in a library. Yes, they would bloom and bear fruit there, after their kind, annually, for the faithful reader who is in sympathy with surrounding Nature.

I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this yearning for the Wild. Approached from this perspective, even the best poetry often seems tame. I do not know where to find in any literature, ancient or modern, any account which truly satisfies me of that raw Nature with which even I am acquainted. You will perceive that I demand something which no classical Augustan or Elizabethan age, which no refined culture, in short, can fully give. Mythology comes nearer to it than anything else. How much more fertile a Nature, at least, is Grecian mythology rooted in, compared to English literature! Mythology is the cultural crop which the Old World bore before its spiritual soil was exhausted, before its fancy and imagination were affected with blight. And it still bears this crop, wherever its pristine, original vigor remains unabated. All other literatures endure only as the familiar elm trees which overshadow our houses; but mythology is like the great, ancient dragon-tree of the Western Isles, as old as mankind itself. And, whether that specific tree endures or not, mythology as a form will endure just as long, for the decay of other, less vital literatures actually creates the fertile soil in which mythology thrives.

The American West is preparing to add its own fables and myths to those of the East (the Old World). The great river valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine have yielded their cultural crops. It remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate, the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce in terms of enduring myths and stories. Perhaps, in the course of ages, when American liberty has become merely a fiction of the past—as it is to some extent a fiction even in the present—the poets of the world will be inspired by a uniquely American mythology born from its wilderness.

The Truth of Wildness

Even the wildest dreams of “wild men” (those living close to nature or outside societal norms) are not any less true, though they may not recommend themselves to the common sense that is most prevalent among Englishmen and Americans today. It is not every truth that appeals to everyday common sense. Nature has a place for the wild clematis vine as well as for the cultivated cabbage. Some expressions of truth are reminiscent, recalling the past. Others are merely “sensible” or practical, as the phrase goes. Still others are prophetic, looking to the future. Some forms of disease, even, may in a way prophesy or point towards future forms of health or understanding. The geologist has discovered that the figures of serpents, griffins, flying dragons, and other fanciful embellishments of heraldry have their prototypes (original models) in the forms of fossil species which were extinct before mankind was created. These, it is said, “indicate a faint and shadowy knowledge of a previous state of organic existence.”

All Good Things Are Wild and Free

In short, all good things are wild and free. There is something in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the human voice—take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance—which by its very wildness (to speak without satire) reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. It is as much of their wildness as I can understand. Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones. The wildness of the so-called savage is but a faint symbol of the awesome, powerful wildness (“ferity”) with which good men and lovers truly connect.

I love even to see domestic animals reassert their native rights—any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor. An example is when my neighbor’s cow breaks out of her pasture early in the spring and boldly swims the river—a cold, gray tide, about 140 to 165 yards wide (twenty-five or thirty rods), swollen by the melted snow. It is like seeing a wild buffalo crossing the Mississippi. This exploit confers some dignity on the whole herd in my eyes—which is already dignified by its connection to nature. The seeds of instinct are preserved under the thick hides of cattle and horses for an indefinite period, like seeds buried in the bowels of the earth.

Any playfulness in cattle is unexpected. I saw one day a herd of a dozen bullocks (young bulls) and cows running about and frisking in unwieldy sport, like huge rats, or even like kittens. They shook their heads, raised their tails, and rushed up and down a hill. I perceived by their horns, as well as by their activity, their ancestral relation to the deer tribe. But, alas! A sudden loud “Whoa!” from a human would have dampened their ardor at once. It would have reduced them symbolically from wild “venison” to domestic “beef.” It would have stiffened their sides and sinews as if they were a locomotive. Who but the Evil One (or the spirit of harmful control) has cried, “Whoa!” to mankind, trying to halt our natural wildness?

I rejoice that horses and steers (cattle) have to be “broken” (tamed with effort) before they can be made the slaves of men. I also rejoice that men themselves have some “wild oats still left to sow” (some youthful wildness and freedom to express) before they become completely submissive members of society. Undoubtedly, all men are not equally fit subjects for civilization. And because the majority, like dogs and sheep, are tame by inherited disposition, this is no reason why the others—those with a wilder spirit—should have their natures broken so that they may be reduced to the same level. Men are in the main alike, but they were made as separate individuals so that they might be various and diverse. If a low, common use is to be served, one man will do nearly or quite as well as another. If a high, noble purpose is to be served, then individual excellence is to be regarded. Any man can stop a hole to keep the wind away, but no other man could serve so rare and unique a use as the author of a truly original illustration or idea did. Confucius says, “The skins of the tiger and the leopard, when they are tanned, are as the skins of the dog and the sheep tanned.” But it is not the part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious. And tanning their beautiful wild skins merely for shoes is not the best use to which these magnificent creatures can be put.

Names and True Identity

When looking over a list of men’s names in a foreign language, such as military officers, or authors who have written on a particular subject, I am reminded once more that there is often nothing truly revealing in a name itself. The name Menschikoff, for instance, has nothing in it to my ears more human than the sound of “whisker,” and it may as well belong to a rat. As the names of Poles and Russians sound strange to us, so do our names to them. It is as if people had been named by a child’s nonsense rhyme—like “lery wiery ichery van, tittle-tol-tan.” I see in my mind a herd of wild creatures swarming over the earth, and to each the herdsman (society or custom) has affixed some barbarous, meaningless sound from his own dialect as a name. The common names of men are, of course, often as cheap and meaningless as common dog names like Bose and Tray.

I think it would be some advantage to philosophy if men were named “merely in the gross,” that is, according to their general type or known character. It would then be necessary only to know their genus (general category), and perhaps their race or variety, to understand the individual. We are not prepared to believe that every private soldier in a Roman army had a name of his own—because we have not generally supposed that he had a unique character of his own. At present, our only true names are often nicknames. I knew a boy who, because of his peculiar energy, was called “Buster” by his playmates, and this nickname rightly supplanted his given Christian name because it better described him. Some travelers tell us that a Native American was not given a name at first but earned it through his deeds, and his name became his fame. Among some tribes, a person acquired a new name with every new exploit. It is pitiful when a man bears a name for convenience merely, having earned neither a true, descriptive name nor any genuine fame.

I will not allow mere names to create artificial distinctions for me; I still see men often acting in unthinking herds, despite their individual names. A familiar name cannot make a man less strange or unknown to me. That name may be given to a “savage” (an untamed individual) who secretly retains his own wild title earned in the woods. We all have a wild, untamed part within us, and a “savage name” that truly fits this part of us is perhaps somewhere recorded as ours. I see that my neighbor, who bears a common name like William or Edwin, seems to take that conventional name off with his jacket. It does not adhere to him when he is asleep, or in anger, or aroused by any strong passion or inspiration. At such moments of authentic being, I seem to hear his kin call him by his original wild name, spoken in some difficult-to-pronounce or else deeply melodious, natural tongue.

Nature, Our Mother, vs. Artificial Culture

Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around us. She possesses such beauty and such fierce affection for her children, like that of a leopard for its cubs. And yet, we are weaned from her breast so early in life and turned over to society. We are given to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man—a sort of “breeding in and in” (like inbreeding among a too-small group). This kind of culture produces, at most, a merely superficial elite, like the English nobility. It is a civilization destined to have a speedy limit to its vitality.

