On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

I wholeheartedly accept the motto “That government is best which governs least,” and I would like to see it put into practice more quickly and more thoroughly. Followed to its conclusion, it finally comes to this, which I also believe: “That government is best which governs not at all.” When people are ready for it, that is the kind of government they will have.

Government is at best only an expedient, a practical device for getting something done. But most governments usually fail to be useful, and all governments sometimes fail. Many serious objections have been raised against a standing army, and they deserve to win the argument. In the end, the same objections can be raised against a standing government.

The standing army is only one arm of the standing government. The government itself is merely the method the people have chosen to carry out their will. Yet before the people have a chance to act through it, the government is just as open to abuse and corruption as the army is.

Consider the present war with Mexico. It is the work of a comparatively small number of individuals who are using the standing government as their tool. At the start, the people would not have agreed to it.

What is this American government, if not a tradition? It is a recent one, trying to pass itself down to future generations intact, yet losing some of its integrity at every moment. It lacks the vitality and force of a single living man, since a single man can bend it to his will.

To the people themselves, it is a kind of wooden gun. If they ever used it in earnest, as a real gun, against each other, it would certainly split.

That does not make it any less necessary. The people must have some complicated machinery or other, and hear it clattering, to satisfy their idea of what government is. In this way governments show how easily men can be deceived, and can even deceive themselves, for their own benefit.

We must all agree that this government is excellent. Yet it has never furthered any enterprise on its own, except by the speed with which it got out of the way. It does not keep the country free. It does not settle the West. It does not educate.

The character of the American people has accomplished everything that has been done. It would have done somewhat more if the government had not sometimes got in its way. Government is a device by which men hope to succeed in leaving one another alone. As has been said, when it is most useful, it leaves the governed most alone.

If trade and commerce were not made of India rubber, they would never manage to bounce over the obstacles that legislators keep putting in their way. If we judged these lawmakers entirely by the effects of their actions, and not partly by their intentions, they would deserve to be classed and punished with the mischief-makers who put obstructions on the railroad tracks.

Speaking practically and as a citizen, however, I am not like those who call themselves no-government men. I ask not for no government at once, but for a better government at once. Let every man make known what kind of government would earn his respect, and that will be one step toward getting it.

When power is once in the hands of the people, why is a majority allowed to rule, and to go on ruling for a long time? In practice, it is not because the majority is most likely to be right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority. It is because the majority is physically the strongest.

But a government in which the majority rules in every case cannot be based on justice, even justice as men understand it. Can there not be a government in which conscience, rather than the majority, effectively decides right and wrong? Can there not be one in which majorities decide only those questions where the rule of expediency, or practical usefulness, properly applies?

Must the citizen ever surrender his conscience to the legislator, even for a moment or in the slightest degree? Then why does every man have a conscience? I think we should be men first and subjects afterward.

It is less desirable to cultivate respect for the law than respect for what is right. The only obligation I have a right to take on is to do at any time what I think right.

It is true enough that a corporation has no conscience. But a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. Law never made men the least bit more just. Through their very respect for it, even well-meaning people are made, every day, into agents of injustice.

A common and natural result of too much respect for the law is a column of soldiers marching off to war: colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all. They march in admirable order over hill and valley, but against their wills, and even against their common sense and consciences. That makes it very steep marching indeed, and sets their hearts pounding.

They have no doubt that the business they are engaged in is damnable. They are all peaceably inclined. So what are they? Are they men at all? Or are they small movable forts and ammunition stores at the service of some unscrupulous man in power?

Visit the Navy Yard and look at a marine. He is the kind of man an American government can make, or the kind it can make out of a man with its black arts. He is a mere shadow and memory of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing. He is already, so to speak, buried under arms with funeral honors, though it may be that

“Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,
As his corpse to the ramparts we hurried;
Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
O’er the grave where our hero we buried.”

The mass of men serve the State in this way, not mainly as men, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army and the militia, the jailers, the constables, the posse comitatus, and so on.

In most cases they exercise no free judgment or moral sense at all. They put themselves on a level with wood, earth, and stones, and perhaps wooden men could be manufactured that would serve the purpose just as well.

Such men command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same kind of worth as horses and dogs. Yet even men like these are commonly regarded as good citizens.

Others, such as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders, serve the State mainly with their heads. Since they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending to, as God.

A very few serve the State with their consciences as well: heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men. For that reason they necessarily resist it for the most part, and the State commonly treats them as enemies.

A wise man will be useful only as a man. He will not submit to be “clay” and “stop a hole to keep the wind away,” but will leave that job, at least, to his dust:

“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.”

He who gives himself entirely to his fellow men seems to them useless and selfish. But he who gives himself to them only partially is hailed as a benefactor and philanthropist.

How should a man behave toward the American government today? My answer is that he cannot be associated with it without disgrace. I cannot for a moment recognize as my government a political organization that is also the slave’s government.

All men recognize the right of revolution: the right to refuse allegiance to the government and to resist it when its tyranny or its incompetence becomes great and unbearable. But almost everyone says that this is not the case now. They think it was the case in the Revolution of ‘75.

Suppose someone told me this was a bad government because it taxed certain foreign goods brought into its ports. Most likely I would not make a fuss about it, since I can do without those goods. All machines have their friction, and possibly this one does enough good to balance the harm. In any case, it is a great evil to stir up trouble over such a thing.

But when the friction comes to have its own machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer.

Consider our actual situation. A sixth of the population of a nation that set out to be the refuge of liberty are slaves. A whole country is being unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army and subjected to military law. Under these conditions, I think it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and make a revolution.

The duty is all the more urgent because the country being overrun is not our own. Ours is the invading army.

Paley, whom many treat as a standard authority on moral questions, reduces all civil obligation to expediency in his chapter on the “Duty of Submission to Civil Government.” 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 inconveniency, it is the will of God that the established government be obeyed, and no longer.”

He continues: “This principle being admitted, the justice of every particular case of resistance is reduced to a computation of the quantity of the danger and grievance on the one side, and of the probability and expense of redressing it on the other.” Of this, he says, every man shall judge for himself.

But Paley seems never to have considered the cases to which the rule of expediency does not apply. In those cases a people, as well as an individual, must do justice, whatever it costs. If I have unjustly snatched a plank from a drowning man, I must give it back to him, even if I drown myself.

According to Paley, this would be inconvenient. But whoever would save his life in such a case shall lose it. This people must stop holding slaves and stop making war on Mexico, even if it costs them their existence as a people.

In practice, nations agree with Paley. But does anyone think that Massachusetts is doing exactly what is right in the present crisis?

“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 here at home. These people care more about commerce and agriculture than about humanity, and they are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to Mexico, whatever it costs.

I have no quarrel with distant enemies. My quarrel is with those close to home who cooperate with the distant ones and do their bidding. Without these people, those far away would be harmless.

We are used to saying that the mass of men are unprepared. But improvement is slow because the few are not much wiser or better than the many. It matters less that many people should be as good as you than that there should be some absolute goodness somewhere. That goodness will leaven the whole lump, as a little yeast raises a whole batch of dough.

There are thousands who are opposed in opinion to slavery and to the war, yet in effect do nothing to end them. They consider themselves children of Washington and Franklin. Yet they sit with their hands in their pockets, say they don’t know what to do, and do nothing.

They even put the question of freedom behind the question of free trade. After dinner they quietly read the latest market prices along with the latest news from Mexico, and perhaps fall asleep over both. What is the market price of an honest man and patriot today?

They hesitate, they regret, and sometimes they petition, but they do nothing in earnest and to any effect. Well-meaning, they will wait for others to cure the evil, so that they will no longer have it to regret. At most, they give the right a cheap vote, a feeble nod of approval, and their good wishes as it passes by them.

There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue for every virtuous man. But it is easier to deal with the real owner of a thing than with its temporary guardian.

All voting is a kind of gambling, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it. It is a game played with right and wrong, with moral questions, and betting naturally goes along with it. The voters’ own character is not at stake.

I cast my vote, perhaps, as I think right, but I am not vitally concerned that the right should win. I am willing to leave it to the majority. The obligation of a vote, therefore, never goes beyond that of expediency.

Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It only expresses to others, feebly, your wish that it should win. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to win through the power of the majority. There is little virtue in the actions of masses 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 little slavery left for their vote to abolish. Then they will be the only slaves. Only the man who asserts his own freedom by his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery with it.

I hear of a convention to be held at Baltimore, or somewhere else, to choose a candidate for the Presidency. It is made up mostly of newspaper editors and men who are politicians by profession. But I ask myself: what does it matter to any independent, intelligent, and respectable man what they decide? Won’t we still have the benefit of his wisdom and honesty? Can’t we count on some independent votes? Aren’t there many people in the country who never attend conventions?

But no. I find that the so-called respectable man immediately drifts from his position and despairs of his country, when his country has more reason to despair of him. He promptly adopts one of the candidates chosen in this way as the only “available” one. By doing so, he proves that he himself is available for any purpose a demagogue may have.

His vote is worth no more than that of any unprincipled foreigner or hired native who may have been bought. Oh, for a man who is a man, and who, as my neighbor says, has a bone in his back you cannot pass your hand through!

Our statistics are wrong: the population has been reported too large. How many men are there to every thousand square miles in this country? Hardly one. Does America offer no inducement for men to settle here?

The American has shrunk into an Odd Fellow, the member of a mutual-aid lodge. He can be recognized by a well-developed organ of gregariousness, the bump phrenologists credit with a love of company, and by an obvious lack of intellect and cheerful self-reliance. On coming into the world, his first and main concern is to make sure the poorhouses are in good repair.

Before he has even lawfully put on the dress of manhood, he is collecting a fund to support whatever widows and orphans there may someday be. In short, he dares to live only with the help of the Mutual Insurance company, which has promised to bury him decently.

It is not automatically a man’s duty to devote himself to wiping out any wrong, even the most enormous one. He may still rightly have other concerns to occupy him. But it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it. And if he no longer gives it any thought, he must at least not give it his support in practice.

If I devote myself to other pursuits and reflections, I must first make sure, at the very least, that I am not pursuing them while sitting on another man’s shoulders. I must get off him first, so that he can pursue his own reflections too.

Look at what gross inconsistency is tolerated. I have heard some of my townsmen say, “I’d like to see them order me out to help put down a slave insurrection, or to march to Mexico. See if I’d go.” Yet each of these very men has supplied a substitute: directly through his allegiance, and so indirectly, at least, through his money.

The soldier who refuses to serve in an unjust war is applauded by people who do not refuse to support the unjust government that makes the war. He is applauded by the very people whose own act and authority he disregards and defies. It is as if the State were sorry enough to hire someone to whip it while it sinned, but not sorry enough to stop sinning even for a moment.

So, in the name of Order and Civil Government, we are all eventually made to honor and support our own meanness. After the first blush of sin comes indifference to it. What was immoral becomes, as it were, unmoral, beyond moral notice altogether, and not entirely unnecessary to the life we have made for ourselves.

The broadest and most widespread error requires the most unselfish virtue to sustain it. The slight reproach that patriotism usually invites is the one the noble are most likely to incur. Those who disapprove of a government’s character and policies but still give it their allegiance and support are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters. For that very reason, they are often the most serious obstacles to reform.

Some people are petitioning the State to dissolve the Union and to disregard the President’s demands. Why don’t they dissolve it themselves, the union between themselves and the State, and refuse to pay their share into its treasury?

Don’t they stand in the same relation to the State that the State stands to the Union? And haven’t the same reasons kept the State from resisting the Union that have kept them from resisting the State?

How can a man be satisfied merely to hold an opinion and enjoy it? Is there any enjoyment in it, if his opinion is that he has been wronged?

If your neighbor cheats you out of a single dollar, you are not satisfied with knowing you were cheated, or with saying so, or even with petitioning him to pay what he owes. You take effective steps at once to recover the full amount, and you make sure you are never cheated again.

Action from principle, which means seeing what is right and doing it, changes things and relationships. It is essentially revolutionary, and it is not fully compatible with anything that existed before. It has divided states and churches, and it divides families. Indeed, it divides the individual, separating the devilish in him from the divine.

Unjust laws exist. Should we be content to obey them? Should we try to amend them, and obey them until we succeed? Or should we break them at once?

Under a government like this one, men generally think they should wait until they have persuaded the majority to change the laws. They think that if they resisted, the remedy would be worse than the evil.

But it is the government’s own fault that the remedy is worse than the evil. The government makes it worse. Why isn’t it readier to anticipate and provide for reform? Why doesn’t it value its wise minority? Why does it cry out and resist before it is hurt?

Why doesn’t it encourage its citizens to stay alert, to point out its faults, and to do better than it asks of them? Why does it always crucify Christ, excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and declare Washington and Franklin rebels?

You would think that a deliberate, practical denial of its authority was the only offense the government had never considered. Otherwise, why hasn’t it assigned this offense a definite, suitable, and proportionate penalty?

If a man with no property refuses even once to earn nine shillings for the State, he is put in prison. The length of his term is limited by no law I know of. It is set only by the discretion of those who put him there. But if he stole ninety times nine shillings from the State, he would soon be allowed to go free again.

If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go. Perhaps it will wear smooth, and the machine will certainly wear out. If the injustice has a spring, a pulley, a rope, or a crank all its own, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will be worse than the evil.

But if the injustice is of such a kind that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another person, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I must do, in any case, is make sure that I do not lend myself to the wrong I condemn.

As for using the methods the State has provided for remedying the evil, I know of no such methods. They take too much time, and a man’s life will be over first. I have other things to attend to. I came into this world not mainly to make it a good place to live in, but to live in it, whether it is good or bad.

A man does not have to do everything, but something. And because he cannot do everything, it does not follow that he must do something wrong. It is no more my business to petition the Governor or the Legislature than it is theirs to petition me. And if they did not hear my petition, what would I do then?

But in this case the State has provided no method at all: its very Constitution is the evil. This may seem harsh, stubborn, and unconciliatory. But it treats with the greatest kindness and consideration the only spirit that can appreciate such treatment or deserves it. All change for the better is like this, like birth and death, which convulse the body.

I do not hesitate to say that those who call themselves abolitionists should at once, and effectively, withdraw their support, both in person and in property, from the government of Massachusetts. They should not wait until they form a majority, even by one, before they allow the right to prevail through them.

I think it is enough if they have God on their side, without waiting for that one extra vote. Besides, any man more right than his neighbors already makes a majority of one.

I meet this American government, or its representative, the State government, directly and face to face once a year, no more, in the person of its tax collector. That is the only way a man in my situation necessarily meets it. And it then says plainly, “Recognize me.”

In the present state of affairs, the simplest, most effective, and most indispensable way of dealing with it on this point is to deny it then. That is how to express your meager satisfaction with and love for it.

My courteous neighbor, the tax collector, is the very man I have to deal with. After all, my quarrel is with men, not with parchment. And he has voluntarily chosen to be an agent of the government.

How will he ever really know what he is and does, as an officer of the government or as a man, until he is forced to decide how to treat me? I am his neighbor, and he respects me. Will he treat me as a neighbor and a well-meaning man, or as a maniac and a disturber of the peace? Can he get past this obstacle to his neighborliness without a cruder, more violent thought or word to match his action?

I know this well. Suppose one thousand men, or one hundred, or ten men whom I could name, only ten honest men, or even one HONEST man in this State of Massachusetts, stopped holding slaves. Suppose he actually withdrew from this partnership and was locked up in the county jail for it. That would be the abolition of slavery in America.

It does not matter how small the beginning may seem: what is once well done is done forever. But we prefer to talk about it, and that, we say, is our mission. Reform keeps scores of newspapers in its service, but not one man.

Consider my respected neighbor, the State’s ambassador, who will spend his days settling the question of human rights in the Council Chamber. Suppose that, instead of being threatened with the prisons of Carolina, he sat down as the prisoner of Massachusetts.

Massachusetts is so eager to push the sin of slavery onto her sister state, though for now she can find only an act of inhospitality as grounds for a quarrel with her. If he were her prisoner, the Legislature would not entirely drop the subject the following winter.

Under a government that imprisons anyone unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. Today the proper place, the only place Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less despondent spirits, is in her prisons. There they are put out and locked out of the State by her own act, just as they have already put themselves out by their principles.

It is there that the fugitive slave, the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian who has come to plead the wrongs of his race should find them. That is the separate but freer and more honorable ground where the State places those who are not with her but against her. It is the only house in a slave state where a free man can live with honor.

Some may think their influence would be lost there. They may think their voices would no longer trouble the ear of the State, and that they would no longer be an enemy within its walls. Such people do not know how much stronger truth is than error. Nor do they know how much more eloquently and effectively a man can fight injustice when he has experienced a little of it in his own person.

Cast your whole vote: not merely a strip of paper, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then. But it is irresistible when it clogs the works with its whole weight. If the choice is between keeping all just men in prison and giving up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate over which to choose.

If a thousand men refused to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure. Paying them would be, because it would enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such thing is possible.

If the tax collector, or any other public officer, asks me, as one has done, “But what shall I do?” my answer is, “If you really want to do something, resign your office.” When the subject has refused allegiance and the officer has resigned his office, the revolution is accomplished.

But suppose blood should flow even so. Isn’t a kind of blood shed when the conscience is wounded? Through this wound a man’s real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death. I see this blood flowing now.

I have chosen to focus on imprisoning the offender rather than seizing his goods, though either would serve the same purpose. The people who stand for the purest right, and who are therefore most dangerous to a corrupt State, usually have not spent much time accumulating property.

The State does comparatively little for such people, and even a small tax tends to seem excessive to them, especially if they must earn it by extra work with their own hands. If there were someone who lived entirely without using money, the State itself would hesitate to demand money from him.

But the rich man, and I do not mean this as an unfair comparison, is always sold to the institution that makes him rich. Speaking in absolute terms, the more money, the less virtue. Money comes between a person and the things he aims at, and obtains them for him. And there was certainly no great virtue in acquiring the money in the first place.

Money settles many questions that a person would otherwise have to work to answer. The only new question it raises is the hard but unnecessary one of how to spend it. In this way, his moral footing is pulled out from under him. The opportunities for living shrink in proportion as the so-called “means” increase.

The best thing a rich man can do for his own development is to try to carry out the plans 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. His meaning was this: if you use money that bears Cæsar’s image, money that Cæsar has put into circulation and given its value, then you are men of the State.

If you gladly enjoy the advantages of Cæsar’s government, then pay him back some of what is his when he demands it. “Render therefore to Cæsar that which is Cæsar’s and to God those things which are God’s.” This left them no wiser than before about which was which, because they did not want to know.

When I talk with the freest of my neighbors, I notice something. Whatever they say about how large and serious the question is, and however much they speak of their concern for public peace, the long and short of it is simple. They cannot do without the protection of the existing government, and they fear what disobedience would cost their property and families.

For my own part, I would not like to think that I ever rely on the State’s protection. But if I deny the State’s authority when it presents its tax bill, it will soon take and waste all my property, and harass me and my children without end. This is hard. It makes it impossible for a person to live honestly and, at the same time, comfortably in outward things.

It will not be worth accumulating property, since it would surely be taken again. You must rent or squat somewhere, raise only a small crop, and eat it soon. You must live within yourself and depend on yourself, always packed and ready to leave, without many affairs to tie you down.

A man may grow rich even in Turkey, if he is a good subject of the Turkish government in every respect. 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 Massachusetts to extend its protection to me in some distant southern port where my liberty is in danger, or until I am set solely on building up an estate at home by peaceful enterprise, I can afford to refuse allegiance to Massachusetts. I can afford to deny its right to my property and my life.

In every sense, it costs me less to accept the penalty for disobeying the State than it would cost me to obey. If I obeyed, I would feel that I was worth less.

Some years ago, the State confronted me on behalf of the church. It ordered me to pay a certain sum toward supporting a clergyman whose preaching my father had attended, though I never had. “Pay it,” it said, “or be locked up in the jail.” I refused to pay. Unfortunately, another man decided to pay it for me.

I did not see why the schoolmaster should be taxed to support the priest, rather than the priest taxed to support the schoolmaster. I was not the State’s schoolmaster; I supported myself by voluntary subscription. Nor did I see why the lyceum, the town’s lecture society, should not present its own tax bill and have the State back its demand, just as the church did.

Still, at the request of the selectmen, the town’s officials, I agreed to make a written statement along these lines: “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 to the town clerk, and he has it.

Having learned in this way that I did not wish to be counted a member of that church, the State has never made a similar demand on me since, though at the time it said it had to hold to its original presumption. If I had known how to name them, I would then have signed off, one by one, from every society I never signed on to. But I did not know where to find a complete list.

I have paid no poll tax for six years. I was put in jail once for this, for one night. I stood looking at the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating that strained the light. I could not help being struck by the foolishness of an institution that treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up.

I wondered that it had finally concluded this was the best use it could make of me, and had never thought of using my services in some other way. I saw that if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was an even harder one for them to climb or break through before they could become as free as I was.

I did not feel confined for a moment, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar. I felt as if I alone, of all my townsmen, had paid my tax. They clearly did not know how to treat me, and behaved like ill-bred people. Every threat and every compliment contained a blunder, because they thought my chief desire was to stand on the other side of that stone wall.

I could not help smiling to see how diligently they locked the door on my thoughts. Those thoughts followed them out again without any hindrance, and they were the only thing about me that was really dangerous. Since they could not reach me, they had decided to punish my body, just as boys who cannot get at someone they hold a grudge against will abuse his dog.

I saw that the State was half-witted, as timid as a woman living alone with her silver spoons, and unable to tell its friends from its enemies. I lost all my remaining respect for it, and I pitied it.

