WALDEN AND ON THE DUTY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE. Henry David ThoreauЧитать онлайн книгу.
the
first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear
will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. After all,
the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most
important messages; he is not an evangelist, nor does he come round
eating locusts and wild honey. I doubt if Flying Childers ever carried
a peck of corn to mill.
One says to me, “I wonder that you do not lay up money; you love to
travel; you might take the cars and go to Fitchburg to-day and see the
country.” But I am wiser than that. I have learned that the swiftest
traveller is he that goes afoot. I say to my friend, Suppose we try who
will get there first. The distance is thirty miles; the fare ninety
cents. That is almost a day’s wages. I remember when wages were sixty
cents a day for laborers on this very road. Well, I start now on foot,
and get there before night; I have travelled at that rate by the week
together. You will in the mean while have earned your fare, and arrive
there some time to-morrow, or possibly this evening, if you are lucky
enough to get a job in season. Instead of going to Fitchburg, you will
be working here the greater part of the day. And so, if the railroad
reached round the world, I think that I should keep ahead of you; and
as for seeing the country and getting experience of that kind, I should
have to cut your acquaintance altogether.
Such is the universal law, which no man can ever outwit, and with
regard to the railroad even we may say it is as broad as it is long. To
make a railroad round the world available to all mankind is equivalent
to grading the whole surface of the planet. Men have an indistinct
notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades
long enough all will at length ride somewhere, in next to no time, and
for nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the depot, and the conductor
shouts “All aboard!” when the smoke is blown away and the vapor
condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are
run over,—and it will be called, and will be, “A melancholy accident.”
No doubt they can ride at last who shall have earned their fare, that
is, if they survive so long, but they will probably have lost their
elasticity and desire to travel by that time. This spending of the best
part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable
liberty during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the
Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he
might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have
gone up garret at once. “What!” exclaim a million Irishmen starting up
from all the shanties in the land, “is not this railroad which we have
built a good thing?” Yes, I answer, _comparatively_ good, that is, you
might have done worse; but I wish, as you are brothers of mine, that
you could have spent your time better than digging in this dirt.
Before I finished my house, wishing to earn ten or twelve dollars by
some honest and agreeable method, in order to meet my unusual expenses,
I planted about two acres and a half of light and sandy soil near it
chiefly with beans, but also a small part with potatoes, corn, peas,
and turnips. The whole lot contains eleven acres, mostly growing up to
pines and hickories, and was sold the preceding season for eight
dollars and eight cents an acre. One farmer said that it was “good for
nothing but to raise cheeping squirrels on.” I put no manure whatever
on this land, not being the owner, but merely a squatter, and not
expecting to cultivate so much again, and I did not quite hoe it all
once. I got out several cords of stumps in ploughing, which supplied me
with fuel for a long time, and left small circles of virgin mould,
easily distinguishable through the summer by the greater luxuriance of
the beans there. The dead and for the most part unmerchantable wood
behind my house, and the driftwood from the pond, have supplied the
remainder of my fuel. I was obliged to hire a team and a man for the
ploughing, though I held the plough myself. My farm outgoes for the
first season were, for implements, seed, work, &c., $14.72½. The seed
corn was given me. This never costs anything to speak of, unless you
plant more than enough. I got twelve bushels of beans, and eighteen
bushels of potatoes, beside some peas and sweet corn. The yellow corn
and turnips were too late to come to any thing. My whole income from
the farm was $ 23.44 Deducting the outgoes,........... 14.72½ There are left,................. $ 8.71½,
beside produce consumed and on hand at the time this estimate was made
of the value of $4.50,—the amount on hand much more than balancing a
little grass which I did not raise. All things considered, that is,
considering the importance of a man’s soul and of to-day,
notwithstanding the short time occupied by my experiment, nay, partly
even because of its transient character, I believe that that was doing
better than any farmer in Concord did that year.
The next year I did better still, for I spaded up all the land which I
required, about a third of an acre, and I learned from the experience
of both years, not being in the least awed by many celebrated works on
husbandry, Arthur Young among the rest, that if one would live simply
and eat only the crop which he raised, and raise no more than he ate,
and not exchange it for an insufficient quantity of more luxurious and
expensive things, he would need to cultivate only a few rods of ground,
and that it would be cheaper to spade up that than to use oxen to
plough it, and to select a fresh spot from time to time than to manure
the old, and he could do all his necessary farm work as it were with
his left hand at odd hours in the summer; and thus he would not be tied
to an ox, or horse, or cow, or pig, as at present. I desire to speak
impartially