In society, even in the best institutions created by men, it is easy to detect a certain precocity (premature development). When we should still be naturally growing children, we are already acting like “little men,” too quickly molded by societal expectations. Give me a culture that imports much “muck” (rich, organic material) from the wild meadows and thereby deepens its soil. I do not want a culture that trusts only to artificial “heating manures” (forcing growth), improved implements, and superficial modes of cultivation!

Many a poor, sore-eyed student I have heard of would grow faster, both intellectually and physically, if, instead of sitting up studying so very late, he honestly slumbered a “fool’s allowance” (a generous, natural amount of sleep).

The Necessity of Darkness and Uncultivated Parts

There may be an excess even of “informing light” (too much knowledge or stimulation without periods of rest and integration). The Frenchman Niépce discovered “actinism,” that power in the sun’s rays which produces a chemical effect. He found that granite rocks, stone structures, and statues of metal “are all alike destructively acted upon during the hours of sunshine, and, but for provisions of Nature no less wonderful, would soon perish under the delicate touch of the most subtle of the agencies of the universe.” But he also observed that “those bodies which underwent this change during the daylight possessed the power of restoring themselves to their original conditions during the hours of night, when this excitement (sunlight) was no longer influencing them.” Hence, it has been inferred that “the hours of darkness are as necessary to the inorganic creation as we know night and sleep are to the organic kingdom.” Not even the moon shines every night, but gives place to darkness, allowing for rest and restoration.

I would not have every man, nor every part of a man, cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated. Part will be tilled for crops, but the greater part should remain as meadow and forest. These wild parts not only serve an immediate use (providing resources and inspiration) but are also preparing a fertile “mould” (topsoil) against a distant future, through the annual decay of the vegetation which they support.

There are other “letters” for the child to learn than those which Cadmus (the mythological bringer of the alphabet to Greece) is said to have invented. Nature herself has a profound language to teach, beyond the mere alphabet of human discourse.

The Wisdom of Wildness and “Useful Ignorance”

The Spanish have a good term to express this kind of wild, intuitive knowledge: Gramática parda, or “tawny grammar.” It is a kind of mother-wit or natural wisdom, derived from that same wild, leopard-like spirit of Nature I referred to earlier.

We have all heard of groups like the “Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.” It is said that knowledge is power, and other similar things. However, I think there is an equal need for a “Society for theDiffusion of Useful Ignorance.” We might call this “Beautiful Knowledge”—a kind of knowing that is useful in a higher sense. For what is most of our boasted, so-called knowledge? Isn’t it often just an arrogant belief that we know something, which actually robs us of the advantage of our actual, humble ignorance? What we call knowledge is frequently our definite ignorance. Conversely, true ignorance (an openness to not knowing) can be a kind of “negative knowledge”—an awareness of our limitations, which is a true starting point for wisdom.

By long years of patient industry and reading newspapers (for what are many scientific libraries but organized files of published reports, much like newspapers?), a person accumulates a myriad of facts. They store these facts in their memory. Then, when in some spring-time of their life they saunter out into the Great Fields of original thought, it is as if they are a horse turned out to pasture (“goes to grass”). They leave all their restrictive harnesses (preconceived notions and accumulated data) behind in the stable. Sometimes, I would like to say to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge: “Go out to pasture! You have eaten enough dry hay (stale facts). Spring has come with its fresh green crop (new insights and direct experiences).” Even the cows are driven to their country pastures before the end of May. Though I have heard of one unnatural farmer who kept his cow in the barn and fed her only on dry hay all year round. This is often how such societies for “useful knowledge” treat their “cattle” (the people they aim to educate with mere information).

A person’s ignorance is sometimes not only useful but also beautiful. On the other hand, their so-called knowledge is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly. Which is the best person to deal with:

• The one who knows nothing about a subject and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing?
• Or the one who really knows something about it but arrogantly thinks that he knows everything?

Beyond Knowledge to Sympathy with Intelligence

My desire for factual knowledge is intermittent; it comes and goes. But my desire to bathe my head—to immerse my mind—in atmospheres of thought and experience unknown to my everyday understanding is perennial and constant. The highest state that we can attain is not mere Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. This means a deep, intuitive connection with the underlying wisdom and order of the universe. I do not know that this higher knowing amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise. It’s a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we previously called Knowledge. It is a discovery, as Hamlet said, that “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy.” It is like the sun suddenly lighting up and clearing away a dense mist. Man cannot “know” in any higher sense than this kind of intuitive revelation, any more than he can look serenely and without harm directly into the face of the sun. As the ancient Chaldean Oracles say: “You will not perceive That (the ultimate reality) in the same way you perceive a particular thing.”

There is something servile (like a servant) in the habit of always seeking after a law which we may simply obey. We may study the laws of matter at our convenience and for our practical purposes, but a truly successful and vital life knows no external, binding law beyond its own inner guidance. It is certainly an unfortunate discovery to find out about a law that restricts us where we did not previously know we were bound. Live free, child of the mist—and with respect to ultimate knowledge, we are all children of the mist, with limited visibility. The person who takes the liberty to live fully and authentically is superior to all man-made laws by virtue of their direct relation to the ultimate Law-maker (God, or the source of universal order). The ancient Hindu text, the Vishnu Purana, says: “That is active duty which is not for our bondage; that is knowledge which is for our liberation: all other duty is good only unto weariness; all other knowledge is only the cleverness of an artist (skill without true wisdom).”

The Poverty of Our Experiences

It is remarkable how few truly significant events or crises there are in our personal histories. We have exercised our minds so little. We have had so few deep experiences. I would gladly be assured that I am growing apace and vigorously (“rankly”), even if my very growth disturbs my dull, calm equanimity—even if it means struggling through long, dark, muggy nights or seasons of gloom. It would be well if all our lives were even a divine tragedy, full of profound meaning and struggle, instead of the trivial comedy or farce they often seem to be. Great figures like Dante and Bunyan appear to have exercised their minds much more than we do. They were subjected to a kind of intellectual and spiritual culture that our local schools and colleges do not even contemplate. Even Mohammed—though many may react negatively to his name—had a good deal more to live for, yes, and to die for, than people commonly have today.

When, at rare intervals, some profound thought visits a person—perhaps as he is walking on a railroad track—then indeed the trains (the distractions of the world) may go by without his even hearing them. But soon, by some inexorable law of our mundane existence, that deep thought passes, our ordinary life resumes, and the “trains” return.

As the poet Ossian lamented:

Gentle breeze, that wanderest unseen, And bendest the thistles round Loira of storms, Traveller of the windy glens, Why hast thou left my ear so soon?

Our Disconnect from Nature

While almost all people feel an attraction drawing them to society, few are attracted strongly to Nature. In their relation to Nature, most people—notwithstanding all their arts and culture—appear to me to be, for the most part, on a lower level than animals. Their relationship with Nature is not often a beautiful one, as it is in the case of animals who live in harmony with it. How little appreciation of the beauty of the landscape there is among us! We have to be told that the ancient Greeks called the world Kósmos (meaning Beauty or Order). But we do not see clearly why they did so, and we esteem this fact, at best, as only a curious philological (related to language study) point.