So the State never deliberately confronts a person’s sense, whether intellectual or moral, but only his body and his physical senses. It is armed not with superior intelligence or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe in my own way. Let us see who is strongest.

What force does a multitude have? Only those who obey a higher law than I do can force me. They force me to become like themselves. I do not hear of men being forced to live this way or that by masses of men. What sort of life would that be?

When I meet a government that says to me, “Your money or your life,” why should I hurry to give it my money? It may be in great difficulty and not know what to do, but I cannot help that. It must help itself, as I do. It is not worth whining about.

I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society. I am not the engineer’s son. When an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, neither one stays inert to make way for the other. Both obey their own laws, sprouting, growing, and flourishing as best they can, until perhaps one overshadows and destroys the other. If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies, and so does a man.

The night in prison was new and interesting enough. When I entered, the prisoners were in their shirt-sleeves, enjoying a chat and the evening air in the doorway. But the jailer said, “Come, boys, it is time to lock up.” So they scattered, and I heard the sound of their steps returning into the hollow rooms.

The jailer introduced my roommate to me as “a first-rate fellow and a clever man.” Once 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, and this one, at least, was the whitest, most simply furnished, and probably the neatest room in town.

He naturally wanted to know where I came from and what had brought me there. When I had told him, I asked in turn how he came to be there, assuming, of course, that he was an honest man; and, as the world goes, I believe he was. “Why,” he said, “they accuse me of burning a barn; but I never did it.”

As near as I could tell, he had probably gone to bed drunk in a barn and smoked his pipe there, and so a barn burned down. He had a reputation as a clever man. He had been there about three months waiting for his trial, and would have to wait about as long again. But he was quite at home and content, since he got his meals for nothing and thought he was well treated.

He had one window and I had the other. I saw that anyone who stayed there long would make looking out the window his main business. I soon read all the tracts that had been left there. I examined where former prisoners had broken out and where a grate had been sawed off, and I heard the history of the room’s various occupants.

I found that even here there was a history and a gossip that never circulated beyond the jail walls. This is probably the only house in town where verses are composed that are afterward printed as circulars but never published. I was shown quite a long list of verses written by some young men who had been caught trying to escape. They took their revenge by singing them.

I questioned my fellow prisoner as thoroughly as I could, pumping him dry, for fear I would never see him again. At last he showed me which bed was mine and left me to blow out the lamp.

Lying there for one night was like traveling to a far country I had never expected to see. It seemed I had never heard the town clock strike before, nor the evening sounds of the village, for we slept with the windows open; they were inside the grating.

I saw my native village in the light of the Middle Ages. Our Concord was transformed into a Rhine stream, and visions of knights and castles passed before me. The voices I heard in the streets were those of old burghers. I was an involuntary spectator and listener to whatever was done and said in the kitchen of the village inn next door, a completely new and rare experience for me.

It was a closer view of my native town. I was truly inside it. I had never seen its institutions before. This is one of its peculiar institutions, since it is a shire town, the seat of the county. I began to understand what its inhabitants were about.

In the morning, our breakfasts were passed through the hole in the door in small oblong tin pans made to fit it. Each held a pint of chocolate, with brown bread and an iron spoon. When they called for the dishes again, I was green enough to return the bread I had left. But my comrade seized it and said I should save it for lunch or dinner.

Soon afterward he was let out to work at haying in a nearby field, where he went every day and would not be back until noon. So he bade me good-day, saying that he doubted he would see me again.

When I came out of prison (someone had interfered and paid the tax), I did not notice any great changes on the town common, like the changes seen by the man who went into prison as a youth and came out gray-haired. And yet, to my eyes, a change had come over the scene. The town, the State, and the country had changed more than mere time could ever change them.

I saw the State I lived in even more clearly. I saw how far the people around me could be trusted as good neighbors and friends. Their friendship was for summer weather only. They had no serious intention of doing right. Their prejudices and superstitions made them as distinct a race from me as the Chinese and Malays are.

In their sacrifices for humanity, they took no risks, not even with their property. After all, they were not so noble that they refused to treat the thief as he had treated them. They hoped to save their souls through a certain outward observance, a few prayers, and by walking now and then along a particular path that was straight but useless.

This may be judging my neighbors harshly. I believe most of them do not even know that their village has such an institution as the jail.

In our village it used to be the custom to greet a poor debtor coming out of jail in a particular way. His acquaintances would look at him through their fingers, crossed to represent the bars of a jail window, and say, “How do ye do?” My neighbors did not greet me this way. They first looked at me, and then at one another, as if I had returned from a long journey.

I had been put in jail while on my way to the shoemaker’s to pick up a mended shoe. When I was let out the next morning, I went on to finish my errand. Then, wearing my mended shoe, I joined a huckleberry-picking party who were impatient to have me lead them.

Within half an hour (the horse was soon harnessed), I was in the middle of a huckleberry field on one of our highest hills, two miles away. From there the State was nowhere to be seen.

This is the whole history of “My Prisons.”

I have never refused to pay the highway tax, because I want to be a good neighbor as much as I want to be a bad subject. As for supporting schools, I am doing my part to educate my fellow-countrymen right now. No particular item in the tax bill is my reason for refusing to pay it. I simply wish to refuse allegiance to the State, to withdraw from it and genuinely stand apart.

I do not care to follow my dollar, even if I could, until it buys a man, or a musket to shoot one with. The dollar is innocent. What concerns me is following the effects of my allegiance. In fact, I quietly declare war on the State in my own way. Even so, I will still use her and get whatever advantages from her I can, as people usually do in such cases.

Some people may pay the tax demanded of me because they sympathize with the State. If so, they are only doing what they have already done in their own case. Or rather, they support injustice even further than the State requires.

Others may pay the tax out of a mistaken concern for the person being taxed, to save his property or keep him out of jail. In that case, they have not thought wisely about how far they let their private feelings interfere with the public good.

This, then, is my present position. But in such a case a person must be especially careful. His actions may be biased by stubbornness, or by too much concern for what other people think. Let him make sure he does only what belongs to himself and to the moment.

Sometimes I think: Why, these people mean well. They are only ignorant. They would do better if they knew how. Why cause your neighbors the pain of treating you in a way they do not want to? But then I think again. This is no reason for me to do as they do, or to let others suffer a much greater pain of a different kind.

At other times I say to myself: Many millions of men demand only a few shillings from you. They make this demand without heat, without ill will, without personal feeling of any kind. Their very makeup prevents them from withdrawing or changing their demand. And on your side, there are no other millions to appeal to. Why expose yourself to this overwhelming brute force?

You do not resist cold and hunger, the winds and the waves, this stubbornly. You quietly submit to a thousand similar necessities. You do not put your head into the fire.

But I do not regard this force as wholly brute. It is partly human. My relation to those millions is a relation to so many millions of men, not to mere brutes or lifeless things. To the extent that I see it this way, I see that appeal is possible. First, and at once, I can appeal from them to their Maker. Second, I can appeal from them to themselves.

But if I deliberately put my head into the fire, I cannot appeal to the fire or to the Maker of fire, and I have only myself to blame.

If I could convince myself that I have any right to be satisfied with men as they are, and to treat them that way rather than, in some respects, according to my demands and expectations of what they and I ought to be, then, like a good Muslim and fatalist, I would try to be satisfied with things as they are and say it is the will of God.

Above all, there is one difference between resisting this force and resisting a purely brute or natural one. I can resist this force with some effect. But I cannot expect to change the nature of rocks, trees, and beasts, as Orpheus did with his music.

I do not wish to quarrel with any man or nation. I do not wish to split hairs, make fine distinctions, or set myself up as better than my neighbors. If anything, I am looking for an excuse to obey the laws of the land. I am all too ready to obey them.

In fact, I have reason to be suspicious of myself on this point. Each year, when the tax collector comes around, I find myself inclined to review the actions and position of the federal and state governments, and the spirit of the people. I am looking for a pretext to conform.

“We must affect our country as our parents,
And if at any time we alienate
Out love of industry from doing it honor,
We must respect effects and teach the soul
Matter of conscience and religion,
And not desire of rule or benefit.”

I believe the State will soon be able to take all my work of this sort off my hands. Then I will be no better a patriot than my fellow-countrymen.

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, admirable and rare things to be thankful for, as a great many people have described them. But seen from a higher point of view, and from the highest, who can say what they are? Who can say they are worth looking at or thinking about at all?

However, the government does not concern me much, and I will give it as few thoughts as possible. Even in this world, I do not spend many moments living under a government. A man may be free in thought, in fancy, and in imagination, so that what is unreal never seems real to him for long. Then unwise rulers or reformers cannot fatally interrupt him.

I know that most men think differently from me. But those who devote their lives professionally to studying these or related subjects satisfy me as little as anyone. Statesmen and legislators stand so completely inside the institution that they never see it clearly and plainly. They speak of moving society, but they have no place to stand outside it.

They may be men of some experience and judgment. No doubt they have invented clever and even useful systems, and we sincerely thank them for these. But all their cleverness and usefulness stay within fairly narrow limits. They tend to forget that the world is not governed by policy and expediency.

Webster never looks behind government, and so he cannot speak about it with authority. His words are wisdom to legislators who intend no essential reform of the existing government. But for thinkers, and for those who legislate for all time, he never once even glances at the subject.

I know of people whose calm and wise reflections on this theme would quickly reveal how limited his mind is, both in its range and in its openness. Yet compare him with the cheap professions of most reformers, and with the even cheaper wisdom and eloquence of politicians in general. By that standard, his are almost the only sensible and valuable words, and we thank Heaven for him.

By comparison, he is always strong, original, and, above all, practical. Still, his quality is not wisdom but prudence. The lawyer’s truth is not Truth. It is consistency, or a consistent expediency. Truth is always in harmony with herself. Her main concern is not to show how justice might coexist with wrongdoing.

He fully deserves to be called, as he has been, the Defender of the Constitution. The only blows he can strike are defensive ones. He is not a leader but a follower. His leaders are the men of 1787, who framed the Constitution.

“I have never made an effort,” he says, “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 sanction the Constitution gives to slavery, he says, “Because it was part of the original compact—let it stand.”

Despite his unusual sharpness and ability, he cannot lift a fact out of its merely political relations. He cannot look at it as it stands in absolute terms, a question for the intellect to settle. He cannot ask, for instance, what a man ought to do here in America today about slavery.

Instead he ventures, or is driven, to give some desperate answer like the following, while claiming to speak in absolute terms and as a private man. What new and peculiar code of social duties might one infer from it?

“The manner,” he says, “in which the governments of those States where slavery exists are to regulate it, is for their own consideration, under the responsibility to their constituents, to the general laws of propriety, 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.”

[These extracts were inserted after the lecture was read. —H.D.T.]

Some people know of no purer sources of truth and have followed its stream no higher. They stand by the Bible and the Constitution, and they are wise to do so. They drink from the stream there with reverence and humanity. But those who see where it trickles into this lake or that pool prepare themselves once more and continue their pilgrimage toward its source.

No man with a genius for legislation has appeared in America. Such men are rare in the history of the world. There are orators, politicians, and eloquent men by the thousand. But the speaker who can settle the much-disputed questions of the day has not yet opened his mouth to speak.

We love eloquence for its own sake. We do not love it for any truth it may express or any heroism it may inspire. Our legislators have not yet learned how to weigh the value to a nation of free trade against freedom, or of union against moral rightness.

They have no genius or talent even for comparatively modest questions of taxation and finance, commerce, manufacturing, and agriculture. Suppose we relied only on the wordy cleverness of legislators in Congress for guidance, uncorrected by the timely experience and effective complaints of the people. America would not long keep her rank among the nations.

The New Testament has been written for eighteen hundred years, though perhaps I have no right to say it. Yet where is the legislator with enough wisdom and practical talent to make use of the light it sheds on the science of legislation?

The authority of government is still impure, even the kind I am willing to submit to. I will gladly obey those who know more and can do better than I can. In many things I will obey even those who neither know nor can do as well. Still, to be strictly just, government must have the approval and consent of the governed. It can have no pure right over my person and property except what I grant it.

The progress from absolute monarchy to limited monarchy, and from limited monarchy to democracy, is progress toward a true respect for the individual. Even the Chinese philosopher was wise enough to regard the individual as the foundation of the empire.

Is democracy as we know it the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take one more step toward recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a truly free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power. All of its own power and authority come from that individual, and it must treat him accordingly.

I enjoy imagining a State that can at last afford to be just to all people and to treat the individual with respect, as a neighbor. Such a State would not even feel its own peace threatened if a few people lived apart from it, neither interfering with it nor absorbed into it, so long as they fulfilled all their duties as neighbors and fellow human beings.

A State that bore this kind of fruit, and let it drop away as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State. I have imagined that State too, but I have not yet seen it anywhere.

Slavery in Massachusetts

Delivered at an anti-slavery celebration on July 4, 1854; first published in The Liberator, July 21, 1854.

I recently attended a meeting of the citizens of Concord. I expected, as one among many, to speak about slavery in Massachusetts. Instead, I was surprised and disappointed to find that my townsmen had gathered to discuss the fate of Nebraska, not Massachusetts. What I had to say would be entirely out of order.

I had thought that the house was on fire, not the prairie. Several citizens of Massachusetts are now in prison for trying to rescue a slave from Massachusetts’s own clutches. Yet not one speaker at that meeting expressed regret about it. Not one even mentioned it. The only thing that seemed to concern them was what would become of some wild lands a thousand miles away.

The people of Concord are not prepared to stand by one of their own bridges, where their ancestors once made a stand. They talk only of taking up a position on the highlands beyond the Yellowstone River. Our Buttricks, Davises, and Hosmers, the heirs of the men who fought at that bridge, are retreating there. I fear they will leave no Lexington Common, no ground to make a stand on, between themselves and the enemy.

There is not one slave in Nebraska. There are perhaps a million slaves in Massachusetts.

People trained in the school of politics fail, now and always, to face the facts. Their measures are only half measures and stopgaps. They postpone the day of settlement indefinitely, and in the meantime the debt keeps growing.

The Fugitive Slave Law had not been discussed at that meeting. But at a later session of the adjourned meeting, I am told, my townsmen finally and feebly resolved on something. One of the parties, they said, had repudiated the compromise agreement of 1820, “Therefore, … the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 must be repealed.”

That is not the reason an unjust law should be repealed. The fact the politician faces is only that there is less honor among thieves than people supposed. He does not face the fact that they are thieves.

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

Once again the Boston Courthouse is full of armed men. They are holding a man prisoner and trying him, to find out whether he is not really a slave. Does anyone think that justice, or God, is waiting for Mr. Loring’s decision?

This question has already been decided from eternity to eternity. The unlettered slave himself, and the crowd around him, heard and accepted that decision long ago. For Loring to go on sitting there, still deciding it, simply makes him ridiculous.

We may be tempted to ask who gave him his commission, and who he is that received it. What strange new statutes does he obey, and what precedents does he treat as authority? The very existence of such a judge is an insult. We do not ask him to make up his mind. We ask him to make up his pack and leave.

I listen for the voice of a governor, the Commander-in-Chief of the forces of Massachusetts. 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 muster days, when the militia assembles for inspection.

I have seen him on horseback, with his hat off, listening to a chaplain’s prayer. As it happens, that is all I have ever seen of a governor. I think I could manage without one. If he is not the slightest use in keeping me from being kidnapped, then what important use is he likely to be to me?

When freedom is in the greatest danger, he lives in the deepest obscurity. A distinguished clergyman once told me that he chose his profession because it allowed the most leisure for literary work. I would recommend to him the profession of governor.

Three years ago, too, when the tragedy of Simms was played out, I said to myself: there is such an officer, if not such a man, as the governor of Massachusetts. What has he been doing these past two weeks? Has it taken all his effort just to stay on the fence during this moral earthquake?

It seemed to me that no sharper satire could have been aimed at that man, and no more cutting insult offered him, than what actually happened. In that crisis, nobody asked about him at all. The worst I know of him, and the most, is that he did not use that opportunity to make himself known, and known worthily.

He could at least have resigned, and so won fame. People seemed to forget that there was any such man or such office. Yet no doubt he was trying to fill the governor’s chair the whole time. He was no governor of mine. He did not govern me.

But at last, in the present case, the governor was heard from. He and the United States government had completely succeeded in robbing a poor, innocent Black man of his liberty for life. As far as they could, they had also robbed him of his Creator’s likeness in his soul. After that, the governor made a speech to his accomplices at a celebratory supper!

I have read a recent law of this state. It makes it a punishable offense for “any officer of the Commonwealth” 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.”

It was also widely known that a writ of replevin could not be served. This was a court order to take the fugitive out of the custody of the United States Marshal. It failed because there was not enough force to back up the officer.

I had thought the governor was, in some sense, the state’s executive officer. As governor, it was his business to see that the laws of the state were carried out. As a man, he was to take care not to break the laws of humanity in doing so. But whenever there is a special, important use for him, he is useless, or worse than useless, and lets the laws of the state go unenforced.

Perhaps I do not know what a governor’s duties are. But being governor may mean submitting to so much disgrace without remedy, and placing a restraint on my manhood. If so, I will take care never to be governor of Massachusetts.

I have not read far in the statutes of this Commonwealth. It is not rewarding reading. They do not always say what is true, and they do not always mean what they say. What I care to know is that this man’s influence and authority were on the side of the slaveholder, not the slave. They favored the guilty, not the innocent, and injustice, not justice.

I never saw the man I am speaking of. In fact, I did not know he was governor until this event took place. I heard of him and of Anthony Burns at the same time, and that, no doubt, 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 counts against him that I had not heard of him. What counts against him is what I did hear. The worst I will say of him is that he proved no better than most of his constituents would probably have proved. In my opinion, he was not equal to the occasion.

The entire military force of the state is at the service of a Mr. Suttle, a slaveholder from Virginia, so that he can catch a man he calls his property. But not one soldier is offered to save a citizen of Massachusetts from being kidnapped!

Is this what all these soldiers, and all this training, have been for during the past seventy-nine years? Have they been trained only to rob Mexico and to carry fugitive slaves back to their masters?

On these very nights I heard the sound of a drum in our streets. Men were still drilling, and for what? With an effort, I could forgive the young roosters of Concord for still crowing, since perhaps they had not been beaten that morning. But I could not excuse this rub-a-dub of the “trainers.”

The slave was carried back by exactly such men as these, that is, by the soldier. The best that can be said of the soldier in this connection is that he is a fool made conspicuous by a painted coat.

Three years ago, too, a week after the Boston authorities gathered to carry a perfectly innocent man back into slavery, the people of Concord had the bells rung and the cannons fired. The authorities knew the man was innocent. Concord was celebrating its liberty, and the courage and love of liberty of the ancestors who fought at the bridge.

It was as if those three millions had fought for the right to be free themselves, and also to hold three million others in slavery. Nowadays men wear a fool’s cap and call it a liberty cap.

I suspect there are some who, if they were tied to a whipping post and could get just one hand free, would use it to ring the bells and fire the cannons to celebrate their liberty. So some of my townsmen took the liberty of ringing and firing.

That was the full extent of their freedom. When the sound of the bells died away, their liberty died away too. When the powder was all used up, their liberty went off with the smoke.

The joke could be no broader if the prisoners in our jails were to pay for all the powder used in such salutes. They might as well hire the jailers to do the firing and ringing for them, while they enjoyed it through the bars.

This is what I thought about my neighbors.

Every humane and intelligent person in Concord who heard those bells and cannons did not think with pride of the events of April 19, 1775. Instead, he or she thought with shame of the events of April 12, 1851. And now we have half buried that old shame under a new one.

Massachusetts sat waiting for Mr. Loring’s decision, as if it could somehow affect her own guilt. Her crime, the most conspicuous and fatal crime of all, was allowing him to be the umpire in such a case. It was really Massachusetts that was on trial.

Every moment she hesitated to set this man free, and every moment she now hesitates to atone for her crime, she stands convicted. The Commissioner in her case is God. Not Edward G. God, but simply God.

I want my countrymen to consider this. Whatever human law may say, neither an individual nor a nation can ever commit the smallest act of injustice against the most obscure person without paying the penalty for it. A government that deliberately enacts injustice, and persists in it, will in the end always become the laughingstock of the world.

Much has been said about American slavery, but I think we still do not even realize what slavery is. Suppose I seriously proposed to Congress that mankind be made into sausages. I have no doubt most of the members would smile at the idea. If any believed I was in earnest, they would think I was proposing something far worse than anything Congress had ever done.

But suppose any of them tells me that making a man into a sausage would be much worse, or any worse at all, than making him into a slave, or than enacting the Fugitive Slave Law. I will accuse him of foolishness, of intellectual incapacity, of drawing a distinction without a difference. The one proposal is just as sensible as the other.

I hear a lot of talk about trampling this law underfoot. But no one needs to go out of the way to do that. This law never rises to the level of the head or of reason. Its natural home is in the dirt. It was born and raised, and it lives, only in the dust and mud, down at the level of the feet.

Anyone who walks freely, and does not, with the mercy of a Hindu, take care to avoid stepping on every poisonous reptile, will inevitably step on this law and trample it underfoot. And Webster, who made it, will be trampled along with it, like the dirt-bug together with the ball of dung it rolls.

Recent events will be valuable as a criticism of how justice is administered among us. More precisely, they show where the real resources of justice lie in any community. Things have reached the point where the friends of liberty, the friends of the slave, have shuddered on learning that his fate would be decided by the country’s courts of law.

Free people have no faith that justice will be delivered in such a case. The judge may decide one way or the other; at best it is a kind of accident. Clearly he is not a competent authority in so important a case. This is no time, then, to judge according to his precedents. It is time to set a precedent for the future.