For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border life. I am on the confines of a wild world into which I make only occasional and transient forays. My patriotism and allegiance to the State—into whose civilized territories I seem to retreat—are like those of a “moss-trooper” (a border raider of old), not fully committed, always ready to slip back into the wild. Unto a life which I call truly natural, I would gladly follow even a will-o’-the-wisp (a deceptive, fleeting light) through bogs and sloughs (swamps) unimaginable. But no moon or fire-fly has yet shown me the clear causeway (path) to it. Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never truly seen even one of her complete features. The walker in the familiar fields which stretch around my native town sometimes finds himself in another land than what is described in the property deeds of their owners. It is as if he is in some far-away field on the confines of the actual Concord, where the town’s jurisdiction ceases, and the ordinary idea suggested by the word “Concord” (harmony, community) also ceases to be suggested. These farms which I have myself surveyed, these property boundaries which I have set up, still appear dimly to me, as if through a mist. But they have no chemical power to fix them permanently; they fade from the surface of the mirror of perception. And the deeper picture which the true artist (Nature, or underlying reality) painted stands out dimly from beneath these superficial human divisions. The world with which we are commonly acquainted leaves no lasting trace, and it will have no true anniversary in the grand scheme of things.

A Vision in Spaulding’s Farm

I took a walk on Spaulding’s Farm the other afternoon. I saw the setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its golden rays straggled into the open aisles of the wood as if into some noble hall. I was deeply impressed, as if some ancient, altogether admirable, and shining family had settled there in that part of the land called Concord, unknown to me. The sun itself seemed to be their servant. This family had not gone into society in the village; no one had made formal calls on them. I saw their park, their pleasure-ground, beyond, through the wood, in what was Spaulding’s cranberry-meadow. The tall pines furnished them with gables (the triangular upper part of a wall at the end of a ridged roof) as they grew. Their house was not obvious to vision; the trees grew right through it. I do not know whether I heard the sounds of a suppressed, quiet hilarity or not. They seemed to recline on the sunbeams. They have sons and daughters. They are all quite well. The farmer’s cart-path, which leads directly through their “hall” (this natural dwelling), does not in the least disturb them—just as the muddy bottom of a pool is sometimes seen through the clear reflection of the sky on the water’s surface, the mundane path does not disrupt their ethereal existence. They have never heard of Mr. Spaulding (the human owner of the farm) and do not know that he is their neighbor—notwithstanding the fact that I heard him whistle as he drove his team right through their “house” (the woods). Nothing can equal the serenity of their lives. Their family crest (“coat of arms”) is simply a lichen. I saw it painted by nature on the pines and oaks. Their attics were in the tops of the trees. They are of no politics. There was no noise of human labor. I did not perceive that they were weaving or spinning. Yet, I did detect, when the wind lulled and all other hearing was done away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum—as of a distant beehive in May. Perhaps this was the sound of their thinking. They had no idle thoughts, and no one from the outside world could see their work, for their industry was not confined and visible like knots and ugly growths on a tree.

But I find it difficult to remember them clearly. They fade irrevocably out of my mind even now while I speak and try to recall them and recollect myself. It is only after a long and serious effort to recollect my best thoughts that I become aware again of their cohabitation with us in this world. If it were not for such spiritual “families” as this existing in nature, I think I should move out of Concord.

The Decline of Thoughts and the Need to Soar

We are accustomed to say in New England that fewer and fewer passenger pigeons visit us every year. Our forests furnish no mast (nuts like acorns and beechnuts) for them. So, it would seem, few and fewer deep thoughts visit each growing person from year to year. This is because the grove in our minds (our capacity for natural, original thought) is laid waste—“sold” to feed unnecessary fires of ambition, or “sent to mill” to be processed into something artificial. There is scarcely a twig left in our minds for such thoughts to perch on. They no longer build their nests nor breed within us.

We hug the earth—how rarely we try to mount and elevate ourselves! I think we might elevate ourselves a little more. We might climb a tree, at least. I found it very rewarding to climb a tree once. It was a tall white pine, on the top of a hill. And though I got well covered in sticky pine pitch, I was well paid for it. For I discovered new mountains in the horizon which I had never seen before—so much more of the earth and the heavens. I might have walked about the foot of that tree for seventy years, and yet I certainly should never have seen those distant mountains. But, above all, I discovered something else around me. It was near the end of June. On the very ends of the topmost branches only, there were a few minute and delicate red cone-like blossoms—the fertile flower of the white pine, looking heavenward. I immediately carried the topmost spire of that pine, with its blossoms, to the village. I showed it to jurymen from out of town who were walking the streets (for it was court week). I showed it to farmers, lumber dealers, woodchoppers, and hunters. Not one of them had ever seen anything like it before. They wondered at it as if it were a star that had dropped down from the sky. People tell of ancient architects finishing their works on the tops of columns as perfectly as on the lower and more visible parts. Nature, from the very first, has unfolded the minute blossoms of the forest trees only toward the heavens, high above men’s heads and unobserved by them. We usually see only the flowers that are under our feet in the meadows. The pines have developed their delicate blossoms on the highest twigs of the wood every summer for ages, equally over the heads of Nature’s Native American children (“red children”) as of her European-descended children (“white ones”). Yet scarcely a farmer or hunter in the land has ever seen them.

Living in the Present, Awakened by Nature

Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. That person is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past. Unless our philosophy hears the rooster crow in every barnyard within our horizon (is responsive to the immediate present), it is belated (out of date). That sound commonly reminds us that we are growing rusty and antique in our employments and habits of thought. The rooster’s “philosophy” (his simple, present-moment awareness) comes down to a more recent time than ours. There is something suggested by its crow that is a newer testament—the gospel according to this moment. He has not fallen behind; he has got up early, and kept up early. To be where he is (fully in the present) is to be in season, in the foremost rank of time. His crow is an expression of the health and soundness of Nature, a brag for all the world to hear—healthiness as of a spring burst forth, a new fountain of the Muses, to celebrate this very last instant of time. Where he lives, no Fugitive Slave Laws are passed. Who among us has not betrayed his own true master (conscience or higher self) many times since last he truly heard that note of present awareness?

The merit of this bird’s song (the rooster’s crow) is in its freedom from all plaintiveness or sadness. A human singer can easily move us to tears or to laughter, but where is he who can excite in us a pure, unadulterated morning joy? When I am in doleful dumps (a sad mood), and the awful stillness of our wooden sidewalk on a Sunday is broken by a rooster crowing far or near; or, perhaps, when I am a watcher in a house of mourning, and I hear that sound, I think to myself, “There is one of us well, at any rate”—and with a sudden gush of feeling, I return to my senses and to the present.

The Glory of a Sunset

We had a remarkable sunset one day last November. I was walking in a meadow, the source of a small brook. The sun at last, just before setting, after a cold gray day, reached a clear stratum (layer) in the horizon. Then, the softest, brightest, clearest sunlight fell on the dry grass, on the stems of the trees on the opposite horizon, and on the leaves of the shrub-oaks on the hillside. Meanwhile, our shadows stretched long over the meadow eastward, as if we were the only tiny motes (specks of dust) visible in its beams. It was such a light as we could not have imagined a moment before. The air also was so warm and serene that nothing was wanting to make a paradise of that meadow. When we reflected that this beautiful sight was not a solitary phenomenon, never to happen again, but that it would happen forever and ever for an infinite number of evenings, and would cheer and reassure the latest child that might ever walk there, it was more glorious still.