I would much rather trust the moral feeling of the people. Their vote would give you something of value, at least, however small. The court gives you only the hampered judgment of one individual, which means nothing, whichever way it goes.

It is, to some extent, fatal to the courts when the people are forced to go around them. I do not want to believe that the courts were made only for fair weather and for very ordinary 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 of a nation, have a right to be free or not!

Yet that question has been left to the so-called courts of justice, all the way up to the Supreme Court of the land. As you all know, that court recognizes no authority but the Constitution, and it has decided that the three million are slaves and shall remain slaves.

Judges like these are merely inspectors of a burglar’s lock-picks and a murderer’s tools. They tell him whether his tools are in working order, and there, they think, their responsibility ends. But there was an earlier case on the docket, which they, as judges appointed by God, had no right to skip. Had they settled it justly, they would have been spared this humiliation. It was the case of the murderer himself.

The law will never make men free; it is men who must make the law free. The true lovers of law and order are those who obey the law when the government breaks it.

Among human beings, the judge whose words seal a man’s fate furthest into eternity is not the one who merely pronounces the verdict of the law. It is whoever, out of love of truth, and without bias from any human custom or statute, speaks a true opinion or sentence about him. That person is the one who truly sentences him.

Whoever has perceived the truth has received his commission from a higher source than the highest chief justice in the world, who can perceive only law. He finds himself appointed judge of the judge. How strange that such simple truths need to be stated!

I am more and more convinced that on any public question, it matters more to know what the countryside thinks than what the city thinks. The city does not think much. On any moral question, I would rather have the opinion of Boxboro than that of Boston and New York put together.

When Boxboro speaks, I feel as if somebody has actually spoken, as if humanity still existed and a reasonable being had asserted its rights. It is as if some unprejudiced men among the country’s hills had finally turned their attention to the subject and, with a few sensible words, redeemed the reputation of the human race.

When the farmers of some obscure country town gather for a special town meeting to express their opinion on a question that is troubling the land, that, I think, is the true Congress. It is the most respectable Congress ever assembled in the United States.

Clearly 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 the country is mean enough, but I am glad to believe there is a slight difference in her favor. As yet, though, she has few if any outlets through which to express herself. The editorials she reads, like the news, come from the coast.

Let us who live in the country cultivate self-respect. Let us not send to the city for anything more essential than our fine woolen cloth and our groceries. Or, if we do read the city’s opinions, let us hold opinions of our own.

Among the measures to be taken, I would suggest attacking the press as earnestly and vigorously as the church has already been attacked, with real effect. The church has improved a great deal in recent years, but the press is almost without exception corrupt. I believe that in this country the press exerts a greater and more harmful influence than the church did at its worst.

We are not a religious people, but we are a nation of politicians. We do not care about the Bible, but we do care about the newspaper. At any meeting of politicians, like the one at Concord the other evening, how out of place it would be to quote from the Bible! And how fitting to quote from a newspaper or from the Constitution!

The newspaper is a Bible we read every morning and every afternoon, standing and sitting, riding and walking. It is a Bible every man carries in his pocket. It lies on every table and counter, and the mail and thousands of missionaries are constantly spreading it. It is, in short, the only book America has printed and the only book America reads. That is how wide its influence is.

The editor is a preacher whom you support voluntarily. Your tax is usually one cent a day, and there is no charge for renting a pew. But how many of these preachers preach the truth?

I repeat the testimony of many intelligent foreigners, as well as my own conviction, when I say this: probably no country was ever ruled by so mean a class of tyrants as the editors of this country’s periodical press, with a few noble exceptions. They live and rule only through their servility, by appealing to the worse rather than the better side of human nature. So the people who read them are like the dog that returns to its vomit.

As far as I know, the Liberator and the Commonwealth were the only papers in Boston that spoke out to condemn the cowardice and meanness of that city’s authorities as shown in 1851. Almost without exception, the other journals insulted at least the common sense of the country by the way they referred to and discussed the Fugitive Slave Law and the return of the slave Simms.

For the most part, it would seem, they did this because they thought it would win the approval of their customers. They did not realize that a sounder feeling prevailed to any real extent in the heart of the Commonwealth. I am told that some of them have improved lately, but they are still thoroughly timeserving, bending to whatever is convenient at the moment. That is the reputation they have earned.

But fortunately, this preacher is even easier for the reformer’s weapons to reach than the unfaithful priest was. The free men of New England have only to stop buying and reading these papers. By simply withholding their pennies, they can kill a score of them at once.

One man I respect told me that he bought Mitchell’s Citizen on the train and then threw it out the window. But would his contempt not have been expressed more fatally if he had never bought it at all?

Are they Americans? Are they New Englanders? Are they residents of Lexington and Concord and Framingham, these people who read and support the Boston Post, Mail, Journal, Advertiser, Courier, and Times? Are these the Flags of our Union? I am not a newspaper reader, so I may have failed to name the worst.

Could slavery itself produce a more complete servility than some of these journals display? Is there any dust their conduct does not lick, and then make fouler with its slime? I do not know whether the Boston Herald still exists, but I remember seeing it around the streets when Simms was carried off. Did it not play its part well and serve its master faithfully? How could it have crawled lower on its belly?

How can a man stoop lower than he already is? How can he do more than put his extremities where his head ought to be, or make his head into his lower extremity?

When I have picked up this paper with my cuffs turned back, I have heard the gurgling of the sewer through every column. I have felt that I was handling a paper fished out of the public gutters. It was a leaf from the gospel of the gambling house, the cheap saloon, and the brothel, in perfect harmony with the gospel of the Merchants’ Exchange.

Most men of the North, and of the South and East and West, are not men of principle. When they vote, they do not send men to Congress on errands of humanity. Their brothers and sisters are being whipped and hanged for loving liberty (I could insert here everything that slavery implies and is), yet what concerns them is the mismanagement of wood and iron and stone and gold.

“Do what you like, O Government, with my wife and children, my mother and brother, my father and sister. I will obey your commands to the letter. It will truly grieve me if you hurt them, if you hand them over to overseers to be hunted by hounds or whipped to death.

“Nevertheless, I will peacefully pursue my chosen work on this fair earth, until perhaps one day, after I have put on mourning for their deaths, I will have persuaded you to relent.” Such is the attitude of Massachusetts, and such are her words.

Rather than act like that, I need not say what match I would light or what system I would try to blow up. But as surely as I love my life, I would side with the light and let the dark earth roll away beneath me, calling my mother and my brother to follow.

I would remind my countrymen that they are to be men first, and Americans only at a late and convenient hour. However valuable the law may be in protecting your property, or even in keeping body and soul together, it fails if it does not keep you and humanity together.

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 he is required to pass sentence under a law that is simply contrary to the law of God.

I am forced to see that in this respect they place themselves, or rather are by their very character, exactly on a level with the marine who fires his musket in whatever direction he is ordered. They are just as much tools, and just as little men. Certainly they deserve no more respect because their master enslaves their understanding and conscience instead of their bodies.

Judges and lawyers (simply as such, I mean) and all men of expediency try this case by a very low and incompetent standard. They ask, not whether the Fugitive Slave Law is right, but whether it is what they call constitutional. Is virtue constitutional, or vice? Is fairness constitutional, or wickedness?

In serious moral questions, questions of life itself like this one, it is just as irrelevant to ask whether a law is constitutional as to ask whether it is profitable. These men persist in being the servants of the worst of men, not the servants of humanity.

The question is not whether you, or your grandfather seventy years ago, made an agreement to serve the Devil, so that the service is now owed. The question is whether you will now, for once and at last, serve God, in spite of your own past faithlessness or your ancestor’s. You serve Him by obeying that eternal and only just Constitution which He, and not any Jefferson or Adams, has written into your being.

It comes down to this: if the majority votes the Devil to be God, the minority will live and behave accordingly, trusting that someday, perhaps through some Speaker’s tie-breaking vote, they may restore God to His place. This is the highest principle I can extract or invent for my neighbors.

These men act as if they believed they could safely slide a little way down a hill, or a good way, and would surely reach a point, before long, where they could begin to slide back up. This is expediency: choosing the course that offers the fewest obstacles to the feet, which means a downhill course.

But no righteous reform can be accomplished through “expediency.” There is no such thing as sliding uphill. In morals, the only sliders are backsliders.

So we steadily worship Mammon, the god of wealth, in school and state and church alike. Then on the seventh day we curse God with a tintamar, a great clattering din, from one end of the Union to the other.

Will mankind never learn that policy is not morality? Policy never secures any moral right. It considers only what is expedient. It chooses the “available” candidate, who is invariably the Devil. And what right do his constituents have to be surprised when the Devil does not behave like an angel of light?

What we need are men not of policy but of integrity: 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. At that game, the worst man is as strong as the best. It does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your bedroom into the street every morning.

What should concern Massachusetts is not the Nebraska Bill or the Fugitive Slave Bill, but her own slaveholding and servility. Let the state dissolve her union with the slaveholder. She may squirm and hesitate, and ask permission to read the Constitution once more. But she will find no respectable law or precedent that permits such a Union to continue for even an instant.

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

The events of the past month teach me to distrust Fame. Fame does not make fine distinctions; she cheers crudely. She does not consider the simple heroism of an action, only how it connects to its apparent consequences. She praises the easy exploit of the Boston Tea Party until she is hoarse. Yet she stays comparatively silent about the braver and more selflessly heroic attack on the Boston Courthouse, simply because it failed!

Covered with disgrace, the state has calmly sat down to try, for their lives and liberties, the men who attempted to do its duty for it. And this is called justice! Those who have shown that they can behave especially well may perhaps be put under bonds to guarantee their good behavior.

Those whom truth now requires to plead guilty are, of all the state’s inhabitants, the most innocent. While the governor, the mayor, and countless officers of the Commonwealth remain at large, the champions of liberty are in prison.

Only those who commit the crime of contempt of such a court are guiltless. Every man should make sure his influence is on the side of justice, and let the courts make their own reputations. My sympathies in this case are entirely with the accused, and entirely against their accusers and judges.

Justice is sweet and musical; injustice is harsh and discordant. The judge still sits cranking his hand organ, but it produces no music. We hear only the sound of the handle. He believes all the music lives in the handle, and the crowd tosses him their pennies just as before.

Do you suppose that the Massachusetts now doing these things is anything but base and servile? She hesitates to crown these men. Some of their lawyers, and perhaps even some judges, may be driven to take refuge in some poor technicality, just so they need not wholly 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 truly administers justice, and I will fight for them if necessary. But show me Massachusetts, and I refuse her my allegiance and express my contempt for her courts.

A good government makes life more valuable; a bad one makes it less valuable. We can afford to let railroad stock, and all merely material holdings, lose some value, because that only forces us to live more simply and economically.

But suppose the value of life itself should shrink! How could we demand less of man and nature than we already do? How could we be more sparing with virtue and every noble quality than we already are?

For the past month I have lived with the feeling of having suffered a vast and undefined loss. I think every man in Massachusetts capable of patriotic feeling 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 I could 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. My investment in life here feels worth many percent less since Massachusetts last deliberately sent an innocent man, Anthony Burns, back into slavery.

Before, perhaps, I lived under the illusion that my life passed somewhere between heaven and hell. Now I cannot persuade myself that I do not live wholly within hell. To me, the site of that political organization called Massachusetts is morally covered with volcanic slag and cinders, like those Milton describes in the infernal regions. If there is any hell more unprincipled than our rulers and we, the ruled, I am curious to see it.

Since life itself is worth less, everything that serves it is worth less too. Suppose you have a small library, with pictures on the walls and a garden laid out around it, and you look forward to scientific and literary work. Then you discover, all at once, that your villa and everything in it stands in hell, and that the justice of the peace has a cloven hoof and a forked tail. Wouldn’t all these things suddenly lose their value in your eyes?

I feel that the state has, to some extent, fatally interfered with my lawful business. It has not only interrupted me as I walked down Court Street on errands of trade. It has interrupted me, and every man, on the onward and upward path by which he had hoped soon to leave Court Street far behind.

What right did it have to remind me of Court Street? I have found hollow what even I had relied on as solid.

I am surprised to see men going about their business as if nothing had happened. I say to myself, “Poor wretches! They have not heard the news.” I am surprised that the man I just met on horseback is so eager to catch his newly bought cows, which are running away. All property is insecure now. Even if they do not run away again, they may be taken from him once he has them.

Fool! Does he not know that his seed corn is worth less this year, and that all good harvests fail as you approach the empire of hell? No prudent man will build a storehouse under these circumstances, or start any peaceful enterprise that takes a long time to complete. Art is as long as ever, but life is more interrupted and less available for a man’s proper pursuits.

This is not an age of rest. We have used up all the freedom we inherited. If we want to save our lives, we must fight for them.

I walk toward one of our ponds. But what does the beauty of nature mean when men are base? We walk to lakes to see our own 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 memory of my country spoils my walk. My thoughts are murder to the state, and without my willing it they go plotting against her.

But the other day I happened to smell a white water lily, and a season I had been waiting for had arrived. The lily is the emblem of purity. It bursts up so pure and lovely to the eye, and so sweet to the smell, as if to show us what purity and sweetness reside in the slime and muck of the earth, and can be drawn out of it. I think I have picked the first one to open for a mile around.

What confirmation of our hopes lies in the fragrance of this flower! Because of it I will not soon despair of the world, despite slavery and the cowardice and lack of principle of Northern men. It suggests what kind of laws have prevailed longest and most widely, and still prevail. It suggests that the time may come when men’s deeds will smell as sweet. Such is the scent this plant gives off.

If Nature can still produce this fragrance every year, I will believe she is still young and full of vigor, her integrity and genius unimpaired. I will believe there is virtue in man too, since he is made to perceive and love it. The lily reminds me that Nature has been a partner to no Missouri Compromise. I smell no compromise in its fragrance. It is not a Nympaea Douglassii.

In it, the sweet, the pure, and the innocent are wholly separated from the obscene and the harmful. I do not smell in it the timeserving indecision of a Massachusetts governor or a Boston mayor.

So behave that the scent of your actions may add to the general sweetness of the air. Then, when we see or smell a flower, we will not be reminded how inconsistent your deeds are with it.

Every scent is only one form of advertising a moral quality. 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 that are immortal.

Slavery and servility have produced no sweet-scented flower each year to charm men’s senses, because they have no real life. They are merely decay and death, offensive to every healthy nose. We do not complain that they live, but that they do not get buried. Let the living bury them. Even they are good for manure.

A Plea for Captain John Brown

Read to the citizens of Concord, Mass., Sunday evening, October 30, 1859; first published in Echoes of Harper’s Ferry, 1860.

I hope you will forgive me for being here. I do not wish to force my thoughts on you, but I feel forced myself. Little as I know of Captain Brown, I want to do my part to correct the tone and the statements of the newspapers, and of my countrymen in general, about his character and actions.

It costs us nothing to be just. We can at least express our sympathy with him and his companions, and our admiration for them. That is what I now propose to do.

First, his history. I will try to leave out, as much as possible, what you have already read. I need not describe his appearance, since 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 Revolution. He himself was born in Connecticut around the beginning of this century, but went to Ohio with his father while still young.

I heard him say that his father was a contractor who supplied beef to the army there during the War of 1812. Brown went with him to the camp and helped him in that work. He saw a good deal of military life, perhaps more than if he had been a soldier, because he was often present at the officers’ councils.

In particular, he learned from experience how armies are supplied and maintained in the field. That work, he remarked, requires at least as much experience and skill as leading them in battle. He said few people had any idea of the cost, even the financial cost, of firing a single bullet in war.

At any rate, he saw enough to disgust him with military life, and even to fill him with a deep loathing for it. When he was about eighteen, he was tempted by the offer of some minor army post. He not only declined it, but also refused to report for militia training when summoned, and was fined for it. He then resolved never to have anything to do with any war, unless it was a war for liberty.

When the troubles in Kansas began, he sent several of his sons there to strengthen the Free State party, equipping them with whatever weapons he had. He told them that if the troubles grew and he was needed, he would follow to help them with his hand and his counsel.

As you all know, he soon did. And it was through his efforts, far more than anyone else’s, that Kansas was made free.

For part of his life he was a surveyor. At one time he was in the wool-growing business, and he went to Europe as an agent in that trade. There, as everywhere, he kept his eyes open and made many original observations.

He said, for instance, that he saw why the soil of England was so rich and that of Germany (I think it was) so poor, and he thought of writing to some of the crowned heads about it. The reason was that in England the peasants live on the land they farm, while in Germany they gather into villages at night. It is a pity he did not make a book of his observations.

I would say he was an old-fashioned man in his respect for the Constitution and his faith in the permanence of this Union. He considered slavery wholly opposed to both, and he was its determined enemy.

He was a New England farmer by ancestry and by birth. He had the great common sense of that class and was deliberate and practical, as such farmers are, but ten times more so. He was like the best of the men who once stood at Concord Bridge, on Lexington Common, and on Bunker Hill. He was, however, firmer and more principled than any of them I have happened to hear of.

No abolitionist lecturer converted him. In some respects he can be compared with Ethan Allen and Stark, but they were rangers in a lower and less important field. They could bravely face their country’s enemies. He had the courage to face his country itself when it was in the wrong.

One Western writer, trying to explain how Brown escaped so many dangers, says that he was hidden under a “rural exterior.” The writer seems to assume that in that prairie country a hero should, by rights, wear only a city man’s clothes.

He did not attend the college called Harvard, good old Alma Mater though it is. He was not raised on the soft, bland food it serves its students. As he put it, “I know no more of grammar than one of your calves.”

Instead, he went to the great university of the West. There he diligently studied Liberty, a subject he had shown a fondness for early in life. After earning many degrees, he finally began the public practice of Humanity in Kansas, as you all know. Those were his humanities, not any study of grammar. He would have left a Greek accent slanting the wrong way, and set a falling man back on his feet.

He belonged to a class of people we hear a great deal about but, for the most part, never see at all: the Puritans. It would be useless to kill him. He died recently, in the time of Cromwell, but he reappeared here. Why shouldn’t he? Some of the Puritan stock are said to have crossed the ocean and settled in New England.

The Puritans did more than celebrate Forefathers’ Day and eat parched corn in memory of those early times. They were neither Democrats nor Republicans. They were men of simple habits, straightforward and prayerful. They did not think much of rulers who did not fear God. They made few compromises, and they did not go looking for electable candidates.

“In his camp,” as someone recently wrote, and as I have heard him say myself, “he permitted no profanity; no man of loose morals was suffered to remain there, unless, indeed, as a prisoner of war. ‘I would rather,’ said he, ‘have the smallpox, yellow fever, and cholera, all together in my camp, than a man without principle.⁠ ⁠…

“‘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, and with a dozen of them I will oppose any hundred such men as these Buford ruffians.’”

He also said that he had little confidence in any man who volunteered to serve under him and was quick to boast about what he could do, or would do, if only he could catch sight of the enemy.

He never found more than twenty or so recruits he was willing to accept. Only about a dozen of them, his sons among them, had his complete trust.

When he was here some years ago, he showed a few people a little handwritten book. I think he called it his “orderly book.” It held the names of the men in his company in Kansas and the rules they had bound themselves to follow. He said that several of them had already sealed that agreement with their blood.

Someone remarked that if he added a chaplain, his company would be a perfect Cromwellian troop. He replied that he would gladly have added a chaplain, if he could have found one able to fill that office worthily. Finding one for the United States Army is easy enough. Even without a chaplain, I believe he held prayers in his camp every morning and evening.

He had Spartan habits. At sixty, when he ate at your table, he was careful about his diet. He excused himself by saying that he had to eat sparingly and live hard, as was proper for a soldier, or for someone preparing himself for difficult enterprises and a life of exposure to the elements.

What set him apart was this: he was a man of rare common sense, direct in speech as well as in action. Above all he was a transcendentalist, a man of ideas and principles. He did not give way to a whim or a passing impulse. He was carrying out the purpose of a whole life.

I noticed that he never overstated anything. He spoke within limits. I particularly remember how, in his speech here, he described what his family had suffered in Kansas without ever releasing the least bit of his pent-up fire. He was a volcano with an ordinary chimney flue.

Speaking of the deeds of certain Border Ruffians, he trimmed his speech down quickly, like an experienced soldier keeping a reserve of force and meaning. He said only, “They had a perfect right to be hung.”

He was not a rhetorician in the least. He was not making speeches for show to win over voters back home, the kind politicians call talking “to Buncombe.” He had no need to invent anything. He needed only to tell the simple truth and to share his own resolve.

For that reason he seemed incomparably strong, and the eloquence of Congress and other places seemed to me worth much less by comparison. It was like comparing the speeches of Cromwell with those of an ordinary king.

As for his tact and caution, I will say only this. At that time hardly any man from the Free States could reach Kansas by a direct route, at least not without having his weapons taken from him. Brown loaded whatever imperfect guns and other weapons he could gather into an oxcart and drove it openly and slowly through Missouri.

He appeared to be a surveyor, with his surveying compass in plain view in the cart. In this way he passed through unsuspected, and he had plenty of opportunity to learn what the enemy intended.

For some time after he arrived, he kept up the same profession. Suppose, for instance, he saw a group of ruffians gathered on the prairie, discussing the single subject that then filled their minds. He might take his compass and one of his sons and begin running an imaginary survey line straight through the spot where that meeting was taking place.

When he reached them, he would naturally stop and talk with them. He would learn their news and, in the end, all of their plans in full. Having finished his real survey, he would resume his imaginary one and continue along his line until he was out of sight.

I once expressed surprise that he could live in Kansas at all, with a reward offered for his head and so many people, the authorities included, enraged against him. He explained it by saying, “It is perfectly well understood that I will not be taken.”