The sun sets on some retired meadow, where no house is visible, with all the glory and splendor that it lavishes on cities. And, perhaps, it sets there as it has never set before. There might be only a solitary marsh hawk whose wings are gilded by its light, or only a muskrat that looks out from his den. And there might be some little, black-veined brook in the midst of the marsh, just beginning to meander, winding slowly round a decaying tree stump. We walked in so pure and bright a light, a light that gilded the withered grass and leaves. It was so softly and serenely bright, I thought I had never bathed in such a golden flood of light before, without a ripple or a murmur to disturb it. The west side of every wood and every rising ground gleamed like the boundary of Elysium (the mythical paradise of heroes). And the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman driving us home at evening.

So we saunter toward the Holy Land. We continue until one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done. He shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as sunlight on a riverbank in autumn.

Life without Principle

Life without Principle

The Ideal Lecture

Not long ago, I attended a public lecture. I felt the speaker had chosen a topic that was too distant from his own personal experience. Because of this, he failed to interest me as much as he might have. He described things that were not close to his heart or central to his being. Instead, he talked about superficial matters, things on the fringes of his understanding. In this sense, there was no truly central or unifying thought in his lecture. I would have preferred him to speak about his most private and personal experiences, as a poet does.

Commonly, if people want anything from me, it is only to know how many acres I have measured on their land, since I am a surveyor. Or, at most, they want to know what trivial news I might have burdened myself with. They never seek the “meat”—the real substance of my thoughts; they prefer the empty “shell” of superficial talk.

A man once came a considerable distance to ask me to give a lecture about Slavery. However, after talking with him, I found that he and his group expected most of the lecture (seven-eighths of it) to simply echo their own views. They wanted to leave only a small portion (one-eighth) for my own thoughts. So, I declined their invitation. I take it for granted, when I am invited to lecture anywhere (and I have had a little experience in this business), that there is a genuine desire to hear what I think on some subject. This is true even if I happen to be the greatest fool in the country. I assume they do not want me to say pleasant things merely, or only things that the audience will easily agree with. And so, I resolve that I will give them a strong dose of my true self. They have sent for me, and they have agreed to pay me. I am determined that they shall get the real me, even if I bore them beyond all precedent.

So now, I would like to say something similar to you, my readers. Since you are my readers, and I have not been much of a traveler, I will not talk about people a thousand miles away. Instead, I will come as near home as I can in my subject matter. As our time is short, I will leave out all the flattery and retain all the criticism.

Let us consider the way in which we spend our lives.

The Tyranny of Business

This world is a place of constant business. What an infinite bustle and hurry! I am awakened almost every night by the panting of the locomotive steam engine. It interrupts my dreams. There is no day of rest, no Sabbath, from this ceaseless activity. It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. But it is nothing but work, work, work. I cannot easily buy a blank notebook to write my thoughts in; the pages are commonly already ruled with lines for dollars and cents, for keeping financial accounts. An Irishman, seeing me taking notes in the fields, automatically assumed that I was calculating my wages. If a man was accidentally tossed out of a window when he was an infant, and so made a cripple for life, or if he was scared out of his wits by Native Americans, it is regretted by society chiefly because he was thus made incapable of doing—business! I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, yes, even to life itself, than this incessant, all-consuming business.

There is a coarse and boisterous money-making fellow on the outskirts of our town. He is going to build a retaining wall under the hill along the edge of his meadow. The “powers that be” (perhaps societal pressures or his own nature) have put this idea into his head to keep him out of mischief. He wishes me to spend three weeks digging there with him. The result will be that he will perhaps get some more money to hoard, which his heirs will then spend foolishly. If I do this manual labor, most people will commend me as an industrious and hard-working man. But if I choose to devote myself to certain other labors which yield more real profit (like intellectual or spiritual pursuits), though they bring in very little money, people may be inclined to look on me as an idler. Nevertheless, I do not need the “police” of meaningless labor to regulate me. I do not see anything absolutely praiseworthy in this fellow’s undertaking, any more than I see it in many an enterprise of our own or foreign governments, however amusing it may be to him or to them. Therefore, I prefer to finish my education at a different kind of school—the school of meaningful activity.

If a man walks in the woods for half of each day, simply for the love of them, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his whole day as a speculator, cutting down those same woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. It is as if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down!

Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back again, merely so that they might earn their wages. But many people today are employed in jobs that are no more worthy or meaningful than that. For instance: just after sunrise one summer morning, I noticed one of my neighbors walking beside his team of oxen. The team was slowly drawing a heavy, hewn stone swung under the axle. He was surrounded by an atmosphere of industry—his day’s work had begun, his brow had started to sweat. He was a living reproach to all sluggards and idlers. He paused beside the shoulders of his oxen and half-turned around with a flourish of his merciful whip, while they gained their length on him. And I thought: Such is the labor which the American Congress exists to protect—honest, manly toil. It is as honest as the day is long. It makes his bread taste sweet and keeps society itself sweet. It is work that all men respect and have consecrated. He is one of that sacred band, doing needful but irksome drudgery. Indeed, I felt a slight sense of shame myself, because I observed this from my window and was not outside, busy with some similar work. The day went by. In the evening, I passed the yard of another neighbor. This man keeps many servants and spends much money foolishly, while he adds nothing of value to the common good. There, I saw the very stone from that morning. It was lying beside a whimsical, bizarre structure intended to adorn this “Lord Timothy Dexter’s” (an eccentric historical figure) premises. And in my eyes, the dignity immediately departed from the teamster’s labor of the morning. In my opinion, the sun was made to light worthier toil than this. I may add that this wealthy employer has since run off, in debt to a good part of the town. After passing through legal proceedings (like bankruptcy court), he has settled somewhere else, there to become once more a “patron of the arts” (likely in a superficial and self-serving way).

The Downward Path of Mere Money-Getting

The ways by which you may get money, almost without exception, lead morally downward. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle, or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him (if there is no deeper value or satisfaction in the work itself), he is being cheated, and he also cheats himself. If you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular. To become popular usually means you must lower your standards drastically, to “go down perpendicularly.” Those services which the community will most readily pay for are often the most disagreeable or morally compromising to render. You are paid for being something less than a fully principled man. The State (government) does not commonly reward a genius any more wisely. Even the poet laureate (the official court poet) would rather not have to celebrate the trivial accidents of royalty. He must be bribed with a cask of wine. And perhaps another, truer poet is called away from his creative muse to do the mundane task of gauging (measuring) that very cask of wine. As for my own business of surveying, even the kind of careful and thorough surveying that I could do with the most satisfaction is not what my employers want. They would prefer that I should do my work coarsely and not too well—yes, not even well enough to be truly accurate. When I observe that there are different ways of surveying, my employer commonly asks which method will give him the most land, not which method is most correct. I once invented a rule for measuring cord-wood accurately and tried to introduce it in Boston. But the official wood measurer there told me that the sellers did not wish to have their wood measured correctly. He said that he was already too accurate for them. Therefore, they commonly got their wood measured in Charlestown (where standards were perhaps looser) before crossing the bridge into Boston.

The True Aim of Labor

The aim of the laborer should be, not merely to get his living or to get “a good job,” but to perform a certain work well. And, even in a purely financial sense, it would be true economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel they were working for low ends (like a livelihood merely), but for scientific or even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work just for money, but hire him who does it for the love of it.