For several years he has spent much of his time hiding in swamps. He suffered from poverty and from illness brought on by exposure, and his only friends were Indians and a few white settlers. Yet even when it was known that he was hiding in a particular swamp, his enemies usually did not care to go in after him.

He could even come into a town where Border Ruffians outnumbered Free State men, conduct some business without lingering, and still be left alone. As he put it, “No little handful of men were willing to undertake it, and a large body could not be got together in season.”

As for his recent failure, we do not know the facts about it. It was clearly far from a wild and desperate attempt. Even his enemy, Mr. Vallandigham, is forced to say that “it was among the best planned and executed conspiracies that ever failed.”

Leaving aside his other successes, consider one exploit. He freed a dozen human beings from bondage and walked away with them in broad daylight, for weeks if not months, at an unhurried pace. He passed through one state after another, across half the length of the North, in full view of everyone, with a reward offered for his head.

On the way, he walked into a courtroom and told what he had done. He thereby convinced Missouri that it did not pay to try to hold slaves anywhere near him. Was that a failure? Did it show poor management? And he managed it not because the government’s servants were lenient, but because they were afraid of him.

Yet he did not foolishly credit his success to “his star” or to any kind of magic. He said, truly, that such greatly superior numbers backed down before him because, as one of his prisoners admitted, they lacked a cause. A cause was a kind of armor that he and his men never lacked.

When the moment came, few men were willing to give their lives defending what they knew to be wrong. They did not want that to be their last act in this world.

But let me hurry on to his last act and its effects.

The newspapers seem to ignore a fact, or perhaps they really do not know it. Throughout the North there are at least two or three people in every town who think about him and his enterprise much as I do. I do not hesitate to say that they form an important and growing party.

We aspire to be something more than stupid and timid pieces of property, pretending to read history and our Bibles while desecrating every house we breathe in and every day we live.

Anxious politicians may perhaps prove that only seventeen white men and five Black men took part in the recent enterprise. But their very eagerness to prove this ought to suggest to them that the whole story has not been told. Why do they keep dodging the truth?

They are so anxious because they are dimly aware of a fact they do not face squarely: at least a million free inhabitants of the United States would have rejoiced if the enterprise had succeeded. At most, those people criticize only its tactics.

Though we wear no black crape in mourning, the thought of that man’s situation and his probable fate is keeping many a man here in the North from thinking about anything else all day. If anyone who has seen him here can successfully follow any other train of thought, I do not know what he is made of.

If there is anyone like that who still gets his usual amount of sleep, I guarantee he will grow fat easily under any circumstances that 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.

On the whole, my respect for my fellow human beings is not growing these days, except in the sense that one man may outweigh a million. I have noticed the cold-blooded way newspaper writers, and people in general, talk about this event.

They speak as if an ordinary criminal had been caught and were about to be hanged, though one with unusual “pluck.” The Governor of Virginia is reported to have called him, in the language of the cockfighting pit, “the gamest man he ever saw.” But Brown was not thinking about his enemies at the moment the governor found him so brave.

Hearing my neighbors’ remarks, or hearing about them, turns what sweetness I have into bitterness. When we first heard that he was dead, one of my townsmen said that “he died as the fool dieth.” Forgive me, but for an instant that suggested a resemblance between Brown dying and my neighbor living.

Other cowardly people said dismissively that “he threw his life away,” because he resisted the government. Which way, may I ask, have they thrown their own lives? These are the same people who would praise a man for single-handedly attacking an ordinary gang of thieves or murderers.

I hear another ask, in typical Yankee fashion, “What will he gain by it?” He talks as if Brown expected to fill his pockets through this enterprise. A man like that has no idea of gain except in this worldly sense. If it does not lead to a “surprise” party, a new pair of boots, or a vote of thanks, it must be a failure.

“But he won’t gain anything by it.” Well, no. I don’t suppose he could earn four shillings and sixpence a day, an ordinary day’s wage, for being hanged, taking the year as a whole. But he does stand a chance of saving 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 where heroes take their blood.

People like this do not understand that the fruit is like the seed. In the moral world, when good seed is planted, good fruit is certain to follow, and it does not depend on our watering and tending it. When you plant a hero in his field, or bury him there, a crop of heroes is sure to spring up. This seed has such force and vitality that it does not ask our permission to sprout.

A poet laureate has celebrated, fittingly enough, the brief charge at Balaclava, made in obedience to a blundering order. That charge proved what a perfect machine a soldier is.

But for some years this man has made a steady, and mostly successful, charge against the armies of slavery, in obedience to an infinitely higher command. His charge is more memorable than that one by as much as an intelligent and conscientious man is superior to a machine. Do you think it will go unsung?

“Served him right.” “A dangerous man.” “He is undoubtedly insane.” Having said this, they go on living their sane, wise, and altogether admirable lives. They read a little Plutarch, but they mostly linger over the famous exploit of Putnam, who was lowered into a wolf’s den. In this way they nourish themselves for the brave and patriotic deeds they will perform at some point.

The Tract Society could safely print that story of Putnam. You could open the district schools by reading it aloud, since it says nothing about slavery or the church. The only risk is that a reader might reflect that some pastors are wolves in sheep’s clothing. Even “The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions” might dare to protest against that wolf.

I have heard of boards, and of American boards, but I never happened to hear of this particular piece of lumber until recently. And yet I hear of Northern men, women, and children, whole families of them, buying “life memberships” in societies like these. A life membership in the grave! You can get buried more cheaply than that.

Our enemies are among us and all around us. There is hardly a house that is not divided against itself. Our enemy is the nearly universal woodenness of both head and heart, the lack of vitality in people, which is the result of our vice. From it are born fear, superstition, bigotry, persecution, and slavery of every kind.

We are mere carved figureheads on a rotting hulk, with livers where our hearts should be. The curse is idol worship, which in the end turns the worshipper himself into a stone image. The New Englander is just as much an idolater as the Hindu. This man was an exception. He did not set up even a political idol between himself and his God.

A church that, as long as it exists, can never stop excommunicating Christ! Away with your broad, flat churches and your narrow, tall churches! Take a step forward and invent a new style of outhouse. Invent a salt that will preserve you from decay, and spare our noses.

The modern Christian is a man who has agreed to say all the prayers in the liturgy, on condition that you let him go straight to bed and sleep peacefully afterward. All his prayers begin with “Now I lay me down to sleep,” and he is forever looking forward to the time when he will go to his “long rest.”

He has also agreed to perform certain long-established charities, after a fashion. But he does not want to hear about any newfangled ones. He does not want any supplementary articles added to the contract to fit it to the present time. He shows the whites of his eyes, turned piously upward, on the Sabbath, and the blacks of them all the rest of the week.

The evil is not merely stagnant blood but stagnant spirit. Many of these people are no doubt well-meaning, but they are sluggish by constitution and by habit. They cannot imagine a man driven by higher motives than their own. So they declare this man insane, because they know they could never act as he does, as long as they remain themselves.

We dream of foreign countries, of other ages and other races of men, and we place them at a distance in history or in space. But let some significant event like this one happen among us, and we often discover that same distance and strangeness between ourselves and our nearest neighbors. They are our Austrias, our Chinas, our South Sea Islands.

Our crowded society suddenly becomes well spaced, clean and handsome to look at, a city of magnificent distances. We discover why we never got beyond compliments and surfaces with these people before. We become aware of as many versts, the old Russian measure of distance, between us and them as lie between a wandering Tartar and a Chinese town.

The thoughtful man becomes a hermit in the busy streets of the marketplace. Impassable seas suddenly settle between us, or silent steppes stretch out there. The true and impassable boundaries between individuals, and between states, are not rivers and mountains. They are differences of constitution, intelligence, and faith. Only the like-minded can come as fully empowered ambassadors to our court.

I read all the newspapers I could get in the week after this event, and I do not remember a single expression of sympathy in them for these men. Since then I have seen one noble statement in a Boston paper, and it was not an editorial. Some bulky papers decided not to print the full report of Brown’s words, because it would have crowded out other material.

It was as if a publisher had rejected the manuscript of the New Testament and printed Wilson’s latest speech instead. The same paper that carried this momentous news was filled mostly, in parallel columns, with reports of the political conventions then being held. But the drop from one to the other was too steep. Those reports should have been spared the contrast, or at least printed in a special extra edition.

To turn from the voices and deeds of earnest men to the cackling of political conventions! Office seekers and speechmakers who do not lay even one honest egg, but sit with bare breasts on an egg of chalk! Their great game is the game of straws, or rather that universal native game of the platter, at which the Indians cried “hub, bub!” Leave out the reports of religious and political conventions, and publish the words of a living man.

But I object less to what they have left out than to what they have put in. Even the Liberator called it “a misguided, wild, and apparently insane … effort.” As for the herd of newspapers and magazines, I do not know a single editor in the country who will deliberately print something he knows will, in the end and for good, reduce the number of his subscribers.

They do not believe it would be expedient. How, then, can they print the truth? If we do not say pleasant things, they argue, nobody will pay attention to us. So they act like certain traveling auctioneers, who sing an obscene song to draw a crowd.

Republican editors, who must get their sentences ready for the morning edition and are used to seeing everything by the dim twilight of politics, express no admiration, not even real sorrow. They call these men “deluded fanatics,” “mistaken men,” “insane,” or “crazed.” This suggests what a sane set of editors we are blessed with. They are not “mistaken men.” They know very well which side their bread is buttered on, at least.

A man does a brave and humane deed, and immediately people and parties on every side declare: “I didn’t do it, and I didn’t encourage him to do it in any conceivable way. It can’t fairly be inferred from my past career.” I, for one, have no interest in hearing you define your position. I don’t think I ever had, or ever will. At a time like this it seems to me mere egotism, or impertinence.

You needn’t go to so much trouble to wash your hands of him. No intelligent man will ever be persuaded that he was any creature of yours. He came and went, as he himself tells us, “under the auspices of John Brown and nobody else.”

The Republican party does not see how many people his failure will lead to vote more correctly than the party would like. They have counted the votes of Pennsylvania and company, but they have not correctly counted Captain Brown’s vote. He has taken the wind out of their sails, what little wind they had, and they may as well heave to and make repairs.

What does it matter that he did not belong to your clique? Even if you do not approve of his methods or his principles, recognize his greatness of spirit. Wouldn’t you like to claim kinship with him in that, even if he is not like you, or likely to be, in anything else? Do you think you would lose your reputation by doing so? Whatever you lost through the barrel’s small tap hole, you would gain back through its large bung.

If they do not mean all this, then they are not telling the truth or saying what they mean. They are simply up to their old tricks.

“It was always conceded to him,” says one writer who calls him 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.”

The slave ship is on her way, crowded with dying victims. New cargoes are being added in mid-ocean. A small crew of slaveholders, backed by a large body of passengers, is smothering four million people below the hatches. And yet the politician insists that the only proper way to win their deliverance is through “the quiet diffusion of the sentiments of humanity,” without any “outbreak.”

As if the sentiments of humanity were ever found without humane deeds to go with them! As if you could spread them, finished to order, the pure article, as easily as sprinkling water from a watering can to settle the dust! What is that I hear being thrown overboard? The bodies of the dead, who have found their deliverance. That is how we are “diffusing” humanity, and its sentiments along with it.

Prominent and influential editors, used to dealing with politicians, men of an infinitely lower grade, say in their ignorance that he acted “on the principle of revenge.” They do not know the man. They must enlarge themselves to grasp who he was. I have no doubt the time will come when they begin to see him as he really was.

They will have to imagine a man of faith and religious principle, not a politician or an Indian. He did not wait until he was personally interfered with, or blocked in some harmless business of his own, before giving his life to the cause of the oppressed.

If Walker can 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 compared with ideal things. He did not recognize unjust human laws, but resisted them as he was commanded to. For once we are lifted out of the trivial dust of politics into the realm of truth and manhood.

No man in America has ever stood up so persistently and so 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 raising false issues to defend him. He was more than a match for all the judges that American voters, or officeholders of any rank, can create.

He could not have been tried by a jury of his peers, because his peers did not exist. When a man stands calmly against the condemnation and vengeance of mankind, literally rising above them by a whole body’s height, the spectacle is sublime. This would be true even if he had lately been the vilest murderer, so long as he had settled that matter with himself.

Didn’t you know it, you Liberators, you Tribunes, you Republicans? In comparison, we become the criminals. Do yourselves the honor of recognizing him. He needs none of your respect.

As for the Democratic papers, they are not human enough to affect me at all. Nothing they say makes me indignant.

I am aware that I am getting a little ahead of events. At last report he was still alive in the hands of his enemies. Even so, I have found myself all along thinking and speaking of him as physically dead.

I do not believe in putting up 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 a statue of Captain Brown in the Massachusetts Statehouse yard than one of any other man I know. I rejoice that I live in this age, that I am his contemporary.

What a contrast when we turn to that political party which is so anxiously shuffling him and his plot out of its way! It is looking around for some suitable slaveholder, perhaps, to be its candidate, or at least for someone who will enforce the Fugitive Slave Law and all the other unjust laws he took up arms to abolish.

Insane! A father, six sons, a son-in-law, and several more men besides, at least as many as twelve disciples, all struck with insanity at once! Meanwhile the same tyrant holds his four million slaves with a firmer grip than ever, and a thousand sane editors, his accomplices, are saving their country and their bacon.

His efforts in Kansas were just as insane. Ask the tyrant who his most dangerous enemy is, the sane man or the insane one. Do the thousands who know him best, who cheered his deeds in Kansas and gave him material help there, think he is insane? For most who keep using the word, it is a mere figure of speech. I have no doubt many of the rest have already silently taken it back.

Read his admirable answers to Mason and the others. How the contrast dwarfs and defeats them! On one side is half-brutish, half-timid questioning. On the other is truth, clear as lightning, crashing into their obscene temples. They are made to stand alongside Pilate, Gessler, and the Inquisition.

How ineffectual their words and actions are! And what a void their silence is! They are only helpless tools in this great work. It was no human power that gathered them around this preacher.

What have Massachusetts and the North sent a few sane representatives to Congress for in recent years? To declare, with real effect, what kind of sentiments? Put all their speeches together and boil them down, and they still do not match the few casual remarks of crazy John Brown on the floor of the engine-house at Harper’s Ferry. They lack his manly directness, his force, and his simple truth. The speakers themselves would probably admit it.

This is the man you are about to hang, sending him to the other world, though not to represent you there. No, he was not our representative in any sense. He was too fine an example of a man to represent people like us. Who, then, were his constituents? If you read his words with understanding, you will find out.

His speech has no idle eloquence. It is not a speech made to order, nor a maiden speech of the kind a new congressman delivers, and it pays no compliments to the oppressor. Truth inspired it, and earnestness polished his sentences. He could afford to lose his Sharps rifles as long as he kept his power of speech. That was a Sharps rifle of infinitely surer aim and longer range.

And the New York Herald prints the conversation word for word! It does not realize what undying words it is carrying.

I have no respect for the insight of anyone who can read the report of that conversation and still call its central figure insane. It rings with a sanity saner than ordinary discipline, ordinary habits of life, or an ordinary constitution can secure. 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.”

A few people talk about his vindictive spirit while they really admire his heroism. They have no test for recognizing a noble man. They lack the amalgam, like the mercury that combines with pure gold, that could join with his pure gold. Instead, they mix their own dross, their own worthless impurities, into it.

It is a relief to turn from these slanders to the testimony of his jailers and hangmen, who are more truthful, though frightened. Governor Wise speaks of him far more justly and appreciatively than any Northern editor, politician, or public figure I happen to have heard. I know you can bear to hear him again on this subject. He 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. He is a fanatic, vain and garrulous” (I leave that part to Mr. Wise), “but firm, truthful, and intelligent. His men, too, who survive, are like him.…

“Colonel Washington says that he 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 the slaveholder has learned to respect!

Mr. Vallandigham’s testimony is less valuable, but it says the same thing: “it is vain to underrate either the man or his conspiracy.… He is the farthest possible remove from the ordinary ruffian, fanatic, or madman.”

“All is quiet at Harper’s Ferry,” the newspapers report. But what kind of calm follows when the law and the slaveholder win? I regard this event as a touchstone, a test designed to reveal with glaring clarity the true character of this government. We needed this help to see it by the light of history. The government needed to see itself.

When a government puts its strength on the side of injustice, as ours does to maintain slavery and to kill those who would free the slave, it shows itself to be mere brute force, or worse, a demonic force. It is the head of the Plug Uglies, the street gang. It is clearer than ever that tyranny rules. I see this government effectively allied with France and Austria in oppressing mankind.

There sits a tyrant holding four million slaves in chains. Here comes their heroic liberator. This thoroughly hypocritical and diabolical government looks up from its seat on top of the gasping four million and asks, with a pretense of innocence, “Why do you attack me? Am I not an honest man? Stop agitating on this subject, or I will make a slave of you too, or else hang you.”

We talk about representative government. But what a monster of a government it is when the noblest faculties of the mind, and the whole heart, go unrepresented. It is like a half-human tiger or ox stalking across the earth with its heart cut out and the top of its brain shot away. Heroes have fought well on their stumps after their legs were shot off, but I have never heard of any good done by a government like that.

The only government I recognize is the power that establishes justice in the land, never the one that establishes injustice. It makes no difference how few lead it or how small its army is. What are we to think of a government whose enemies are all the truly brave and just men in the land, standing between it and the people it oppresses? It is a government that claims to be Christian and crucifies a million Christs every day!

Treason! Where does such treason begin? I cannot help thinking of you governments as you deserve. Can you dry up the springs of thought? When high treason means resisting tyranny here on earth, it originates with, and is first committed by, the power that makes man and forever remakes him.

When you have caught and hanged all these human rebels, you have achieved nothing but your own guilt, because you have not struck at the source. You presume to fight an enemy at whom West Point cadets and rifled cannon cannot aim. Can all the skill of the cannon-maker persuade matter to turn against its maker? Is the shape the founder thinks he casts it into more fundamental than the nature of the metal, and of the founder himself?

The United States holds a coffle of four million slaves, a chained gang like those driven to market. The country is determined to keep them in that condition, and Massachusetts is one of the allied overseers who prevent their escape. Not all the people of Massachusetts are like this, but those who rule and are obeyed here are.

It was Massachusetts, as well as Virginia, that put down this insurrection at Harper’s Ferry. She sent the marines there, and she will have to pay the penalty for her sin.

Suppose there is a society in this state that, out of its own pocket and generosity, saves every fugitive slave who runs to us and protects our Black fellow citizens, leaving all other work to the so-called government. Isn’t that government quickly losing its job and becoming contemptible to mankind?

If private citizens must perform the duties of government, protecting the weak and dispensing justice, then the government becomes only a hired hand or clerk, doing menial or unimportant chores. A government whose existence requires a Vigilant Committee is, of course, only the shadow of a government.

What would we think even of an oriental qadi, a Muslim judge, if a Vigilant Committee worked in secret behind him? Yet that describes our Northern States in general: each has its Vigilant Committee. To some extent, these crazy governments recognize and accept the arrangement. In effect they say, “We’ll be glad to work for you on these terms. Just don’t make any noise about it.”

So the government, its salary guaranteed, withdraws into the back shop, taking the Constitution with it, and spends most of its labor repairing that. When I sometimes hear it at work as I pass by, it reminds me, at best, of farmers who earn a little extra in winter by taking up barrel-making. And what kind of spirit is their barrel made to hold?

These men speculate in stocks and bore tunnels through mountains, but they are not competent to lay out even a decent highway. The only free road, the Underground Railroad, is owned and run by the Vigilant Committee. Its members have tunnelled 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 and is caught by one that can hold it.

I hear many people condemn these men because there were so few of them. When were the good and the brave ever a majority? Would you have had him wait until then, until you and I came over to his side? The very fact that he had no mob or troop of hired men around him would alone set him apart from ordinary heroes.

His company was small because few could be found worthy to pass inspection. Each man who laid down his life there for the poor and oppressed was hand-picked, chosen out of many thousands, if not millions. Each was, apparently, a man of principle, rare courage, and devoted humanity, ready to sacrifice his life at any moment for the good of his fellow man.

It may be doubted whether there were as many more men equal to them in these qualities in the whole country. I speak of his followers only, for their leader no doubt searched the land far and wide, trying to enlarge his troop. These men alone were ready to step between the oppressor and the oppressed.

Surely they were the very best men you could choose to hang. That was the greatest compliment this country could pay them. They were ripe for her gallows. She has been trying for a long time, and she has hanged a good many, but she never found the right one before.

I think of him, his six sons, and his son-in-law, not to list the others, all enlisted for this fight. They went to work coolly, reverently, and humanely, for months if not years. They slept and woke with this purpose and carried the thought through summer and winter. They expected no reward but a good conscience, while almost all America stood lined up on the other side. I say again that it affects me as a sublime spectacle.

Suppose he had had a newspaper advocating “his cause,” an “organ,” as the phrase goes, droning the same old tune monotonously and tiresomely and then passing round the hat. That would have been fatal to his effectiveness. If he had acted in any way that let the government leave him alone, he might have been suspected.

What set him apart from every reformer of the day that I know was this: either the tyrant had to give way to him, or he to the tyrant.

It was his distinctive doctrine that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder in order to rescue the slave. I agree with him. People who are constantly shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of a slaveholder, but no one else does. Such people will be more shocked by his life than by his death.

I shall not be quick to call a man’s method mistaken if it frees the slave fastest. I speak for the slave when I say that I prefer Captain Brown’s philanthropy to the kind that neither shoots me nor frees me.

In any case, I do not think it is quite sane to spend one’s whole life talking or writing about this subject unless one is continually inspired, and I have not done so. A man may have other business to attend to.