It is remarkable that there are few men so well employed, so much to their own satisfaction, that a little money or fame would not commonly buy them off from their present pursuit. I see advertisements for “active young men,” as if activity were the whole of a young man’s capital (his worth or assets). Yet I have been surprised when someone has confidently proposed to me, a grown man, that I should embark in some enterprise of his. It’s as if I had absolutely nothing else to do, as if my life had been a complete failure up to that point. What a doubtful compliment this is to pay me! It is as if he had met me halfway across the ocean, struggling against the wind, bound nowhere, and then proposed that I should simply go along with him. If I did, what do you think the “underwriters” (those who insure or vouch for the value of a voyage) would say? No, no! I am not without employment at this stage of my life’s voyage. To tell the truth, I saw an advertisement for able-bodied seamen when I was a boy, sauntering in my native port. And as soon as I came of age, I “embarked” (began my own journey in life, though not necessarily as a literal sailor).

The Wise Man and His Business

The community has no bribe that will tempt a wise man. You may raise enough money to tunnel through a mountain, but you cannot raise enough money to hire a man who is truly “minding his own business”—that is, living his own principled life. An efficient and valuable man does what he can, whether the community pays him for it or not. The inefficient, on the other hand, offer their inefficiency to the highest bidder and are forever expecting to be put into office. One would suppose that they are rarely disappointed.

Perhaps I am more than usually jealous with respect to my freedom. I feel that my connection with and obligation to society are still very slight and transient. Those slight labors which provide me a livelihood, and by which it is acknowledged that I am to some extent serviceable to my contemporaries, are still commonly a pleasure to me. I am not often reminded that they are a dire necessity. So far, in this, I am successful. But I foresee that if my material wants should greatly increase, the labor required to supply them would become a drudgery. If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most people appear to do, I am sure that, for me, there would be nothing left worth living for. I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright (my freedom and principled life) for a mere “mess of pottage” (a trivial meal, an allusion to Esau in the Bible). I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life merely “getting his living” without truly living. All great enterprises are, in a deeper sense, self-supporting. The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his poetry, just as a steam planing-mill feeds its own boilers with the wood shavings it makes. You must get your living by loving what you do and what is truly valuable. But as it is said of merchants that ninety-seven in a hundred fail in business, so the lives of men generally, when tried by this standard of principled living, are failures. Spiritual bankruptcy may be surely prophesied for most.

Merely to come into the world as the heir to a fortune is not truly to be born, but rather to be still-born, spiritually speaking. To be supported by the charity of friends, or by a government pension—provided you simply continue to breathe—is essentially to go into the almshouse (a home for the poor), no matter what fine synonyms you use to describe these dependent relationships. On Sundays, the “poor debtor” (the person spiritually bankrupt) goes to church as if to take an account of his spiritual stock. He finds, of course, that his spiritual outgoes (expenditures) have been greater than his spiritual income. In the Catholic Church, especially, people go into a kind of spiritual “Chancery” (court of accounting). They make a clean confession, give up all their past wrongs, and think to start again. Thus, men will lie on their backs, talking about the fall of man, and never make an effort to actually get up and improve.

As for the comparative demands which men make on life, it is an important difference between two types of people:

1. One is satisfied with a level, ordinary success; his goals can all be hit by point-blank shots.
2. The other, however low or unsuccessful his life may outwardly appear, constantly elevates his aim, even if at a very slight upward angle to the horizon. I should much rather be the second type of man—though, as some Eastern philosophies say, “Greatness doth not approach him who is forever looking down; and all those who are looking high (towards spiritual aims) are often growing poor (in material terms).”

It is remarkable that there is little or nothing memorable written on the subject of “getting a living”—that is, how to make the process of earning a livelihood not merely honest and honorable, but altogether inviting and glorious. For if getting a living is not so, then living itself is not truly so. One would think, from looking at most literature, that this question had never disturbed a single individual’s thoughts. Is it that men are too much disgusted with their own experiences in this area to want to speak of it? The valuable lesson which money (or the pursuit of it) teaches—a lesson which the Author of the Universe has taken such pains to teach us—we are inclined to skip altogether. As for the means of living, it is wonderful how indifferent men of all classes are about it, even so-called reformers—whether they inherit their money, earn it, or steal it. I think that society has done nothing for us in this respect, or at least has undone whatever good it might have previously done. Cold and hunger seem more friendly to my true nature than those methods which men have adopted and advise for warding them off, especially if those methods involve compromising one’s principles.

True Wisdom and Principled Living

The title “wise” is, for the most part, falsely applied. How can one be a wise man if he does not know any better how to live a meaningful life than other men do? What if he is only more cunning and intellectually subtle? Does Wisdom work on a treadmill, achieving nothing of substance? Or does she teach how to succeed by her own example of principled living? Is there any such thing as wisdom that is not applied to real life? Is Wisdom merely like a miller who grinds the finest, most abstract logic, with no practical or moral outcome? It is pertinent to ask if Plato got his living in a better way, or more successfully (in a principled sense), than his contemporaries. Or did he simply succumb to the difficulties of life like other men? Did he seem to prevail over some of life’s challenges merely by indifference, or by assuming grand airs? Or did he find it easier to live because his aunt remembered him in her will? The ways in which most men get their living—that is, the ways they actually live—are mere make-shifts and a shirking (avoidance) of the real business of life. This is chiefly because they do not know any better, but partly because they do not intend to live any better.

The Disgrace of Unprincipled Enterprise

The rush to California for gold, for instance, and the attitude towards it—not merely of merchants, but of so-called philosophers and prophets—reflect the greatest disgrace on mankind. It is shameful that so many are ready to live by luck, and so get the means of commanding the labor of others less lucky, without contributing any real value to society themselves! And that is called “enterprise”! I know of no more startling development of the immorality of trade and all the common modes of getting a living. The philosophy, poetry, and religion of such a mankind are not worth the dust of a puffball mushroom. Even the hog that gets his living by rooting in the soil, thereby stirring it up usefully, would be ashamed of such company. If I could command the wealth of all the worlds by merely lifting my finger, I would not pay such a moral price for it. Even the prophet Mohammed knew that God did not make this world in jest. This pursuit of unearned wealth makes God seem like a rich gentleman who scatters a handful of pennies merely to see mankind scramble for them. The world’s raffle! A subsistence that should come from the domains of Nature becomes a thing to be raffled for! What a comment, what a satire on our institutions! The conclusion will be that mankind will, metaphorically, hang itself upon a tree. And have all the precepts in all the Bibles taught men only this? And is the last and most admirable invention of the human race only an improved muck-rake (a tool for scraping manure), fit only for accumulating material filth? Is this the common ground on which Orientals and Occidentals (people from East and West) meet? Did God direct us to get our living in this way—digging where we never planted anything of value—and would He, perhaps, then reward us with lumps of gold for such behavior?

God gave the righteous man a certificate entitling him to food and clothing (a true entitlement based on his virtue). But the unrighteous man found a counterfeit copy of that same certificate in God’s metaphorical coffers, appropriated it, and thereby obtained food and clothing just like the righteous man did. It is one of the most extensive systems of counterfeiting (pretending to have value or desert) that the world has ever seen. I did not know that mankind was suffering for want of gold. I have seen a little of it. I know that gold is very malleable (easily shaped), but it is not as malleable or as valuable as wit (true intelligence and wisdom). A grain of gold will gild a great surface with a thin layer, but not so much as a grain of wisdom can truly enrich.