I do not wish to kill or to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which I could not avoid either. We preserve the so-called peace of our community every day through acts of petty violence. Look at the policeman’s club and handcuffs! Look at the jail! Look at the gallows! Look at the regiment’s chaplain!

We are only hoping to live safely on the outskirts of this temporary army. So we defend ourselves and our henhouses, and we maintain slavery.

I know that most of my countrymen think the only righteous uses for Sharps rifles and revolvers are fighting duels when other nations insult us, hunting Indians, shooting fugitive slaves, and the like. I think that for once the Sharps rifles and the revolvers were used in a righteous cause. The tools were in the hands of someone who knew how to use them.

The same indignation that is said to have cleared the temple once will clear it again. The question is not the weapon, but the spirit in which you use it. No man has yet appeared in America who loved his fellow man so well or treated him so tenderly. He lived for him. He took up his life and he laid it down for him.

What sort of violence is it that is encouraged not by soldiers but by peaceable citizens, not so much by laymen as by ministers of the gospel, not so much by the fighting sects as by the Quakers, and not so much by Quaker men as by Quaker women?

This event reminds me that there is such a thing as death, and that a man can actually die. It seems as if no one had ever died in America before, because in order to die, you must first have lived. I don’t believe in the hearses, the palls, and the funerals they have held. There was no death in those cases, because there had been no life.

Those people merely rotted or wore away, much as they had rotted and dragged along while alive. No temple veil was torn in two; only a hole was dug somewhere. Let the dead bury their dead. The best of them simply ran down like a clock. Franklin and Washington were let off without dying. They were just missing one day.

I hear many people pretend that they are going to die, or that they have already died, for all I know. Nonsense! I defy them to do it. They don’t have enough life in them. They will dissolve like fungi and keep a hundred eulogists busy mopping up the spot where they left off. Only half a dozen or so people have truly died since the world began.

Do you think that you are going to die, sir? No! There’s no hope for you. You haven’t learned your lesson yet. You’ll have to stay after school. We make a needless fuss about capital punishment, about taking lives, when there is no life to take.

Memento mori! “Remember that you must die.” We do not understand that sublime sentence, which some worthy person once had carved on his gravestone. We have read it in a groveling, whimpering sense. We have entirely forgotten how to die.

But make sure that you do die, all the same. Do your work, and finish it. If you know how to begin, you will know when to end.

These men, in teaching us how to die, have also taught us how to live. If this man’s actions and words do not spark a revival, that will be the harshest possible satire on whatever actions and words do. It is the best news America has ever heard.

It has already quickened the feeble pulse of the North. It has filled her veins and heart with more generous blood than any number of years of so-called commercial and political prosperity could. How many a man who was recently thinking of suicide now has something to live for!

One writer says that Brown’s peculiar monomania made him “dreaded by the Missourians as a supernatural being.” Of course it did. A hero among us cowards is always dreaded in that way. He is exactly that: someone who shows himself superior to 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 his insanity is proven by his belief that he was appointed to do the work he did, and by the fact that he never doubted himself for a moment! They talk as if no one in these times could possibly be “divinely appointed” to do any work at all. They talk as if vows and religion no longer had anything to do with anyone’s daily work.

They talk as if the agent who abolishes slavery could only be someone appointed by the President or by some political party. They talk as if a man’s death were a failure, and his continued life, whatever its character, were a success.

Consider the cause to which this man devoted himself, and how religiously he did so. Then consider the causes to which his judges, and all who condemn him so angrily and so glibly, devote themselves. When I compare the two, I see that they are as far apart as heaven and earth.

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

Whose safety requires that Captain Brown be hanged? Is his hanging essential to any Northern man? Is there no choice but to throw these men, too, to the Minotaur, the devouring monster of the old myth? If you do not want it, say so plainly. While these things are being done, beauty stands veiled, and music is a screeching lie.

Think of him, and of his rare qualities! He is the kind of man it takes ages to make and ages to understand. He is no mock hero and no representative of any party. He is a man such as the sun may never rise on again in this darkened land.

The costliest material, the finest adamant, went into his making. He was sent to be the redeemer of those in captivity, and the only use you can find for him is to hang him at the end of a rope! You who claim to care about Christ crucified, consider what you are about to do to the man who offered himself as the savior of four million people.

Any man knows when he is justified, and all the clever minds in the world cannot enlighten him on that point. The murderer always knows that he is justly punished. But when a government takes a man’s life without the consent of his conscience, it is an audacious government, and it is taking a step toward its own dissolution.

Is it not possible for an individual to be right and a government wrong? Are laws to be enforced simply because they were made, or because any number of people have declared them good, even when they are not good? Must a man be a tool to carry out a deed that his better nature disapproves? Do lawmakers intend that good men should ever be hanged?

Are judges to interpret the law by its letter and not by its spirit? What right do you have to make a pact with yourself to act one way or another against the light within you? Is it for you to make up your mind, to settle on any resolution whatever, rather than accept the convictions that are forced upon you, and that always pass your understanding?

I do not believe in lawyers, or in their way of attacking or defending a man. In that approach you come down to meet the judge on his own ground. Yet in cases of the highest importance, it makes no difference whether a man breaks a human law or not. Let lawyers decide trivial cases. Businessmen can settle those among themselves.

If lawyers were the interpreters of the everlasting laws that rightfully bind humanity, that would be another matter. But here is a counterfeiting law factory, standing half in a slave land and half in a free one! What kind of laws for free men can you expect from that?

I am here to plead his cause with you. I plead not for his life but for his character, his immortal life. That makes it entirely your cause, and not his 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 that does not lack its links. He is no longer Old Brown; he is an Angel of Light.

I see now that it was necessary for the bravest and most humane man in the whole country to be hanged. Perhaps he saw it himself. I almost fear that I may still hear of his rescue, because I doubt that a longer life, or any life at all, could do as much good as his death.

“Misguided!” “Garrulous!” “Insane!” “Vindictive!” So you write from your easy chairs. And this is how he, wounded, answers from the floor of the Armory, as clear as a cloudless sky and as true as the voice of nature: “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, speaking to his captors as they 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 anyone to interfere with you so far as to free those you willfully and wickedly hold in bondage.”

And speaking of his movement: “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 don’t recognize your own Testament 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, 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.”

I foresee a time when painters will paint that scene and will no longer need to go to Rome for a subject. Poets will sing it, and historians will record it. Alongside the Landing of the Pilgrims and the Declaration of Independence, it will adorn some future national gallery, at least once the present form of slavery no longer exists here. Then we will be free to weep for Captain Brown. Then, and not until then, we will take our revenge.

Walking

First published in The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862.

I want to speak a word for nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as opposed to a freedom and culture that are merely civil. I want to regard man as an inhabitant of nature, a part and parcel of it, rather than as a member of society.

I want to make an extreme statement, if that is how I can make an emphatic one. There are already plenty of champions of civilization. The minister, the school committee, and every one of you will take care of that.

In the course of my life I have met only one or two people who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks. They had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering. That word has a beautiful origin. It is said to come “from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la Sainte Terre,” to the Holy Land.

Children would then cry out, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. Those who never actually go to the Holy Land on their walks, as they claim to, are indeed just idlers and vagabonds. But those who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, the sense I mean.

Some, however, derive the word from sans terre, “without land,” or without a home. In the good sense, that would mean having no particular home, but being equally at home everywhere. This is the secret of successful sauntering.

The person who sits in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all. The saunterer in the good sense is no more a vagrant than a winding river, which is all the while diligently seeking the shortest route to the sea.

Still, I prefer the first derivation, which is in fact the more probable one. Every walk is a kind of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit within us, urging us to go out and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.

It is true that nowadays we are only fainthearted crusaders, even those of us who walk. We undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our expeditions are mere tours that circle back in the evening to the old hearth we set out from. Half the walk is just retracing our steps.

We should set out on even the shortest walk, perhaps, in a spirit of undying adventure, never to return, ready to send back only our embalmed hearts as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, brother and sister, wife and child and friends, and never see them again, and if you have paid your debts, made your will, settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.

To come down to my own experience: my companion and I (for I sometimes have a companion) enjoy imagining ourselves knights of a new order, or rather an old one. We are not Equestrians or Chevaliers, not Ritters or Riders, but Walkers, a still more ancient and honorable class, I trust.

The chivalric and heroic spirit that once belonged to the Rider now seems to reside in the Walker, or perhaps to have sunk down into him. He is not the Knight Errant but the Walker Errant. He is a kind of fourth estate, outside Church, State, and People.

We have felt that we were nearly the only ones around here who practiced this noble art. To tell the truth, though, if we can believe their own claims, most of my townsmen would gladly walk sometimes as I do, but they cannot. No wealth can buy the leisure, freedom, and independence that are the capital of this profession.

It comes only by the grace of God. Becoming a walker requires a direct dispensation from Heaven. You must be born into the family of the Walkers. Ambulator nascitur, non fit: a walker is born, not made.

Some of my townsmen, it is true, can remember walks they took ten years ago, and have described them to me. On those walks they were blessed enough to lose themselves in the woods for half an hour. But I know very well that they have kept to the highway ever since, whatever claims they make to belong to this select class.

No doubt they were lifted up for a moment, as if by the memory of an earlier state of existence, when even they were foresters and outlaws.

“When he came to the green wood,
On a merry morning,
There he heard the little notes
Of birds merrily singing.

“It is long ago,” said Robin,
“That I was last here;
I’d like a little while to shoot
At the dun-colored deer.”

I think that I cannot keep my health and spirits unless I spend at least four hours a day, and usually more, sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, completely free of all worldly engagements. You may safely say, “A penny for your thoughts,” or a thousand pounds.

Sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all morning but all afternoon too. So many of them sit with their legs crossed, as if legs were made to sit on and not to stand or walk on. When I think of this, I feel they deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago.

I cannot stay in my room for a single day without gathering some rust. Sometimes I have slipped out for a walk at the eleventh hour, four o’clock in the afternoon. By then it was too late to redeem the day, and the shadows of night were already beginning to mingle with the daylight. On those occasions I have felt as if I had committed some sin that needed to be atoned for.

So I confess that I am astonished at the endurance of my neighbors, to say nothing of their moral numbness. They confine themselves to shops and offices all day, for weeks and months, and even for years almost on end. I do not know what they are made of. They sit there at three o’clock in the afternoon as if it were three o’clock in the morning.

Bonaparte may talk of three-o’clock-in-the-morning courage. It is nothing compared with the courage it takes to sit down cheerfully at this hour of the afternoon, facing the self you have known all morning. Such a person is besieging and starving out a garrison to which he is bound by the strongest ties of sympathy.

I wonder that at about this time, say between four and five in the afternoon, too late for the morning papers and too early for the evening ones, there is no general explosion heard up and down the street. Such a blast would scatter a whole legion of stale, house-bred notions and whims to the four winds for an airing, and so the evil would cure itself.

How women, who are confined to the house even more than men, stand it I do not know. I have reason to suspect that most of them do not stand it at all.

Early on a summer afternoon, we are sometimes shaking the dust of the village from the hems of our garments, hurrying past those houses with purely Doric or Gothic fronts. They have such an air of repose about them that my companion whispers that their occupants have probably all gone to bed by now.

At those moments I appreciate the beauty and glory of architecture. Architecture itself never turns in for the night. It stands forever outside and upright, keeping watch over the sleepers.

No doubt temperament, and above all age, have a good deal to do with it. As a man grows older, his ability to sit still and follow indoor occupations increases. His habits become those of the evening as the evening of his life approaches. At last he comes out only just before sundown, and gets all the walking he needs in half an hour.

But the walking I mean has nothing to do with “taking exercise,” as it is called. It is not like the sick taking medicine at set hours, or like swinging dumbbells or chairs. It is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day.

If you want exercise, go in search of the springs of life. Think of a man swinging dumbbells for his health, while those springs are bubbling up in far-off pastures that he never seeks!

Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only animal that ruminates while walking, chewing its cud and mulling things over as it goes. When a traveler asked Wordsworth’s servant to show him her master’s study, she answered, “Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.”

Living much out of doors, in the sun and wind, will no doubt produce a certain roughness of character. It will cause a thicker skin to grow over some of the finer qualities of our nature, just as it does on the face and hands. In the same way, hard manual labor robs the hands of some of their delicacy of touch.

Staying in the house, on the other hand, may produce softness and smoothness, not to say thinness of skin. Along with this comes an increased sensitivity to certain impressions. Perhaps we would be more open to some influences important to our intellectual and moral growth if the sun had shone and the wind had blown on us a little less. No doubt it is a delicate matter to get the right proportion of thick skin and thin.

But I think that roughness is a scurf that will fall off quickly enough. The natural remedy lies in the proportion that night bears to day, winter to summer, and thought to experience. Our thoughts will have all the more air and sunshine in them.

The callused palms of the laborer know finer textures of self-respect and heroism, whose touch thrills the heart, than the languid fingers of idleness ever do. It is mere sentimentality that lies in bed by day and thinks itself pure and white, far from the tan and callus of experience.

When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods. What would become of us if we walked only in a garden or a promenade? Even some schools of philosophers felt the need to bring the woods to themselves, since they did not go to the woods. “They planted groves and walks of plane trees,” where they took subdiales ambulationes, or open-air walks, in porticoes open to the sky.

Of course it is useless to point our steps toward the woods if they do not actually carry us there. I am alarmed when I have walked a mile into the woods with my body without arriving there in spirit. On my afternoon walk I would gladly forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society.

But sometimes I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some piece of work keeps running through my head, and I am not where my body is. I am out of my senses. On my walks I want to return to my senses. What business do I have in the woods if I am thinking of something outside the woods?

I suspect myself, and cannot help shuddering, when I find myself caught up in this way, even in what are called good works. For this can happen too.

My neighborhood offers many good walks. For many years I have walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days at a stretch, yet I have not used them up. An entirely new view is a great happiness, and I can still find one any afternoon. Two or three hours of walking will take me to as strange a country as I ever expect to see.

A single farmhouse I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the realm of the King of Dahomey. There is in fact a kind of harmony between the possibilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles’ radius, the limits of an afternoon walk, and the seventy years of a human life. The landscape will never become entirely familiar to you.

Nowadays almost all of man’s so-called improvements, such as building houses and cutting down the forest and every large tree, simply disfigure the landscape. They make it more and more tame and cheap. I wish for a people who would begin by burning the fences and leaving the forest standing!

I once saw the fences half burned up, their ends lost in the middle of the prairie. Some worldly miser was there with a surveyor, looking after his boundaries. Heaven had come to pass all around him, but he did not see the angels going to and fro. He was looking for an old posthole in the middle of paradise.

I looked again and saw him standing in the middle of a boggy fen, dark as the river Styx, surrounded by devils. He had found his boundaries without a doubt: three little stones where a stake had once been driven. Looking closer, I saw that the Prince of Darkness was his surveyor.

I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, or any number of miles starting from my own door, without passing a single house. I need not cross a road except where the fox and the mink cross it. I go first along the river, then the brook, then the meadow and the edge of the woods. There are square miles near me with no inhabitant at all.

From many a hill I can see civilization and human dwellings in the distance. The farmers and their works are hardly more noticeable than woodchucks and their burrows. Man and his affairs are there: church, state, and school, trade and commerce, manufacturing and agriculture, and even politics, the most alarming of them all. I am pleased to see how little space they take up in the landscape.

Politics is only a narrow field, and that still narrower highway over there leads to it. I sometimes direct the traveler that way. If you want to reach the political world, follow the main road. Follow that man driving to market, keep his dust in your eyes, and it will lead you straight there. Politics, too, has merely its own place and does not fill all space.

I leave it behind as I would pass from a bean field into the forest, and it is forgotten. In half an hour I can walk to some part of the earth’s surface where no one stands from one year’s end to the next. Consequently there is no politics there, for politics is only like a man’s cigar smoke.

The village is the place the roads lead to. It is a kind of widening of the highway, as a lake is a widening of a river. It is the body, and the roads are its arms and legs. It is a “trivial” or “quadrivial” place, where three or four ways meet, the thoroughfare and the inn of travelers.

The word comes from the Latin villa. The Roman scholar Varro derives villa, along with via, a way, or in older forms ved and vella, from veho, to carry, because the villa is the place to and from which things are carried. People who earned their living by hauling goods were said vellaturam facere, to do the carrying trade.

From the same source, apparently, come the Latin word vilis and our word “vile,” and also “villain.” This suggests the kind of degeneracy villagers are prone to. They are worn down by the traffic that passes by and over them, without ever traveling themselves.

Some people do not walk at all. Others walk on the highways. A few walk across the fields. Roads are made for horses and men of business. I travel on them relatively little, because I am in no hurry to reach any tavern, grocery, livery stable, or railway depot they lead to. I am a good horse for traveling, but not by choice a road horse.

The landscape painter uses human figures to mark where a road runs. He would not use mine that way. I walk out into a nature like the one the old prophets and poets walked in: Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer.

You may call it America, but it is not America. Neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest discovered it. There is a truer account of it in mythology than in any so-called history of America that I have seen.

However, there are a few old roads that may still be walked with profit, as if they led somewhere now that they are nearly abandoned. There is the Old Marlborough Road, which I think does not go to Marlborough anymore, unless Marlborough is wherever it takes me. I am bolder about mentioning it here because I assume there are one or two such 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,
Except Elisha Dugan—
O man of wild habits,
Partridges and rabbits,
Who have no cares
Except to set snares,
Who live 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 are
Who enter in,
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 guideposts of stone,
But travelers 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,
Gourgas or Lee,
Clark or Darby?
They’re a great endeavor
To be something forever;
Blank tablets of stone,
Where a traveler might groan,
And in one sentence
Carve 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.

At present, in this area, the best part of the land is not private property. The landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys a relative freedom.

But perhaps the day will come when the land is divided into so-called pleasure-grounds, where a few people will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure. Fences will multiply. Mantraps and other devices will be invented to keep people on the public road, and walking over the surface of God’s earth will be treated as trespassing on some gentleman’s property.

To enjoy something exclusively is usually to shut yourself out from truly enjoying it. So let us make good use of our opportunities before the evil days come.

What makes it so hard, sometimes, to decide where we will walk? I believe there is a subtle magnetism in nature that will guide us correctly if we yield to it without thinking about it. It matters which way we walk. There is a right way, but carelessness and stupidity make us very likely to take the wrong one.

We would like to take a walk through this actual world that we have never yet taken, one that perfectly symbolizes the path we love to travel in the inner, ideal world. No doubt we sometimes find it hard to choose a direction because that path does not yet exist clearly in our minds.

When I leave the house for a walk, not yet sure where I will go, I let my instinct decide for me. Strange and whimsical as it may seem, I find that I finally and inevitably settle on the southwest, heading toward some particular wood, meadow, abandoned pasture, or hill in that direction.

Like a compass needle, mine is slow to settle. It varies a few degrees and does not always point due southwest, it is true, and it has good authority for this variation. But it always settles somewhere between west and south-southwest. The future lies that way for me, and the earth on that side seems richer and less used up.

If you traced the boundary of my walks, it would not be a circle but a parabola. More exactly, it would resemble one of those comet orbits once thought to be curves that never return. In my case the curve opens toward the west, and my house occupies the place of the sun.

Sometimes I turn around and around, undecided, for a quarter of an hour, until I decide for the thousandth time that I will walk southwest or west. I go east only when forced to, but I go west freely. No business takes me there.

I find it hard to believe that I will find beautiful landscapes, or enough wildness and freedom, behind the eastern horizon. A walk in that direction does not excite me. But I believe that the forest I see on the western horizon stretches unbroken toward the setting sun, with no towns or cities in it important enough to disturb me.

Wherever I live, the city is on one side and the wilderness on the other, and I am always leaving the city further behind and withdrawing into the wilderness. I would not put so much weight on this fact if I did not believe that something like it is the prevailing tendency of my fellow Americans.

I must walk toward Oregon, not toward Europe. That is the way the nation is moving, and I might say that humankind progresses from east to west.

In the last few years we have seen a migration toward the southeast, in the settlement of Australia. But this strikes us as a backward movement. Judging by the moral and physical character of the first generation of Australians, it has not yet proved a successful experiment.

The eastern Tartars think there is nothing west beyond Tibet. “The world ends there,” they say. “Beyond there is nothing but a shoreless sea.” Where they live, it is East through and through.

We go east to experience history and to study works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the human race. We go west as if into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure.

The Atlantic is a stream of Lethe, the river of forgetfulness in Greek myth. In crossing it, we have had a chance to forget the Old World and its institutions.

If we do not succeed this time, there may be one more chance left for the human race before it reaches the banks of the Styx, the river of the dead. That last chance lies in the Lethe of the Pacific, which is three times as wide.

I do not know how significant it is, or how much it shows my own peculiarity, that an individual should agree, even in his smallest walk, with the general movement of the race. But I do know that something like a migratory instinct affects both nations and individuals, either constantly or from time to time.

It resembles the migratory instinct in birds and four-footed animals. In some cases this instinct is known to have affected squirrels, driving them into a general and mysterious movement. Some say they were seen crossing the widest rivers, each on its own chip of wood with its tail raised as a sail, and bridging narrower streams with their dead.

It also resembles the frenzy that seizes domestic cattle in the spring, which people attribute to a worm in their tails.

Not a flock of wild geese honks over our town without unsettling, to some degree, the value of real estate here. If I were a broker, I would probably take that disturbance into account.

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

Every sunset I see fills me with the desire to go to a West as distant and as beautiful as the one into which the sun sets. He seems to migrate west every day, tempting us to follow him. He is the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow.

All night we dream of the mountain ridges on the horizon that his rays last turned to gold, though they may be nothing but vapor.