The gold-digger in the ravines of the mountains is as much a gambler as his fellow in the gambling saloons of San Francisco. What difference does it make whether you shake dirt in a pan to find gold, or shake dice in a game? If you “win” by such luck, society as a whole is the loser. The gold-digger is the enemy of the honest laborer, whatever superficial checks and compensations might seem to exist. It is not enough to tell me that you worked hard to get your gold. So does the Devil work hard. The way of transgressors (those who do wrong) may be hard in many respects, but that difficulty does not make their actions right. Even the humblest observer who goes to the gold mines sees and says that gold-digging has the character of a lottery. The gold obtained in this way is not the same thing as the wages earned through honest toil. But, practically, this observer often forgets what he has seen. He has seen only the surface fact (the gold), not the underlying moral principle. And so, he often goes into trade there—that is, he buys a ticket in what commonly proves to be just another kind of lottery, where the gambling aspect is not so immediately obvious.

Digging for Inner Gold

After reading William Howitt’s account of the Australian gold-diggings one evening, I had in my mind’s eye, all night, a vision of numerous valleys, with their streams, all cut up with foul pits. These pits were from ten to one hundred feet deep, and about half a dozen feet across, dug as close together as they possibly could be, and partly filled with water. This was the kind of locality to which men furiously rushed to probe for their fortunes. They were uncertain where they should break ground, not knowing if the gold might be right under their own camp. Sometimes they dug one hundred and sixty feet before they struck a vein of gold, or then missed it by a mere foot. These men were turned into demons, regardless of each other’s rights, in their thirst for riches. Whole valleys, for thirty miles, were suddenly honeycombed by the pits of these miners, so that even hundreds of them drowned in these pits. Standing in water, and covered with mud and clay, they worked night and day, often dying of exposure and disease. Having read this, and then partly forgotten it, I was thinking, accidentally, of my own unsatisfactory life, doing as others do. With that vision of the diggings still before me, I asked myself: Why might I not be “washing some gold” daily from my own life experiences, even if it were only the finest particles of truth and value? Why might I not sink a shaft down to the “gold” within my own soul, and work that mine? There is a Ballarat, a Bendigo (famous rich goldfields in Australia) for you to discover within yourself—what though your inner mine might seem at first like a lonely or unpromising “sulky gully”? At any rate, I might pursue some path in life, however solitary and narrow and crooked it might be, in which I could walk with love and reverence. Wherever a man separates from the multitude and goes his own way in this mood of love and reverence, there indeed is a significant fork in the road of life. Ordinary travelers, however, may see only a small gap in the fence, not recognizing its true importance. His solitary path, taken “across-lots” (off the main, conventional road, following his own principled course), will turn out to be the higher, more valuable way of the two.

True Gold and Where to Find It

People rush to California and Australia as if true gold were to be found in those directions. But that is to go to the very opposite extreme from where real value actually lies. They go prospecting farther and farther away from the true source of wealth (inner riches). They are most unfortunate when they think themselves most successful in their material gold digging.

Is not our own native soil also gold-bearing in a deeper sense? Does not a stream from some spiritual “golden mountains” flow through our own native valley (our lives and communities)? And has not this stream, for longer than geological ages, been bringing down shining particles of truth and forming valuable “nuggets” for us? Yet, strange to tell, if a person were to quietly “steal away”—prospecting for this true gold, these inner riches, in the unexplored solitudes around us and within us—there is no danger that anyone would follow their steps and try to take their place. Such a seeker of inner gold may explore and “undermine” (dig deep into) the whole valley of their experience. This includes both the cultivated (developed) and uncultivated (wild) portions of their being. They can do this their whole life long in peace, for no one will ever dispute their claim to these inner riches. People will not pay any attention to their “cradles” or their “toms” (tools for inner mining). This seeker is not confined to a claim twelve feet square, like miners in Ballarat, Australia. They may “mine” for inner truth anywhere. They can “wash” the experiences of the whole wide world in their “tom” (their reflective mind and heart) to find its inherent value.

The Ruin of Material Windfalls

The writer William Howitt tells a story about a man who found a great gold nugget weighing twenty-eight pounds at the Bendigo diggings in Australia. Howitt says: “He soon began to drink; got a horse, and rode all about, generally at full gallop. When he met people, he called out to inquire if they knew who he was, and then kindly informed them that he was ‘the bloody wretch that had found the nugget.’ At last he rode full speed against a tree, and nearly knocked his brains out.” I think, however, there was no real danger of him knocking his brains out then. He had already, in effect, “knocked his brains out” (lost his sense and judgment) against the gold nugget itself. Howitt adds, “He is a hopelessly ruined man.” But this man is just a type, an example of that whole class of people. They are all “fast men,” living reckless lives. Listen to some of the names of the places where they dig for gold: “Jackass Flat,” “Sheep’s-Head Gully,” “Murderer’s Bar,” etc. Is there no satire in these names? Let them carry their ill-gotten wealth wherever they will. I am thinking that the place where they live, morally speaking, will still be a “Jackass Flat” (a place of foolishness), if not a “Murderer’s Bar” (a place of violence and desperation).

The latest desperate venture for quick wealth has been the robbing of ancient graveyards on the Isthmus of Darien in Panama. This shameful enterprise appears to be only in its infancy. According to late accounts, an act has even passed its second reading in the legislature of New Granada (the regional government at the time) to regulate this kind of grave “mining.” A correspondent of the “Tribune” newspaper writes: “In the dry season, when the weather will permit of the country being properly prospected, no doubt other rich ‘guacas’ [that is, indigenous graveyards] will be found.” To emigrants considering this, he advises: “Do not come before December; take the Isthmus route in preference to the Boca del Toro one; bring no useless baggage, and do not cumber yourself with a tent; but a good pair of blankets will be necessary; a pick, shovel, and axe of good material will be almost all that is required.” This is advice that sounds like it could have been taken from a “Grave Robber’s Guide.” And he concludes his article with this line in italics and small capital letters: “IF YOU ARE DOING WELL AT HOME, STAY THERE.” This can be fairly interpreted to mean: “If you are already getting a good living by robbing graveyards (or by other immoral means) where you currently live, then you might as well just stay there.”

But why go as far as California for an example of this mindset? California is, in a sense, the child of New England. Its values were bred in New England’s own schools and churches, reflecting a similar underlying materialism.

The Scarcity of True Moral Guidance

It is remarkable that among all the preachers, there are so few true moral teachers. The modern “prophets” often seem employed in merely excusing the common ways of men. Most respected seniors, the supposed “illuminati” (enlightened ones) of the age, tell me, with a gracious, reminiscent smile—somewhere between an aspiration for something better and a shudder at reality—not to be too tender or sensitive about these moral issues. They advise me to just “lump all that”—that is, to make a lump of gold of every principle, to prioritize monetary gain above all. The highest advice I have heard on these subjects was, in fact, degrading (“grovelling”). The main point of it was: “It is not worth your while to undertake to reform the world in this particular. Do not ask how your bread is buttered (how your livelihood is obtained, especially if by questionable means); it will only make you sick if you do.” And so on. A man had better starve at once than lose his innocence in the process of getting his bread. If within the sophisticated, worldly man there is not also an unsophisticated, pure inner self, then he is but one of the Devil’s angels—evil disguised as refinement. As we grow old, we often begin to live more coarsely. We relax a little in our personal disciplines. To some extent, we cease to obey our finest instincts. But we should be extremely careful and principled (“fastidious”) to the very point of what society might consider “insanity” (meaning, we should be willing to appear eccentric for our principles). We should disregard the mocking gibes of those who are more morally unfortunate than ourselves.