The island of Atlantis, and the islands and gardens of the Hesperides, a kind of paradise on earth, seem to have been the Great West of the ancients, wrapped in mystery and poetry. Who, looking into the sunset sky, has not seen in imagination the gardens of the Hesperides and the source of all those fables?

Columbus felt the westward pull more strongly than anyone before him. He obeyed it and found a New World for Castile and León. The herd of men in those days smelled fresh pastures from far away.

“And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,
And now was dropped into the western bay;
At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue;
Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.”

Where on the globe can one find an area as large as the one occupied by most of our states that is so fertile, so rich and varied in what it produces, and at the same time so livable for Europeans?

Michaux, who knew only part of these states, says 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.

Humboldt came to America to fulfill his youthful dreams of tropical vegetation. He saw it at its most perfect in the primitive forests of the Amazon, the most gigantic wilderness on earth, which he has described so eloquently.

The geographer Guyot, himself a European, goes further than I am ready to follow him. But I do follow him 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.”

When he has exhausted the rich soil of Europe and renewed his strength, he “then recommences his adventurous career westward as in the earliest ages.” So much for Guyot.

When this western impulse met the barrier of the Atlantic, the commerce and enterprise of modern times sprang from the collision.

The younger Michaux, in his Travels West of the Alleghanies in 1802, says that the common question in the newly settled 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 obsolete Latin word, I might say, Ex Oriente lux; ex Occidente frux. From the East, light; from the West, fruit.

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 intenser, the moon looks larger, the stars are brighter, the thunder is louder, the lightning is vivider, the wind is stronger, the rain is heavier, the mountains are higher, the rivers longer, the forests bigger, the plains broader.”

This statement will at least serve as a counterweight to Buffon’s account of this part of the world and what it produces.

Linnaeus said long ago, “Nescio quae facies laeta, glabra plantis Americanis: I know not what there is of joyous and smooth in the aspect of American plants.”

I think that in this country there are no Africanae bestiae, or at most very few. That was the Romans’ name for African beasts, the dangerous wild animals of that continent. In this respect, too, America is especially suited 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 carried off by tigers every year. But in North America a traveler can lie down in the woods at night almost anywhere without fear of wild beasts.

These are encouraging testimonies. If the moon looks larger here than in Europe, the sun probably looks larger too. If the heavens of America appear infinitely higher and the stars brighter, I trust that these facts symbolize the height to which the philosophy, poetry, and religion of its people may one day rise.

Perhaps in time the immaterial heaven will appear just as much higher to the American mind, and the hints and intimations that shine in it like stars will appear just as much brighter.

I believe that climate does act on people in this way, just as there is something in mountain air that feeds the spirit and inspires it. Will not people grow to greater perfection here, intellectually as well as physically, under these influences? Or does it not matter how many foggy days there are in a person’s life?

I trust that we will become more imaginative. I trust that our thoughts will be clearer, fresher, and more ethereal, like our sky, and that our understanding will be more comprehensive and broader, like our plains.

I trust that our intellect generally will be on a grander scale, like our thunder and lightning, our rivers, mountains, and forests, and that our hearts will even match our inland seas in breadth, depth, and grandeur.

Perhaps the traveler will see something in our very faces, he knows not what, that is laeta and glabra, joyous and serene. Otherwise, to what end does the world go on, and why was America discovered?

To Americans I hardly need to say:

“Westward the star of empire takes its way.”

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

Our sympathies in Massachusetts are not limited 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, just as among the Scandinavians the younger sons took to the sea as their inheritance.

It is too late to be studying Hebrew. It is more important to understand even the slang of today.

Some months ago I went to see a panorama of the Rhine. It was like a dream of the Middle Ages. I floated down its historic stream in something more than imagination, under bridges built by the Romans and repaired by later heroes, past cities and castles whose very names were music to my ears, each of them the subject of a legend.

There were Ehrenbreitstein, Rolandseck, and Coblentz, which I knew only from history. It was the ruins that interested me most. From the river’s waters and its vine-covered hills and valleys there seemed to rise a hushed music, like the sound of Crusaders departing for the Holy Land.

I floated along under a spell of enchantment, as if I had been carried back to an heroic age and was breathing an atmosphere of chivalry.

Soon afterward, I went to see a panorama of the Mississippi. As I worked my way up the river in the light of the present day, I saw the steamboats stopping to take on wood for fuel, and I counted the cities rising along its banks. I looked at the fresh ruins of Nauvoo, and I watched Indians moving west across the stream.

Before, I had looked up the Moselle. Now I looked up the Ohio and the Missouri, and heard the legends of Dubuque and of Wenona’s Cliff. Throughout, I was thinking more of the future than of the past or the present. I saw that this was a Rhine of a different kind.

Here the foundations of the castles were still to be laid, and the famous bridges were still to be built across the river. I felt that this was the heroic age itself, though we do not recognize it, because the hero is usually the simplest and most obscure of men.

The West I speak of is only another name for the Wild. What I have been preparing to say is this: in Wildness is the preservation of the world. Every tree sends out its fibers in search of the Wild. Cities import it at any price. People plough and sail for it. From the forest and the wilderness come the tonics and barks that strengthen mankind.

Our ancestors were savages. The story of Romulus and Remus being nursed by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every state that has risen to greatness drew their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source. The children of the Roman Empire were not nursed by the wolf, and that is why they were conquered and displaced by the children of the Northern forests, who were.

I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows. We need an infusion of hemlock-spruce or arborvitae in our tea. There is a difference between eating and drinking for strength and doing so out of mere gluttony.

The Hottentots eagerly eat the marrow of the koodoo and other antelopes raw, as a matter of course. Some of our Northern Indians eat the marrow of the Arctic reindeer raw, along with various other parts, including the tips of the antlers while they are still soft. In this, perhaps, they have gotten ahead of the cooks of Paris. They get what usually goes to feed the fire.

This is probably better than stall-fed beef and slaughterhouse pork for making a man. Give me a wildness whose gaze no civilization can endure, as if we lived on the marrow of koodoos eaten raw.

There are some intervals bordering on the song of the wood thrush to which I would migrate: wild lands where no settler has yet squatted. I think I am already adapted to their climate.

The African hunter Cummings tells us that the skin of the eland, like that of most other antelopes just killed, gives off the most delicious scent of trees and grass. I would have every man be so much like a wild antelope, so completely a part of nature, that his very body would sweetly announce his presence to our senses and remind us of the parts of nature he most frequents.

I feel no urge to mock when a trapper’s coat smells even of muskrat. To me it is a sweeter scent than the one that usually rises from the clothes of a merchant or a scholar. When I go into their wardrobes and handle their garments, they remind me of no grassy plains or flowery meadows they have visited. They remind me instead of dusty merchants’ exchanges and libraries.

A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and perhaps olive is a more fitting color than white for a man who lives in the woods. “The pale white man!” I do not wonder that the African pitied him. Darwin the naturalist 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.”

Ben Jonson exclaims:

“How near to good is what is fair!”

So I would say:

How near to good is what is wild!

Life goes together with wildness. What is most alive is wildest. Because it has not yet been subdued by man, its presence refreshes him. Someone who pressed forward constantly and never rested from his labors, who grew quickly and made endless 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 fallen trunks of primeval forest trees.

For me, hope and the future lie not in lawns and cultivated fields, nor in towns and cities, but in impenetrable, quaking swamps. In the past, when I have analyzed my liking for some farm I was thinking of buying, I have often found that what attracted me was only a few square rods of impermeable, bottomless bog, a natural sink in one corner of it. That was the jewel that dazzled me.

I draw more of my sustenance from the swamps around my native town than from the cultivated gardens in the village. To my eyes, no flower beds are richer than the dense growths of dwarf andromeda (Cassandra calyculata) that cover these tender places on the earth’s surface.

Botany can do no more than tell me the names of the shrubs that grow there: the high-blueberry, panicled andromeda, lamb-kill, azalea, and rhodora, all standing in the quaking sphagnum moss.

I often think I would like my house to face this mass of dull red bushes. I would leave out other flower plots and borders, transplanted spruce and trimmed boxwood, even gravel walks. I would have this fertile spot under my windows, rather than a few imported wheelbarrow-loads of soil spread only to cover the sand thrown out when the cellar was dug.

Why not put my house, my parlor, behind this plot, instead of behind that meager collection of curiosities, that poor excuse for nature and art, which I call my front yard? A front yard is an effort to tidy up and look respectable once the carpenter and mason have left, and it is done as much for the passerby as for the person living inside.

Even the most tasteful front-yard fence never interested me. The most elaborate ornaments, acorn-tops or whatever else, soon bored and disgusted me. So bring your doorsills right up to the edge of the swamp, then, though it may not be the best place for a dry cellar, so that citizens have no way in on that side. Front yards are not made to walk in, but at most to walk through, and you could go in the back way.

Yes, though you may think me perverse: if I were offered the choice of living near the most beautiful garden human art ever devised, or near a dismal swamp, I would certainly choose the swamp. How futile, then, all your labors have been, citizens, as far as I am concerned!

My spirits rise without fail in proportion to the bleakness of my surroundings. Give me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness! In the desert, pure air and solitude make up for the lack of moisture and fertility.

The traveler Burton says of it: “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.”

Those who have traveled for a long time on the steppes of Tartary 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.”

When I want to restore myself, I seek out the darkest wood, the thickest and most endless swamp, the one a townsperson would find most dismal. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum, a holy of holies. There is the strength, the marrow, of nature. The wild wood covers untouched soil, and the same soil is good for both men and trees.

A man’s health requires as many acres of meadow within his view as his farm requires loads of muck. These are the strong meats he feeds on. A town is saved not more by the righteous people in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it.

Picture a township where one primeval forest waves overhead while another primeval forest rots below. Such a town is fit to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the ages to come. In such soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey.

Preserving wild animals generally means creating a forest for them to live in or retreat to. The same is true of man. A hundred years ago, bark peeled from our own woods was sold in our streets. In the very appearance of those primitive, rugged trees there was, I think, a tanning agent that hardened and strengthened the fibers of men’s thoughts.

Ah! I already shudder at these comparatively degenerate days in my native village, when you cannot gather a load of bark of good thickness, and we no longer produce tar and turpentine.

The civilized nations, Greece, Rome, and England, have been sustained by the primeval forests that rotted long ago where they stood. They survive as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture! Little can be expected of a nation once its vegetable mould is exhausted and it is forced to make fertilizer from the bones of its fathers.

In such a nation the poet survives merely on his own surplus fat, and the philosopher is brought down to his knees, down on his marrowbones.

It is said that the American’s task is “to work the virgin soil,” and that “agriculture here already assumes proportions unknown everywhere else.” I think the farmer displaces the Indian precisely because he reclaims the meadow, and so makes himself stronger and, in some respects, more natural.

The other day I was surveying a single straight line for a man, one hundred and thirty-two rods long, through a swamp. Over its entrance might have been written the words Dante read over the entrance to the infernal regions: “Leave all hope, ye that enter.” That is, all hope of ever getting out again. At one point I saw my employer actually up to his neck, swimming for his life in his own property, though it was still winter.

He had another similar swamp that I could not survey at all, because it was completely under water. Yet about a third swamp, which I surveyed from a distance, he told me, true to his instincts, that he would not part with it for any price, because of the mud it contained.

This man intends to dig a ditch around the whole of it within forty months, and so reclaim it by the magic of his spade. I mention him only as a representative of a whole class.

The weapons with which we have won our most important victories, the ones that ought to be handed down as heirlooms from father to son, are not the sword and the lance. They are the bush-whack, the turf-cutter, the spade, and the bog-hoe, rusted with the blood of many a meadow and grimy with the dust of many a hard-fought field.

The very winds blew the Indian’s cornfield into the meadow and pointed out the way, but he lacked the skill to follow it. He had no better tool for entrenching himself in the land than a clamshell. The farmer, however, is armed with plough and spade.

In literature, only the wild attracts us. Dullness is just another name for tameness. What delights us in Hamlet and the Iliad, in all the scriptures and mythologies, is their uncivilized, free, and wild thinking, which is not learned in the schools.

The wild duck is swifter and more beautiful than the tame one. In the same way, the wild thought, the mallard, is swifter and more beautiful as it flies above the marshes amid the falling dew.

A truly good book is as natural, and as unexpectedly and inexplicably beautiful and perfect, as a wild flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East.

Genius is a light that makes the darkness visible, like the flash of lightning that may even shatter the temple of knowledge itself. It is not a candle lit at the hearth of the human race, which grows pale in ordinary daylight.

English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets, including Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, and even Shakespeare, breathes no strain that is entirely fresh and, in this sense, wild. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, a reflection of Greece and Rome.

Its wilderness is a greenwood, and its wild man is a Robin Hood. There is plenty of warm affection for Nature in it, but not much of Nature herself. Its chronicles tell us when England’s wild animals became extinct, but not when the wild man in her did.

The science of Humboldt is one thing, and poetry is another. Despite all the discoveries of science and all the accumulated learning of mankind, the poet today has no advantage over Homer.

Where is the literature that gives expression to nature? He would be a poet who could press the winds and streams into his service and make them speak for him. He would fasten words to their original meanings, as farmers in spring drive back down the stakes that the frost has heaved up.

He would derive his words afresh each time he used them, transplanting them to his page with the earth still clinging to their roots. His words would be so true, fresh, and natural that they would seem to swell like buds as spring approaches, even while lying half-smothered between two musty pages in a library.

Yes, they would bloom and bear fruit there, each after its kind, year after year, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with the nature around them.

I know of no poetry I could quote that adequately expresses this longing for the Wild. Judged from this angle, even the best poetry is tame. I do not know where to find, in any literature ancient or modern, an account that satisfies me of even the nature that I myself know.

You will see that I am asking for something that no Augustan or Elizabethan age can give. In short, it is something no culture can give. Mythology comes nearer to it than anything else. Greek mythology, at least, is rooted in a far more fertile nature than English literature is.

Mythology is the crop the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted, before fancy and imagination were struck with blight. It still bears that crop wherever its original vigor remains undiminished.

All other literatures last only as long as the elms that shade our houses. Mythology is like the great dragon tree of the Western Isles, which is as old as mankind. Whether or not that tree lasts as long as mankind, mythology will, because the decay of other literatures becomes the soil in which it thrives.

The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine have already yielded their crop. It remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate, the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce.

Perhaps, after ages have passed and American liberty has become a fiction of the past, the poets of the world will draw inspiration from American mythology. To some extent, American liberty is already a fiction of the present.

Even the wildest dreams of wild men are no less true for failing to appeal to the sense most common among Englishmen and Americans today. Not every truth recommends itself to common sense. Nature has room for the wild clematis as well as for the cabbage.

Some expressions of truth look back and remember. Others are merely sensible, as people say. Still others look ahead and prophesy. Even some forms of disease may foretell forms of health.

Geologists have discovered that the serpents, griffins, flying dragons, and other fanciful decorations of heraldry have their originals in fossil species. These species died out before man was created. The heraldic figures therefore “indicate a faint and shadowy knowledge of a previous state of organic existence.”

The Hindus dreamed that the earth rested on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on a serpent. It may be an unimportant coincidence, but it is worth mentioning here that a fossil tortoise has recently been discovered in Asia that is large enough to support an elephant.

I admit that I am fond of these wild fancies, which go beyond the order of time and development. They are the most sublime recreation of the intellect. The partridge loves peas, but not the ones that go into the pot with her.

In short, all good things are wild and free. Consider a strain of music, whether it comes from an instrument or a human voice. The sound of a bugle on a summer night is one example. Its wildness reminds me of the cries of wild beasts in their native forests, and I say this without irony. It is as much of their wildness as I can understand.

Give me wild men for my friends and neighbors, not tame ones. The wildness of the savage is only a faint symbol of the awesome fierceness with which good men and lovers meet.

I love even to see domestic animals reassert their native rights. I welcome any sign that they have not entirely lost their original wild habits and vigor.

My neighbor’s cow, for instance, breaks out of her pasture early in spring and boldly swims the river. The river is a cold, gray current, twenty-five or thirty rods wide and swollen with melted snow. It is the buffalo crossing the Mississippi.

This feat gives the herd, already dignified, some added dignity in my eyes. The seeds of instinct survive under the thick hides of cattle and horses for an indefinite time, like seeds buried deep in the earth.

Any playfulness in cattle is unexpected. One day I saw a herd of a dozen bullocks and cows running about and frisking in clumsy play, like huge rats, or even like kittens.

They shook their heads, raised their tails, and rushed up and down a hill. Their horns, as well as their liveliness, showed me their kinship with the deer tribe.

But alas, a sudden loud “Whoa!” would have dampened their spirits at once. It would have reduced them from venison to beef and stiffened their sides and sinews like a locomotive’s. Who but the Evil One has ever cried “Whoa!” to mankind?

In fact, the life of cattle, like that of many men, is only a kind of locomotive motion. They move one side at a time, and man, with his machinery, is meeting the horse and the ox halfway. Whatever part the whip has touched is paralyzed from then on. Who would ever speak of a side of any of the supple cat tribe, as we speak of a side of beef?

I am glad that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be made the slaves of men. I am also glad that men themselves still have some wild oats left to sow before they become submissive members of society. Certainly not all men are equally fit subjects for civilization.

Most men, like dogs and sheep, are tame by inherited disposition. That is no reason why the others should have their natures broken to bring them down to the same level. Men are mostly alike, but they were made separate so that they might be varied.

If a low purpose is to be served, one man will do nearly or quite as well as another. If a high purpose is to be served, individual excellence must be considered. Any man can stop up a hole to keep out the wind, but no other man could serve so rare a purpose as the author of this illustration 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 true culture does not tame tigers, any more than it makes sheep ferocious. And tanning their skins for shoes is not the best use they can be put to.

Sometimes I look over a list of men’s names in a foreign language, such as a list of military officers or of authors who have written on a particular subject. It reminds me once again that there is nothing in a name. The name Menschikoff, for example, sounds no more human to my ears than a whisker, and it might belong to a rat.

The names of Poles and Russians sound to us the way ours sound to them. It is as if they had been named by a child’s nonsense rhyme: Iery wiery ichery van, tittle-tol-tan.

I picture a herd of wild creatures swarming over the earth, and the herdsman has attached some barbarous sound in his own dialect to each one. Men’s names, of course, are as cheap and meaningless as “Bose” and “Tray,” the names of dogs.

It would benefit philosophy, I think, if men were named only in bulk, as they are actually known. One would need to know only the genus, and perhaps the race or variety, to know the individual.

We are not prepared to believe that every private soldier in a Roman army had a name of his own. That is because we have not supposed that he had a character of his own.

At present our only true names are nicknames. I knew a boy whose playmates called him “Buster” because of his unusual energy, and this name rightly replaced his Christian name.

Some travelers report that an Indian was given no name at first, but earned one, and his name was his fame. Among some tribes he acquired a new name with every new exploit. It is pitiful when a man bears a name merely for convenience, having earned neither name nor fame.

I will not let mere names make distinctions for me. In spite of them, I still see men in herds. A familiar name cannot make a man any less strange to me.

The name may have been given to a savage who secretly keeps his own wild title, earned in the woods. We have a wild savage within us, and perhaps a savage name is recorded somewhere as ours.

I see that my neighbor, who goes by the familiar label William or Edwin, takes it off along with his jacket. It does not cling to him when he is asleep or angry, or roused by any passion or inspiration. At such times I seem to hear some of his kin pronounce his original wild name, in some jaw-breaking or else melodious language.

Here lies this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, all around us. She has as much beauty, and as much affection for her children, as the leopard. And yet we are weaned so early from her breast and sent into society. We are sent into a culture that consists entirely of man acting on man.

This culture is a kind of inbreeding. At most it produces a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to reach its limit quickly.

In society, even in the best human institutions, it is easy to detect a certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are already little men.

Give me a culture that brings in plenty of muck from the meadows and deepens the soil. I do not want one that relies only on heating manures and improved tools and methods of cultivation!

I have heard of many a poor, sore-eyed student who would grow faster, in both mind and body, if he honestly slept a fool’s allowance instead of staying up so very late.

There can be too much even of enlightening light. Niépce, a Frenchman, discovered “actinism,” the power in the sun’s rays that produces chemical effects. He found that granite rocks, stone structures, and metal statues “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 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 was no longer influencing them.”

From this 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.” Even the moon does not shine every night, but gives way to darkness.

I would not have every man, or every part of a man, cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated. Part will be plowed land, but the greater part will be meadow and forest. This land serves an immediate use. It also prepares rich soil for a distant future through the yearly decay of the plants it supports.

There are other letters for a child to learn than the ones Cadmus invented. The Spaniards have a good term for this wild, dusky knowledge: Gramática parda, tawny grammar. It is a kind of mother-wit derived from the same leopard I mentioned earlier.

We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. People say that knowledge is power, and so on. I think there is an equal need for a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance. We might call this Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge that is useful in a higher sense.

Most of our boasted, so-called knowledge is only a conceited belief that we know something. That belief robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance. What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance, and ignorance is our negative knowledge.

Through long years of patient work and newspaper reading, a man gathers countless facts and stores them in his memory. And what are the libraries of science but files of newspapers?

Then, in some springtime of his life, he wanders out into the Great Fields of thought. He goes to grass like a horse, so to speak, and leaves all his harness behind in the stable.

Sometimes I would say to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge: Go to grass. You have eaten hay long enough. Spring has come with its green crop. Even the cows are driven to their country pastures before the end of May.

Yet I have heard of one unnatural farmer who kept his cow in the barn and fed her hay all year round. That is often how the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge treats its cattle.

A man’s ignorance is sometimes not only useful but beautiful. His so-called knowledge, by contrast, is often worse than useless, and ugly besides.

Which is the better man to deal with? One man knows nothing about a subject and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing. Another really knows something about it, but thinks he knows everything.

My desire for knowledge comes and goes. But my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres my feet have never known is lasting and constant. The highest thing we can reach is not knowledge, but sympathy with intelligence.

I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a new and grand surprise. The surprise comes with a sudden revelation that everything we called knowledge before is insufficient. It is a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. It is the sun lighting up the mist.

Man cannot know in any higher sense than this, any more than he can look calmly and safely into the face of the sun. As the Chaldean Oracles say: Ὡς τὶ νοῶν, οὐ κεῖνον νοήσεις, “You will not perceive that, as perceiving a particular thing.”

There is something servile in the habit of looking for a law to obey. We may study the laws of matter for our own convenience, but a successful life knows no law. It is certainly an unfortunate discovery when we find a law that binds us where we did not know before that we were bound.

Live free, child of the mist. When it comes to knowledge, we are all children of the mist. The man who takes the liberty to live is superior to all laws, because of his relation to the lawmaker.

“That is active duty,” says the Vishnu Parana, “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.” True duty does not enslave us, and true knowledge sets us free. Any other duty only wears us out. Any other knowledge is merely a craftsman’s cleverness.

It is remarkable how few events or crises there are in our life stories, how little our minds have been tested, and how few experiences we have had. I want to be sure that I am growing quickly and vigorously, even if my growth disturbs this dull calm, and even if it means struggling through long, dark, muggy nights or seasons of gloom.

It would be better if our lives were even a divine tragedy, rather than this trivial comedy or farce. Dante, Bunyan, and others seem to have been tested in their minds more than we are. They went through a kind of education that our district schools and colleges never consider. Even Muhammad, though many may cry out at his name, had far more to live for, and to die for, than they usually have.

At rare intervals a thought visits someone, perhaps while he is walking along a railroad. Then the cars really do go by without his hearing them. But soon, by some unyielding law, our life goes by and the cars return.

“Gentle breeze, wandering unseen,
Bending the thistles round Loira of storms,
Traveler of the windy glens,
Why have you left my ear so soon?”

Almost everyone feels drawn toward society, but few are strongly drawn to nature. In their relation to nature, most people seem to me lower than the animals, despite all their arts. Unlike the animals’ relation to nature, theirs is seldom a beautiful one.

How little we appreciate the beauty of the landscape! We have to be told that the Greeks called the world Κόσμος, meaning Beauty, or Order. Yet we do not clearly see why they did so, and at best we regard it as a curious fact about language.

For my part, I feel that I live a kind of border life with respect to nature. I live at the edges of a world that I enter only in occasional, brief raids. My patriotism and loyalty toward the state whose territory I seem to retreat into are those of a moss-trooper, one of the raiders who once roamed the boggy borderlands between England and Scotland.

To reach a life I would call natural, I would gladly follow even a will-o’-the-wisp, the faint drifting light seen over marshes at night, through unimaginable bogs and swamps. But no moon or firefly has shown me the raised road that leads there. Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen a single one of her features.

Someone walking in the familiar fields around my native town sometimes finds himself in a different land from the one described in the owners’ deeds. It is as if he had reached some faraway field at the edges of the actual Concord. There the town’s authority ends, and the word Concord no longer suggests the idea it usually does.

These farms that I myself have surveyed, and these boundaries I have marked, still appear dimly, as if through a mist. But like a photographic image on glass that was never chemically fixed, they fade from the surface. The picture the painter originally painted shows dimly from underneath. The world we commonly know leaves no trace, and it will have no anniversary.

I took a walk on Spaulding’s Farm the other afternoon. I saw the setting sun lighting up the far side of a stately pine wood. Its golden rays strayed into the aisles of the wood as if into some noble hall.

It seemed to me that some ancient, wholly admirable, and shining family had settled there, in that part of the land called Concord, without my knowing it. The sun was their servant. They had not mixed with society in the village, and no one had called on them. I saw their park, their pleasure-ground, beyond the wood in Spaulding’s cranberry meadow.

The pines gave them gables as they grew. Their house was not easy to see, because the trees grew through it. I am not sure whether I heard the sounds of a suppressed merriment. They seemed to recline on the sunbeams. They have sons and daughters. They are quite well.

The farmer’s cart path, which runs straight through their hall, does not bother them in the least, just as the muddy bottom of a pool is sometimes visible through the reflected sky. They have never heard of Spaulding and do not know that he is their neighbor, even though I heard him whistle as he drove his team through the house.

Nothing can equal the calm of their lives. Their coat of arms is simply a lichen; I saw it painted on the pines and oaks. Their attics were in the tops of the trees. They have no politics. There was no noise of labor, and I did not notice them weaving or spinning.

Yet when the wind died down and there was nothing left to hear, I did detect the finest, sweetest musical hum imaginable, like a distant beehive in May. Perhaps it was the sound of their thinking. They had no idle thoughts. No one outside could see their work, because their industry did not show itself in knots and swollen growths, as ours does.

But I find it hard to remember them. Even now, as I speak and try to recall them and collect myself, they fade from my mind beyond recovery. Only after a long and serious effort to recall my best thoughts do I become aware again that they live alongside us. If it were not for families like this, I think I would move out of Concord.

In New England we often say that fewer and fewer pigeons visit us every year. Our forests no longer provide mast, the nuts and acorns the pigeons feed on. In the same way, it seems, fewer and fewer thoughts visit each growing person from year to year.

The grove in our minds has been cut down. It has been sold to feed unnecessary fires of ambition, or sent to the mill, and there is hardly a twig left for thoughts to perch on. They no longer build nests or breed with us.

In some milder season, perhaps, a faint shadow passes across the landscape of the mind. It is cast by the wings of some thought on its spring or autumn migration. But when we look up, we cannot find the thought itself.

Our winged thoughts have been turned into poultry. They no longer soar. The most they reach is the grandeur of a Shanghai or a Cochin-China, the large, showy chicken breeds now in fashion. Those gra-a-ate thoughts, those gra-a-ate men you hear about!

We hug the earth. How rarely we rise! I think we could raise ourselves a little higher. At the very least, we could climb a tree. I once found it worthwhile to climb a tree. It was a tall white pine on top of a hill.

I got well smeared with pitch, but I was well paid for it. I discovered new mountains on the horizon that I had never seen before, so much more of the earth and the heavens. I might have walked around the foot of that tree for seventy years, and I would certainly never have seen them.

Above all, I discovered something around me. It was near the end of June. On the ends of the topmost branches only, there were a few tiny, delicate red blossoms shaped like cones. They were the fertile flowers of the white pine, looking toward the heavens.

I immediately carried the topmost spire to the village. It was court week, so I showed it to jurymen from out of town who were walking the streets. I also showed it to farmers, lumber dealers, woodchoppers, and hunters. Not one of them had ever seen anything like it. They marveled at it as if a star had fallen.

People speak of ancient architects who finished the tops of their columns as perfectly as the lower, more visible parts! From the very beginning, nature has opened the tiny blossoms of the forest only toward the heavens, above people’s heads, where no one notices them. We see only the flowers under our feet in the meadows.

Every summer for ages, the pines have opened their delicate blossoms on the highest twigs of the forest. They have done so above the heads of Nature’s red children as well as her white ones. Yet hardly a farmer or hunter in the land has ever seen them.

Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. Of all mortals, the most blessed is the one who loses no moment of passing life in remembering the past. Unless our philosophy hears the rooster crow in every barnyard within our horizon, it is behind the times.

That sound usually reminds us that our work and habits of thought are growing rusty and old-fashioned. The rooster’s philosophy reaches a more recent time than ours. His crow suggests a newer testament: the gospel according to this moment.

He has not fallen behind. He got up early, has kept up early, and is exactly where he should be, in good time, in the front rank of time. His crow expresses the health and soundness of nature. It is a boast to the whole world, a healthiness like a spring bursting from the ground, a new fountain of the Muses, celebrating this latest instant of time.

Where he lives, no fugitive slave laws are passed. Which of us has not betrayed his master many times since he last heard that note?

The merit of this bird’s song is that it is entirely free of sorrow. A singer can easily move us to tears or to laughter. But who can stir in us a pure morning joy?

Sometimes I am in low spirits, breaking the awful stillness of our wooden sidewalk on a Sunday, or perhaps keeping watch in a house of mourning. Then I hear a rooster crow, near or far, and I think to myself, “There is one of us well, at any rate.” With a sudden rush, I return to my senses.

We had a remarkable sunset one day last November. I was walking in a meadow at the source of a small brook. After a cold, gray day, the sun, just before setting, at last reached a clear layer of sky near the horizon.

The softest, brightest morning light fell on the dry grass, on the trunks of the trees on the opposite horizon, and on the leaves of the shrub oaks on the hillside. Our shadows stretched long across the meadow toward the east, as if we were the only specks of dust in its beams.

It was a light we could not have imagined a moment before. The air, too, was so warm and calm that nothing was missing to make a paradise of that meadow.

When we reflected that this was not a single event, never to happen again, it seemed more glorious still. It would happen forever and ever, on an infinite number of evenings, and would cheer and reassure the last child who ever walked there.

The sun sets on some secluded meadow, where no house is in sight, with all the glory and splendor it pours out on cities. Perhaps it sets as it has never set before. There may be only a solitary marsh hawk to have its wings gilded by it, or only a muskrat looking out from his lodge.

In the middle of the marsh there may be some little black-veined brook, just beginning to meander, winding slowly around a decaying stump.

We walked in a light so pure and bright, gilding the withered grass and leaves, so softly and calmly bright, that I thought I had never bathed in such a golden flood. It flowed without a ripple or a murmur.

The west side of every wood and hill gleamed like the border of Elysium, the Greek paradise. The sun at our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman driving us home in the evening.

So we saunter toward the Holy Land, until one day the sun will shine more brightly than it ever has. Perhaps it will shine into our minds and hearts and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm, calm, and golden as sunlight on a bank in autumn.

Life Without Principle

Derived from a lecture titled “What Shall It Profit?”, delivered at Providence, Rhode Island, on December 6, 1854. First published in its present form in The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 71, October 1863.

At a lyceum not long ago, I felt that the lecturer had chosen a subject too foreign to himself, and so he interested me less than he might have. He described things that were not in or near his heart, but out toward his extremities and surfaces. In this sense, the lecture had no truly central thought, nothing at its core that drew the rest together.

I would have had him deal with his most private experience, as a poet does. The greatest compliment anyone ever paid me was when someone asked what I thought and actually listened to my answer. When this happens I am surprised as well as delighted. It is such a rare use to make of me, as if he knew what the tool was for.

Usually, if people want anything from me, it is only to know how many acres their land measures, since I am a surveyor, or at most what trivial news I have loaded myself with. No one will ever go to court to claim the meat of me, as in the old fable of the disputed oyster. They prefer the shell.

A man once came a considerable distance to ask me to lecture on Slavery. But when I talked with him, I found that he and his clique expected seven-eighths of the lecture to be theirs and only one-eighth mine. So I declined.

When I am invited to lecture anywhere, and I have had a little experience in that business, I assume there is a desire to hear what I think on some subject, even if I am the greatest fool in the country. I do not assume they want me merely to say pleasant things, or things the audience will agree with. So I resolve to give them a strong dose of myself.

They have sent for me and agreed to pay for me, and I am determined that they shall have me, even if I bore them beyond all precedent.

So now I would say something similar to you, my readers. Since you are my readers, and I have not traveled much, I will not talk about people a thousand miles away, but come as close to home as I can. As the time is short, I will leave out all the flattery and keep all the criticism.

Let us consider the way we spend our lives.

This world is a place of business. What endless bustle! The panting of the locomotive wakes me almost every night and interrupts my dreams. There is no sabbath. It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work.

I cannot easily buy a blank book to write my thoughts in, because blank books are usually ruled for dollars and cents. An Irishman who saw me jotting a note in the fields took it for granted that I was calculating my wages.

If a man was thrown out of a window as an infant and crippled for life, or frightened out of his wits by the Indians, people regret it mainly because it has made him unfit for business! I think nothing, not even crime, is more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, yes, to life itself, than this incessant business.

On the outskirts of our town there is a coarse, loud, money-making fellow who is going to build a bank-wall at the foot of the hill along the edge of his meadow. The powers have put this idea into his head to keep him out of mischief, and he wants me to spend three weeks digging there with him.

The result will be that he may get a little more money to hoard and leave to his heirs to spend foolishly. If I do this, most people will praise me as industrious and hardworking. But if I choose to devote myself to certain labors that yield more real profit, though little money, they may be inclined to see me as an idler.

Still, I do not need the police of meaningless labor to regulate me. Nor do I see anything truly praiseworthy in this fellow’s project, any more than in many undertakings of our own or foreign governments, however amusing they may be to him or to them. So I prefer to finish my education at a different school.

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

Most men would feel insulted if someone proposed to employ them throwing stones over a wall and then throwing them back again, just so they could earn wages. Yet many are employed no more worthily now.

For instance, just after sunrise one summer morning, I noticed one of my neighbors walking beside his team of oxen. They were slowly drawing a heavy hewn stone slung beneath the axle. He was surrounded by an atmosphere of industry: his day’s work begun, his brow starting to sweat, a reproach to all sluggards and idlers.

He paused alongside the shoulders of his oxen and half turned with a flourish of his merciful whip while they pulled a length ahead of him. And I thought: such is the labor the American Congress exists to protect. Honest, manly toil, honest as the day is long, that makes his bread taste sweet and keeps society sweet.

It is labor that everyone respects and has made sacred. He was one of the sacred band, doing the necessary but tedious drudgery. In fact, I felt slightly reproached, because I watched all this from a window instead of being out and busy with similar work.

The day went by. In the evening I passed the yard of another neighbor, who keeps many servants and spends a great deal of money foolishly, while adding nothing to the common stock. There I saw the morning’s stone lying beside a whimsical structure meant to decorate his grounds. He was a second “Lord” Timothy Dexter, the eccentric rich man who filled his estate with fanciful ornaments.

At once, in my eyes, the dignity left the teamster’s labor. In my opinion, the sun was made to light worthier work than this. I may add that this employer has since run off owing money to a good part of the town. After his affairs passed through the court of Chancery, he settled somewhere else, there to become once more a patron of the arts.

The ways of getting money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything merely to earn money is to have been truly idle, or worse. If the laborer gets nothing more than the wages his employer pays him, he is cheated; he cheats himself.

If you want to get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, and that means going straight down. The services the community will most readily pay for are the most disagreeable to perform. You are paid for being something less than a man.

The State does not usually reward a genius any more wisely. Even the poet laureate would rather not have to celebrate the accidents of royalty. He has to be bribed with a pipe of wine, a large cask. And perhaps another poet is called away from his muse to work as a tax officer and gauge, or measure, that very cask.

As for my own business, even the kind of surveying I could do with most satisfaction is not what my employers want. They would rather I did my work coarsely and not too well, indeed, not well enough. When I point out that there are different ways of surveying, my employer usually asks which will give him the most land, not which is most correct.

I once invented a rule for measuring cordwood and tried to introduce it in Boston. But the measurer there told me that the sellers did not want their wood measured correctly. He was already too accurate for them, so they usually had their wood measured in Charlestown before crossing the bridge.

The laborer’s aim should be not to get his living, or to get “a good job,” but to do a certain work well. Even in purely financial terms, it would be good economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel they were working for low ends, merely for a livelihood, but for scientific or even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but one who does it for love of it.

It is remarkable how few men are so well employed, so much to their liking, that a little money or fame would not usually buy them away from what they are doing. I see advertisements for active young men, as if activity were the whole of a young man’s capital.

Yet I have been surprised when someone has confidently proposed that I, a grown man, join some enterprise of his, as if I had absolutely nothing to do and my life had been a complete failure so far. What a doubtful compliment! It is as if he had met me halfway across the ocean, beating against the wind but bound nowhere, and proposed that I come along with him.

If I did, what do you think the underwriters who insure my voyage would say? No, no! I am not without employment at this stage of the voyage. To tell the truth, when I was a boy wandering about my native port, I saw an advertisement for able-bodied seamen, and as soon as I came of age I signed on.

The community has no bribe that will tempt a wise man. You can raise enough money to tunnel through a mountain, but you cannot raise enough to hire a man who is minding his own business. An efficient and valuable man does what he can, whether the community pays him for it or not.

The inefficient offer their inefficiency to the highest bidder and are forever expecting to be put into office. One would suppose they were rarely disappointed.

Perhaps I am more jealous of my freedom than most. I feel that my connection with society, and my obligation to it, are still very slight and temporary. The light labors that earn my living, and that allow me to be of some use to my contemporaries, are so far usually a pleasure to me. I am not often reminded that they are a necessity. So far, I am successful.

But I foresee that if my wants increased much, the labor needed to supply them would become drudgery. If I sold both my mornings and my afternoons to society, as most people seem to do, I am sure nothing would be left for me worth living for. I trust I shall never sell my birthright this way for a mess of pottage, as Esau sold his for a bowl of stew.

I want to suggest that a man may be very industrious and still not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than the one who uses up most of his life getting his living. All great enterprises are self-supporting. The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his poetry, just as a steam planing-mill feeds its boilers with the wood shavings it produces. You must get your living by loving.

But just as it is said that ninety-seven out of a hundred merchants fail, so the lives of people in general, tried by this standard, are failures, and bankruptcy can be confidently predicted.

Merely to come into the world as heir to a fortune is not to be born but rather to be stillborn. To be supported by the charity of friends or by a government pension, provided you keep breathing, is to go into the almshouse, whatever fine words you use to describe the arrangement.

On Sundays the poor debtor goes to church to take stock of his accounts, and finds, of course, that his expenses have been greater than his income. In the Catholic Church especially, they go into Chancery, as bankrupts do: they make a clean confession, give up everything, and expect to start again. In this way people will lie on their backs talking about the fall of man and never make an effort to get up.

As for the different demands people make on life, there is an important difference between two kinds of person. One is satisfied with a level success, where all his targets can be hit by point-blank shots. The other, however low and unsuccessful his life may be, keeps raising his aim, even if only at a very slight angle above the horizon.

I would much rather be the second man. Though, as the Orientals say, “Greatness does not approach him who is forever looking down; and all those who are looking high are growing poor.”

It is remarkable that little or nothing worth remembering has been written on the subject of getting a living. No one explains how to make earning a living not merely honest and honorable but altogether inviting and glorious. For if getting a living is not so, then living is not. Judging from literature, one would think this question had never troubled a single person’s thoughts.

Is it that people are too disgusted with their experience to talk about it? The lesson of value that money teaches, which the Author of the Universe has taken such pains to teach us, we tend to skip altogether. As for the means of living, it is astonishing how indifferent people of all classes are to it, even so-called reformers. They seem not to care whether they inherit it, earn it, or steal it.

I think society has done nothing for us in this respect, or at least has undone what it has done. Cold and hunger seem friendlier to my nature than the methods people have adopted, and advise, to keep them away.

The title wise is, for the most part, wrongly applied. How can someone be a wise man if he knows no better than other people how to live, and is only more cunning and intellectually subtle? Does Wisdom labor in a treadmill? Or does she teach how to succeed by her own example? Is there any such thing as wisdom that is not applied to life? Is she merely a miller who grinds the finest logic?

It is fair to ask whether Plato earned his living in a better way, or more successfully, than the people of his time. Or did he give in to the difficulties of life like everyone else? Did he seem to overcome some of them merely through indifference, or by putting on grand airs? Or did he find living easier because his aunt remembered him in her will?

The ways in which most people get their living, which is to say the ways they live, are mere makeshifts. They avoid the real business of life. This is chiefly because people do not know any better, but partly because they do not intend to do any better.

The rush to California is one example. So is the attitude toward it, held not only by merchants but by so-called philosophers and prophets. Together they bring the greatest disgrace on mankind. So many people are ready to live by luck, and in this way to gain the means of commanding the labor of others who are less lucky, without contributing any value to society! And this is called enterprise!

I know of no more startling example of the immorality of trade, and of all the common ways of getting a living. The philosophy, poetry, and religion of such a mankind are not worth the dust of a puffball. The hog that gets its living by rooting in the ground, stirring up the soil as it does, would be ashamed of such company. If I could command the wealth of all the worlds by lifting a finger, I would not pay such a price for it.

Even Muhammad knew that God did not make this world as a joke. The gold rush makes God out to be a wealthy gentleman who scatters a handful of pennies just to watch mankind scramble for them. It is the world’s raffle! A living drawn from Nature, turned into a prize to be raffled off! What a commentary, what a satire, on our institutions! The end of it will be that mankind hangs itself from a tree.

Have all the teachings in all the Bibles taught people only this? Is the latest and most admired invention of the human race nothing more than an improved muckrake? Is this the common ground where East and West meet? Did God direct us to get our living this way, digging where we never planted, so that He might perhaps reward us with lumps of gold?

God gave the righteous man a certificate entitling him to food and clothing. But the unrighteous man found a copy of the same certificate in God’s treasury, took it for himself, and obtained food and clothing just as the righteous man did. This is one of the most extensive systems of counterfeiting the world has ever seen.

I did not know that mankind was suffering for lack of gold. I have seen a little of it. I know that it is very malleable, but not as malleable as wit. A grain of gold will gild a large surface, but not as large a surface as a grain of wisdom will.

The gold-digger in the mountain ravines is as much a gambler as his fellow in the saloons of San Francisco. What difference does it make whether you shake dirt or shake dice? If you win, society loses. Whatever checks and compensations there may be, the gold-digger is the enemy of the honest laborer.

It is not enough to tell me that you worked hard to get your gold. The Devil works hard too. The way of transgressors may be hard in many respects. Even the humblest observer who goes to the mines sees, and says, that gold-digging is a kind of lottery. Gold obtained this way is not the same thing as the wages of honest work.