Even in our science and philosophy, there is commonly no true and absolute account of things. The spirit of sectarianism (narrow-minded adherence to a particular group or belief) and bigotry has metaphorically planted its animal-like “hoof” even among the stars, in our attempts to understand the universe. You only have to discuss the problem of whether the stars are inhabited or not in order to discover this narrowness. Why must we daub (smear and defile) the heavens with our prejudices as well as the earth? It was considered an unfortunate discovery by some that Dr. Kane (an Arctic explorer) was a Freemason, and that Sir John Franklin (the explorer he searched for) was also one. But it was an even more cruel suggestion that possibly this shared membership was the primary reason why the former went in search of the latter (implying that even great endeavors could be reduced to narrow, sectarian motives). There is not a popular magazine in this country that would dare to print a child’s simple, honest thought on important subjects without adding some adult comment or interpretation. A child’s pure insight must be submitted to the “D.D.s” (Doctors of Divinity, learned theologians) for approval. I wish instead it were submitted to the “chickadee-dees” (to the simple, natural wisdom of nature).

You might come from metaphorically attending the funeral of mankind (observing the death of principle in society) to then attend to a simple natural phenomenon. A little genuine thought, in such moments, can act as a sexton to the whole world—it can ring the bells for society’s passing, dig its grave, or perhaps, care for what remains sacred.

The Difficulty of True Conversation

I hardly know even one intellectual man who is so broad-minded and truly liberal that you can think aloud freely in his society. Most people with whom you try to talk soon come to a defensive stand for some institution in which they appear to be invested. That is, they cling to some particular, limited way of viewing things, not a universal perspective. They will continually thrust their own low roof, with its narrow skylight, between you and the open sky, when it is the unobstructed heavens you truly wish to view. Get out of the way with your mental cobwebs! Wash your windows of perception, I say! In some public lecture series (lyceums), they tell me that they have voted to exclude the subject of religion. But how do I even know what their definition of religion is, and when I am near to it or far from it in my own thoughts? I have walked into such an arena and done my best to make a clean breast of what religion I have experienced—my deepest spiritual insights. The audience never even suspected what I was truly talking about. The lecture was as harmless and insubstantial as moonshine to them; it had no real impact. Ordinarily, the inquiry from others is, “Where did you come from?” or, “Where are you going?” A much more pertinent question was one I overheard one of my auditors (listeners) put to another once: “What does he lecture for?” (What is his true purpose?) That question made me quake in my shoes, for it probes the very heart of the matter.

To speak impartially, even the best men that I know are not truly serene, not complete worlds in themselves. For the most part, they live according to external forms and conventions. They flatter others and study the effect of their words and actions, perhaps only more finely or skillfully than the rest of society. We select granite for the underpinning (foundation) of our houses and barns; we build fences of stone. But we ourselves do not rest on an underpinning of “granitic truth”—the lowest, most primitive and solid rock of principle. Our own moral sills (foundations) are rotten. What kind of “stuff” is a man made of who is not, in our thought, coexistent with the purest and most subtle truth? I often accuse my finest acquaintances of an immense frivolity (shallowness). For while we observe polite manners and exchange compliments, we do not truly meet on a deeper level. We do not teach one another the lessons of honesty and sincerity that even the “brutes” (animals) in their natural state do, or the lessons of steadiness and solidity that the rocks themselves demonstrate. The fault for this superficiality is commonly mutual, however; for we do not habitually demand any more of each other.

Consider that public excitement about Kossuth (the Hungarian freedom fighter who visited America). Think how characteristic, yet how superficial, it was! It was only another kind of politics or social dancing. Men were making speeches to him all over the country, but each speech expressed only the thought—or the lack of real thought—of the multitude. No man stood firmly on truth. They were merely banded together, as usual, one leaning on another for support, and all of them together leaning on nothing solid. It’s like the Hindu myth where the world rests on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on a serpent—but there was nothing to put under the serpent to support it all. For all the fruit of that great public stir, all we really have to show for it is the “Kossuth hat” (a trivial fashion item named after him).

Just so hollow and ineffectual, for the most part, is our ordinary conversation. Surface meets surface. When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not simply read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor. And, for the most part, the only difference between us and our fellow is that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not. In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post office, hoping for external news or connection. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not truly “heard from himself”—listened to his own inner voice—for a very long while.

The Poverty of News and the Wealth of the Present

I do not know but it is too much to read even one newspaper a week. I have tried it recently, and for the time I am reading it, it seems to me that I have not truly dwelt in my own native region (my inner self, or in true connection with Nature). The sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees say less to me when I am absorbed in the news. You cannot serve two masters (the trivialities of the world and the eternal truths of nature and self). It requires more than a full day’s devotion to truly know and possess the real wealth that a single day can offer.

We may well be ashamed to tell what trivial things we have read or heard in our day-to-day lives. I do not know why the “news” I encounter should be so trivial—considering what one’s dreams and expectations for life are, why should the actual developments and information we focus on be so paltry (insignificant)? The news we hear, for the most part, is not “news” to our deepest self, our inner genius. It is often the stalest repetition. You are often tempted to ask why such stress is laid on a particular, mundane experience you have had—for example, that after twenty-five years, you should happen to meet Mr. Hobbins, the Registrar of Deeds, again on the sidewalk. Have you not budged an inch, then, in your life’s journey? Such is the nature of most “daily news.” Its “facts” appear to float in the atmosphere, as insignificant as the tiny spores of fungi. They impinge on some neglected surface of our minds (a “thallus”), which then affords a basis for them, and from this, a parasitic growth of trivial thoughts begins. We should wash ourselves clean of such news. Of what consequence is it, though our planet itself might explode, if there is no human character, no moral significance, involved in that explosion? In a state of spiritual health, we have not the least curiosity about such purely external, sensational events. We do not live for idle amusement. I would not even run around a corner just to see the world blow up, if it were a meaningless spectacle.

All summer, and far into the autumn, perhaps, you unconsciously went by the newspapers and the news. Now you realize it was because your mornings and your evenings were already full of real news, directly from your own experiences with life and nature. Your walks were full of meaningful incidents. You attended, not to the distant affairs of Europe, but to your own affairs and observations in the fields of Massachusetts. If you chance to live and move and have your whole being only in that thin stratum (layer) of society in which the events that make the “news” transpire—a layer thinner than the very paper on which that news is printed—then these trivial things will fill your world for you. But if you soar above that plane of superficiality, or dive below it into deeper realities, you cannot remember these fleeting things, nor will you be reminded of them. Really to see the sun rise or go down every day, and in doing so, to relate ourselves to a universal fact of nature, would preserve us sane forever. Nations! What are nations? Tartars, and Huns, and Chinamen! (Using these historical group names as examples of vast, teeming populations often viewed in history as undifferentiated masses). Like insects, they swarm. The historian strives in vain to make these masses memorable as collections of distinct individuals. It is often for want of truly remarkable individual men that history seems filled with so many undifferentiated “men.” It is individuals, living principled lives, that truly populate the world with meaning. Any thinking man may say with the Spirit of Lodin (from the Ossianic poems):

“I look down from my height on nations, And they become ashes before me;— Calm is my dwelling in the clouds; Pleasant are the great fields of my rest.”

Pray, let us live without being constantly dragged by external demands and societal pressures, like being pulled by sled dogs in the Inuit fashion—tearing over hill and dale, and metaphorically biting each other’s ears in the frantic rush.