In practice, however, he forgets what he has seen, because he has seen only the fact and not the principle behind it. So he goes into trade there instead. That is, he buys a ticket in what usually turns out to be another lottery, one in which the fact is simply less obvious.

One evening I read Howitt’s account of the Australian gold-diggings. All night afterward I saw them in my mind’s eye. I saw the many valleys with their streams, all cut up with foul pits, from ten to one hundred feet deep and half a dozen feet across. The pits were dug as close together as possible and were partly filled with water.

This was the place where men rush furiously to probe for their fortunes. They are uncertain where to break ground, and for all they know the gold lies under their own camp. Sometimes they dig one hundred and sixty feet before they strike the vein, or else miss it by a foot. In their thirst for riches they are turned into demons, regardless of one another’s rights.

Whole valleys, for thirty miles, are suddenly honeycombed by the miners’ pits, so that even hundreds of men drown in them. Standing in water, covered with mud and clay, they work night and day, and die of exposure and disease.

Having read this, and partly forgotten it, I happened to be thinking about my own unsatisfactory life, in which I was doing as others do. With that vision of the diggings still before me, I asked myself why I might not be washing some gold every day, even if only the finest particles. Why might I not sink a shaft down to the gold within me, and work that mine?

There is a Ballarat, a Bendigo, for you. What does it matter if it is a sulky-gully? At any rate, I might follow some path, however solitary, narrow, and crooked, along which I could walk with love and reverence.

Wherever a man separates from the crowd and goes his own way in this spirit, there truly is a fork in the road, even if ordinary travelers see only a gap in the fence. His solitary path across the fields will turn out to be the higher road of the two.

People rush to California and Australia as if the true gold were to be found in that direction. But that is going to the very opposite extreme from where it lies. They go prospecting farther and farther from the true vein, and they are most unfortunate when they think themselves most successful.

Is our native soil not gold-bearing? Does a stream from the golden mountains not flow through our native valley? Has it not been carrying down shining particles, and forming nuggets for us, for longer than geologic ages?

Yet, strange to say, if a digger slips away into the unexplored solitudes around us, prospecting for this true gold, there is no danger that anyone will follow him and try to push him out. He may claim and undermine the whole valley, both its cultivated and uncultivated parts, in peace for his whole life, because no one will ever dispute his claim.

No one will bother about his cradles or his toms, the rocking boxes and troughs miners use to wash gold from gravel. He is not confined to a claim twelve feet square, as at Ballarat. He may mine anywhere, and wash the whole wide world in his tom.

Howitt writes this about the man who found the great nugget, weighing twenty-eight pounds, at the Bendigo diggings in Australia: “He soon began to drink; got a horse, and rode all about, generally at full gallop, and, when he met people, called out to inquire if they knew who he was, and then kindly informed them that he was ‘the bloody wretch that had found the nugget.’ At last he rode full speed against a tree, and nearly knocked his brains out.”

I think, however, that there was no danger of that, since he had already knocked his brains out against the nugget. Howitt adds, “He is a hopelessly ruined man.” But he is typical of his class. They are all fast men.

Listen to some of the names of the places where they dig: “Jackass Flat,” “Sheep’s-Head Gully,” “Murderer’s Bar,” and so on. Is there no satire in these names? Let them carry their ill-gotten wealth wherever they like. I suspect that wherever they live, it will still be “Jackass Flat,” if not “Murderer’s Bar.”

The latest outlet for our energy has been robbing graveyards on the Isthmus of Darien. This enterprise seems to be only in its infancy. According to recent reports, a bill regulating this kind of mining has passed its second reading in the legislature of New Granada. A correspondent of the Tribune writes: “In the dry season, when the weather will permit of the country being properly prospected, no doubt other rich guacas [that is, graveyards] will be found.”

To emigrants he says: “Do not come before December; take the Isthmus route in preference to the Boca del Toro one; bring no useless baggage, and do not cumber yourself with a tent; but a good pair of blankets will be necessary; a pick, shovel, and axe of good material will be almost all that is required.”

This advice might have been taken from the “Burker’s Guide,” as if written for those who killed or stole bodies to sell for dissection. He ends with this line in italics and small capitals: “If you are doing well at home, stay there.” This may fairly be taken to mean, “If you are making a good living by robbing graveyards at home, stay there.”

But why go to California for an example? California is the child of New England, raised in New England’s own school and church.

It is remarkable that among all the preachers there are so few moral teachers. The prophets are busy excusing the ways of men. The most reverend elders, the enlightened ones of the age, tell me with a gracious, reminiscent smile, halfway between an aspiration and a shudder, not to be too tender about these things. They tell me to lump it all together, which is to say, to make a lump of gold of it.

The highest advice I have heard on these subjects was groveling. Its message was this: it is not worth your while to try to reform the world in this respect. Do not ask how your bread is buttered; it will make you sick if you do. And so on.

A man would do better to starve at once than to lose his innocence in the process of earning his bread. If there is not an unsophisticated man inside the sophisticated one, then he is merely one of the Devil’s angels.

As we grow old, we live more coarsely. We relax our disciplines a little, and to some extent we stop obeying our finest instincts. But we should be fastidious to the very limit of sanity, ignoring the jeers of those who are more unfortunate than we are.

Even in our science and philosophy there is usually no true and absolute account of things. The spirit of sect and bigotry has planted its hoof among the stars. You need only discuss whether the stars are inhabited to discover this. Why must we smear the heavens as well as the earth?

It was an unfortunate discovery that Dr. Kane was a Mason, and that Sir John Franklin was one too. But it was a crueler suggestion that this might be the reason Kane went in search of Franklin.

There is not a popular magazine in this country that would dare to print a child’s thought on important subjects without adding comment. It must first be submitted to the D.D.s, the Doctors of Divinity. I wish it were submitted to the chickadee-dees.

You come away from attending the funeral of mankind to attend to a natural phenomenon. A little thought is the sexton who buries the whole world.

I hardly know even an intellectual man who is so broad and truly liberal that you can think aloud in his company. Most people you try to talk with soon come to a halt against some institution in which they seem to hold stock. That is, they are committed to some particular, rather than universal, way of seeing things.

They keep thrusting their own low roof, with its narrow skylight, between you and the sky, when it is the open heavens you want to see. Get out of the way with your cobwebs, I say, and wash your windows!

In some lyceums, I am told, they have voted to exclude the subject of religion. But how am I to know what their religion is, or when I am near to it or far from it? I have walked into such a hall and done my best to speak openly about whatever religion I have experienced, and the audience never suspected what I was doing. To them the lecture was as harmless as moonshine.

On the other hand, if I had read them the biographies of the greatest scoundrels in history, they might have thought I had written the lives of the deacons of their own church. Usually the question people ask is, Where did you come from? or, Where are you going? I once overheard one of my listeners ask another a more pertinent question: “What does he lecture for?” It made me quake in my shoes.

To speak fairly, the best men I know are not serene, each a world in himself. For the most part, they live in forms and conventions. They flatter and aim at effect, only more finely than everyone else.

We choose granite for the foundations of our houses and barns, and we build fences of stone. But we ourselves do not rest on a foundation of granite truth, the lowest and most primitive rock. Our sills are rotten. What is a man made of if we cannot think of him together with the purest and subtlest truth?

I often accuse my finest acquaintances of immense frivolity. As long as manners and compliments stand between us, we do not truly meet. We do not teach one another the lessons of honesty and sincerity that animals teach, or of steadiness and solidity that rocks teach. The fault, however, is usually mutual, because we do not habitually demand anything more of each other.

That excitement about Kossuth: consider how typical it was, and how shallow! It was only another kind of politics, or of dancing. People made speeches to him all over the country, but each speaker expressed only the thought, or the lack of thought, of the crowd. No one stood on truth.

They were simply banded together, as usual, each leaning on another and all of them together resting on nothing. The Hindus made the world rest on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on a serpent, and then had nothing to put under the serpent. The only fruit of all that stir is the Kossuth hat.

Our ordinary conversation is, for the most part, just as hollow and ineffective. Surface meets surface. When our life stops being inward and private, conversation sinks into mere gossip. We rarely meet anyone who can tell us news he has not read in a newspaper or heard from a neighbor.

Usually the only difference between us and the other person is that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not. The more our inner life fails, the more often and desperately we go to the post office. You can be sure that the poor fellow who walks away with the most letters, proud of his wide correspondence, has not heard from himself in a long time.

I am not sure that even one newspaper a week is not too much. I have tried it recently, and for that long it seems to me that I have not been living in my native region. The sun, the clouds, the snow, and the trees have less to say to me. You cannot serve two masters. It takes more than a day’s devotion to know and possess the wealth of a single day.

We may well be ashamed to admit what we have read or heard in our time. I do not know why my news should be so trivial. Given what our dreams and expectations are, I do not know why what actually happens should be so petty. Most of the news we hear is no news to our genius. It is the stalest repetition.

You are often tempted to ask why so much weight is placed on some particular experience you have had: that after twenty-five years you should meet Hobbins, Registrar of Deeds, on the sidewalk again. Have you not moved an inch, then? Such is the daily news.

Its facts seem to float in the air, as insignificant as fungus spores. They land on some neglected thallus, the simple body in which a fungus takes root. In the same way they land on some neglected surface of our minds that gives them a footing, and a parasitic growth springs up. We should wash ourselves clean of such news.

What would it matter if our planet exploded, if no character were involved in the explosion? When we are healthy, we feel not the least curiosity about such events. We do not live for idle amusement. I would not run around a corner to see the world blow up.

All summer, and perhaps well into autumn, you passed by the newspapers and the news without noticing. Now you realize it was because the mornings and evenings were full of news for you. Your walks were full of incidents. You paid attention not to the affairs of Europe but to your own affairs in the fields of Massachusetts.

Perhaps you live and move and have your being in the thin layer where the events that make the news take place, a layer thinner than the paper the news is printed on. Then these things will fill the world for you. But if you rise above that level or dive below it, you can neither remember them nor be reminded of them.

To truly see the sun rise and set every day, and so connect ourselves with a universal fact, would keep us sane forever. Nations! What are nations? Tartars, and Huns, and Chinese! They swarm like insects. The historian tries in vain to make them memorable. It is for want of a man that there are so many men. It is individuals who populate the world. Any thinking person may say, with the Spirit of Lodin:

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

Please, let us live without being dragged along by dogs, the way the Eskimos travel, tearing over hill and valley and biting each other’s ears.

I often notice, with a slight shudder at the danger, how close I have come to letting into my mind the details of some trivial affair, the news of the street. I am astonished to see how willing people are to clutter their minds with such rubbish. They allow idle rumors and the most insignificant incidents to intrude on ground that 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 the main subjects of discussion? Or shall it be a region of heaven itself, a hypaethral temple open to the sky, consecrated to the service of the gods?

I find it so hard to deal with the few facts that are significant to me that I hesitate to burden my attention with insignificant ones, which only a divine mind could make illuminating. That, for the most part, is the news in newspapers and conversation. It is important to keep the mind chaste in this respect.

Think of letting the details of a single criminal court case into our thoughts, to stalk irreverently through their innermost sanctuary, their sanctum sanctorum, for an hour, or even for many hours! Think of turning the mind’s innermost room into a barroom, as if the dust of the street had occupied us all that time.

It would be as if the street itself, with all its traffic, bustle, and filth, had passed through the shrine of our thoughts. Would that not be intellectual and moral suicide?

Sometimes I have been compelled to sit for hours as a spectator and listener in a courtroom. I have watched my neighbors, who were under no such compulsion, slipping in from time to time and tiptoeing about with washed hands and faces.

To my mind’s eye, when they took off their hats, their ears suddenly swelled into vast hoppers for sound, like the funnels that feed grain into a mill. Their narrow heads were crowded between them. Like the sails of windmills, their ears caught the broad but shallow stream of sound. After a few tickling turns among the cogs of their brains, it passed out the other side.

I wondered whether, when they got home, they were as careful to wash their ears as they had been to wash their hands and faces beforehand.

At such times it has seemed to me that the listeners and the witnesses, the jury and the lawyers, the judge and the criminal at the bar were all equally criminal, if I may presume him guilty before he is convicted. A thunderbolt might be expected to come down and destroy them all together.

Use every kind of trap and warning sign, threatening the most extreme penalty of divine law, to keep such trespassers off the only ground that can be sacred to you. It is so hard to forget what is worse than useless to remember! If I must be a thoroughfare, I would rather carry mountain brooks, the streams of Parnassus, the mountain of the Muses, than the town sewers.

There is inspiration, the gossip that reaches the attentive mind from the courts of heaven. And there is the irreverent, stale revelation of the barroom and the police court. The same ear is made to receive both messages. Only the character of the hearer decides which one it will open to and which one it will close against.

I believe the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts become tinged with triviality. Our very intellect becomes macadamized, as it were. Like a macadam road, its foundation is broken into small fragments for the wheels of traffic to roll over.

If you want to know what makes the most durable pavement, better than rolled stones, spruce blocks, or asphalt, you have only to look into some of our minds that have been treated this way for so long.

If we have desecrated ourselves in this way, and who has not, the remedy is to reconsecrate ourselves through watchfulness and devotion, and make the mind a temple once more. We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and open-hearted children in our care. We should be careful what objects and subjects we push before their attention.

Read not the Times. Read the Eternities. Conventions, in the end, are as bad as impurities. Even the facts of science may cover the mind with dust through their dryness, unless they are in a sense wiped away each morning, or rather made fertile by the dew of fresh and living truth. Knowledge does not come to us in details, but in flashes of light from heaven.

Yes, every thought that passes through the mind wears it down and deepens its ruts. Like the ruts in the streets of Pompeii, they show how much it has been used. There are many things that we might well stop and consider whether we had better know at all.

We might ask whether we should let their peddlers’ carts drive, even at the slowest trot or walk, over that bridge of glorious span by which we hope at last to cross from the farthest edge of time to the nearest shore of eternity.

Have we no culture, no refinement, only the skill to live coarsely and serve the Devil? Only the skill to gain a little worldly wealth, or fame, or liberty, and make a false show with it, as if we were all husk and shell, with no tender, living kernel inside? Shall our institutions be like those chestnut burrs that contain stunted nuts and are perfect only for pricking the fingers?

America is said to be the arena where the battle of freedom is to be fought. But surely the freedom meant cannot be merely political. Even if we grant that the American has freed himself from a political tyrant, he is still the slave of an economic and moral tyrant.

Now that the republic, the res-publica or public thing, has been settled, it is time to attend to the res-privata, the private state. As the Roman senate charged its consuls, we must see “ne quid res-privata detrimenti caperet,” that the private state receive no harm.

Do we call this the land of the free? What does it mean to be free of King George and remain slaves of King Prejudice? What does it mean to be born free and not live free? What is political freedom worth except as a means to moral freedom? Is it a freedom to be slaves that we boast of, or a freedom to be free?

We are a nation of politicians, concerned only with the outermost defenses of freedom. Perhaps it is our children’s children who will be truly free. We tax ourselves unjustly. There is a part of us that is not represented. It is taxation without representation.

We quarter troops on ourselves, making ourselves house them; we quarter fools and cattle of every kind on ourselves. We quarter our coarse bodies on our poor souls, until the bodies eat up all the souls’ substance.

With respect to true culture and manhood, we are still essentially provincial, not metropolitan. We are mere Jonathans, country cousins in the image of Brother Jonathan. We are provincial because we do not find our standards at home. We do not worship truth but the reflection of truth.

We are warped and narrowed by an exclusive devotion to trade, commerce, manufacturing, agriculture, and the like, which are only means and not the end.

The English Parliament is provincial too. Its members betray themselves as mere country bumpkins whenever a more important question comes before them, the Irish question, for instance. Why did I not call it the English question? Their natures are subdued to what they work in. Their “good breeding” concerns only secondary things.

The finest manners in the world look awkward and foolish beside a finer intelligence. They seem like the fashions of past days: mere courtliness, knee buckles and breeches, out of date. It is the vice of manners, not their excellence, that character keeps deserting them.

They are cast-off clothes or shells, claiming the respect that belonged to the living creature. You are handed the shells instead of the meat. And it is generally no excuse that with some sea creatures the shells are worth more than the meat.

The man who forces his manners on me acts as if he insisted on showing me his cabinet of curiosities when I wanted to see him. It was not in this sense that the poet Decker called Christ “the first true gentleman that ever breathed.”

I repeat that, in this sense, the most splendid court in Christendom is provincial. It has authority to consult only about Transalpine interests, the affairs of the provinces beyond the Alps, and not about the affairs of Rome. A praetor or proconsul would be enough to settle the questions that absorb the English Parliament and the American Congress.

Government and legislation! These, I thought, were respectable professions. In the history of the world we have heard of heaven-born Numas, Lycurguses, and Solons, whose names at least may stand for ideal lawgivers. But think of legislating to regulate the breeding of slaves, or the export of tobacco!

What do divine lawgivers have to do with the export or import of tobacco? What do humane ones have to do with the breeding of slaves? Suppose you submitted the question to any son of God. Has He no children in the nineteenth century? Is that family extinct? In what condition would you get the question back?

What shall a state like Virginia say for itself at the Last Judgment, when these have been its principal, staple products? What ground is there for patriotism in such a state? I take my facts from statistical tables that the states themselves have published.

A commerce that covers every sea with white sails in search of nuts and raisins, and makes slaves of its sailors to get them! The other day I saw a ship that had been wrecked. Many lives were lost, and her cargo of rags, juniper berries, and bitter almonds lay scattered along the shore.

It hardly seemed worth braving the dangers of the sea between Leghorn and New York for a cargo of juniper berries and bitter almonds. America sending to the Old World for the ingredients of her bitters, the bitter tonics taken to help a drink go down! Are not the salt of the sea and the misery of shipwreck bitter enough to make the cup of life go down here?

Yet this, to a large extent, is the commerce we boast about. Some who call themselves statesmen and philosophers are blind enough to think that progress and civilization depend on exactly this kind of exchange and activity. It is the activity of flies buzzing around a barrel of molasses. “Very well,” someone remarks, “if men were oysters.” And “Very well,” I answer, “if men were mosquitoes.”

Lieutenant Herndon, whom our government sent to explore the Amazon, and, it is said, to extend the territory of slavery, observed that the region lacked “an industrious and active population, who know what the comforts of life are, and who have artificial wants to draw out the great resources of the country.”

But which “artificial wants” should be encouraged? Not the love of luxuries, such as the tobacco and slaves of what I believe is his native Virginia. Not the ice, granite, and other material wealth of our native New England. Nor are “the great resources of a country” the fertility or barrenness of the soil that produces these things.

The chief want in every state I have been in was a high and earnest purpose in its people. This alone draws out “the great resources” of Nature. In the end it even taxes her beyond her resources, because man naturally dies out of her.

When we want culture more than potatoes, and enlightenment more than sugarplums, then the great resources of a world are taxed and drawn out. The result, the staple product, is not slaves or factory workers but men. These are the rare fruits called heroes, saints, poets, philosophers, and redeemers.

In short, a snowdrift forms wherever the wind lulls. In the same way, one might say, an institution springs up wherever there is a lull in truth. But the truth keeps blowing right over it all the same, and at last blows it down.

What is called politics is, by comparison, so superficial and inhuman that in practice I have never really acknowledged that it concerns me at all. I notice that the newspapers devote some of their columns specifically to politics or government free of charge. That, one might say, is all that saves it. But since I love literature, and to some extent the truth as well, I never read those columns anyway.

I do not wish to blunt my sense of right that much. I do not have to answer for having read a single President’s Message. This is a strange age of the world, when empires, kingdoms, and republics come begging at a private man’s door and voice their complaints at his elbow!

I cannot pick up a newspaper without finding some wretched government or other, hard pressed and on its last legs, pleading with me, the reader, to vote for it. It is more insistent than an Italian beggar.

Such beggars often carry a certificate vouching for their misfortunes. If I care to look at this government’s certificate, I will find it was written, perhaps, by some kind merchant’s clerk, or by the captain who brought it over, since it cannot speak a word of English itself. I will probably read about the eruption of some Vesuvius or the flooding of some Po, true or forged, that brought it to this condition.

In such a case I do not hesitate to suggest work, or the poorhouse. Or why not stay quietly in its own castle, as I usually do? The poor President, trying both to preserve his popularity and to do his duty, is completely bewildered.

The newspapers are the ruling power. Any other government is reduced to a few marines at Fort Independence. If a man neglects to read the Daily Times, the government will go down on its knees to him, for that is the only treason nowadays.

The things that now most occupy people’s attention, such as politics and the daily routine, are, it is true, vital functions of human society. But they should be carried out unconsciously, like the corresponding functions of the physical body. They are infra-human, a kind of vegetation.

I sometimes wake to a half-awareness of them going on around me. In the same way, a man in an unhealthy state may become aware of some of the processes of digestion, and so suffer from what is called dyspepsia. It is as if a thinker allowed himself to be ground up in the great gizzard of creation.

Politics is, so to speak, the gizzard of society, that grinding stomach full of grit and gravel. The two political parties are its two opposite halves, sometimes perhaps split into quarters, which grind against each other.

Not only individuals but whole states thus suffer from chronic dyspepsia. You can imagine the kind of eloquence through which it expresses itself. So our life is not entirely a forgetting. It is also, unfortunately, to a great extent a remembering of things we should never have been conscious of, certainly not in our waking hours.

Why should we not meet, not always as dyspeptics telling each other our bad dreams, but sometimes as eupeptics, people of sound digestion, congratulating each other on the ever-glorious morning? Surely that is not an excessive demand.

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