Guarding the Sanctity of the Mind

Not without a slight shudder at the danger, I often perceive how near I had come to admitting into my mind the details of some trivial affair—the common news of the street. And I am astonished to observe how willing men are to lumber their minds with such rubbish—to permit idle rumors and incidents of the most insignificant kind to intrude on ground which should be sacred to thought. Shall the mind be a public arena, where the affairs of the street and the gossip of the tea-table are chiefly discussed? Or shall it be a quarter of heaven itself—a temple open to the sky (hypæthral), consecrated to the service of the gods (higher truths)? I find it so difficult to dispose of, to fully understand, even the few facts which are significant to me, that I hesitate to burden my attention with those which are insignificant—those which only a divine mind could perhaps find meaning in or illustrate. Such, for the most part, is the “news” found in newspapers and ordinary conversation. It is important to preserve the mind’s chastity (purity) in this respect, by not letting it be defiled by trivialities. Think of admitting the details of a single criminal court case into our thoughts! Imagine those details stalking profanely through the very sanctum sanctorum (holy of holies) of our minds for an hour, yes, for many hours! It would be like making a very barroom of the mind’s inmost, private apartment. It would be as if, for that long, the dust of the street had occupied us—as if the very street itself, with all its travel, its bustle, and its filth, had passed right through the sacred shrine of our thoughts! Would it not be an intellectual and moral suicide? When I have been compelled to sit as a spectator and auditor in a courtroom for some hours, and have seen my neighbors—who were not compelled to be there—stealing in from time to time, and tiptoeing about with carefully washed hands and faces (maintaining an outward show of respectability), it has appeared to my mind’s eye that when they took off their hats, their ears suddenly expanded into vast hoppers (funnels) for sound. Their narrow heads seemed almost crowded and lost between these enormous, indiscriminately receptive ears. Like the vanes (sails) of windmills, their ears caught the broad but shallow stream of sound from the courtroom. This sound, after a few brief, superficially exciting gyrations in their mechanical (“coggy”) brains, simply passed out the other side, having no deep or lasting effect. I wondered if, when they got home, they were as careful to wash their ears (to cleanse their minds of what they had heard) as they had been to wash their hands and faces beforehand. It has seemed to me, at such a time, that the auditors and the witnesses, the jury and the counsel (lawyers), the judge, and even the criminal at the bar—if I may presume him guilty before he is convicted—were all equally criminal in their participation in this often degrading and superficial spectacle. It seemed a thunderbolt might be expected to descend and consume them all together for their part in such a charade.

By all kinds of mental traps and internal signboards, threatening the extreme penalty of divine (moral) law, you should exclude such trivial trespassers from the only ground which can be truly sacred to you—your own mind. It is so hard to forget what it is worse than useless to remember! If my mind is to be a thoroughfare (a passage for thoughts), I prefer that it be for mountain brooks and Parnassian streams (sources of poetic inspiration, from Mount Parnassus, home of the Muses), and not for the town sewers filled with societal filth. There is true inspiration—that divine “gossip” which comes to the ear of the attentive mind from the courts of heaven. And then there is the profane (disrespectful of sacred things) and stale “revelation” of the barroom and the police court. The same ear is fitted to receive both kinds of communication. Only the character of the hearer determines to which messages the mind shall be open, and to which it shall be closed. I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned (desecrated) by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that eventually all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality. Our very intellect shall be “macadamized,” as it were—its foundation broken into small, hard fragments for the wheels of passing travel (trivial thoughts) to roll over. And if you would know what will make the most durable pavement—surpassing rolled stones, spruce blocks, and asphaltum—you have only to look into some of our minds which have been subjected to this treatment of constant trivial input for so long. (They become hard, unreceptive, and rutted).

Reconsecrating the Mind

If we have thus desecrated ourselves—as who among us has not, to some degree?—the remedy will be found through wariness (watchfulness) and devotion. We must reconsecrate ourselves and make once more a fane (a temple or sacred place) of the mind. We should treat our minds—that is, ourselves—as if they were innocent and ingenuous (open-hearted, unsuspecting) children, whose guardians we are. We must be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust upon their attention. Read not The Times (the daily newspaper, representing fleeting and often trivial news). Read the Eternities (focus on timeless truths and principles). Conventionalities (empty social customs) are, in the end, as bad for the mind as outright impurities. Even the facts of science may “dust” the mind with their dryness, unless they are, in a sense, effaced each morning—or rather, rendered fertile—by the dews of fresh and living truth, by direct experience and insight. Knowledge does not come to us by an accumulation of details, but in flashes of light from heaven (moments of profound understanding). Yes, every thought that passes through the mind helps to wear and tear it, and to deepen the ruts of habitual thinking. These ruts, like those in the ancient streets of Pompeii, show how much the mind has been used, often in uncreative, repetitive ways. How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them at all! Should we really let their “peddling-carts” (their trivial, distracting information and concerns) be driven, even at the slowest trot or walk, over that bridge of glorious span (our precious time and attention) by which we trust to pass at last from the farthest brink of time to the nearest shore of eternity? Have we no true culture, no real refinement—but skill only to live coarsely and serve the Devil (materialism and unprincipled pursuits)? Is our only aim to acquire a little worldly wealth, or fame, or a superficial kind of liberty, and then make a false show with it, as if we were all husk and shell, with no tender and living kernel of truth and spirit within us? Shall our institutions be like those prickly chestnut-burs which contain abortive, undeveloped nuts—perfect only to prick the fingers of those who handle them?

True Freedom: Beyond the Political

America is said to be the arena on which the battle of freedom is to be fought. But surely, it cannot be freedom in a merely political sense that is meant. Even if we grant that the American has freed himself from a political tyrant (like a king), he is often still the slave of an economic tyrant (the relentless pursuit of money) and a moral tyrant (societal pressure, prejudice, and a lack of personal principle).

Do we call this the land of the free? What is it to be free from King George (the British monarch of the Revolutionary era) if we continue to be the slaves of “King Prejudice”? What is it to be born free and yet not to live free in a moral and intellectual sense? What is the value of any political freedom, except as a means to achieve moral freedom? Is it a “freedom to be slaves” (to convention, to materialism, to our own lower impulses) that we boast of? Or is it a true freedom to be genuinely free in thought and action? We are a nation of politicians, concerned about the outmost defenses only of freedom, not its inner substance or practice. It may be only our children’s children who will, perchance, be really and truly free. We tax ourselves unjustly in many ways. There is a vital part of our true selves which is not represented in our society or in our government. It is, in a spiritual sense, taxation without representation. We “quarter” troops upon ourselves (an old grievance), but we also quarter fools and burdensome “cattle” of all sorts upon our inner lives. We quarter our gross physical bodies and their demands upon our poor souls, until the former (the physical) eat up all the latter’s (the soul’s) substance.

Provincialism of Spirit

With respect to a true culture and mature manhood, we Americans are essentially provincial still, not truly metropolitan or worldly-wise in the best sense. We are mere “Jonathans” (a colloquial term for Americans, sometimes implying a rustic, naive, or unsophisticated nature). We are provincial because we do not find our highest standards of value and living at home, within our own culture or within ourselves. We are provincial because we do not worship truth itself, but only its pale reflection or popular substitutes. We are provincial because we are warped and narrowed by an exclusive devotion to trade and commerce, manufactures and agriculture, and the like. These activities are but means to an end, and not the true end of life itself.

So, in this same way, is the English Parliament provincial (limited and narrow in its ultimate concerns, despite its power).