WALDEN AND ON THE DUTY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE. Henry David Thoreau

Concord in grandeur and luxury, as soon as it pleases me as much and

      will cost me no more than my present one.

      I thus found that the student who wishes for a shelter can obtain one

      for a lifetime at an expense not greater than the rent which he now

      pays annually. If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is

      that I brag for humanity rather than for myself; and my shortcomings

      and inconsistencies do not affect the truth of my statement.

      Notwithstanding much cant and hypocrisy,—chaff which I find it

      difficult to separate from my wheat, but for which I am as sorry as any

      man,—I will breathe freely and stretch myself in this respect, it is

      such a relief to both the moral and physical system; and I am resolved

      that I will not through humility become the devil’s attorney. I will

      endeavor to speak a good word for the truth. At Cambridge College the

      mere rent of a student’s room, which is only a little larger than my

      own, is thirty dollars each year, though the corporation had the

      advantage of building thirty-two side by side and under one roof, and

      the occupant suffers the inconvenience of many and noisy neighbors, and

      perhaps a residence in the fourth story. I cannot but think that if we

      had more true wisdom in these respects, not only less education would

      be needed, because, forsooth, more would already have been acquired,

      but the pecuniary expense of getting an education would in a great

      measure vanish. Those conveniences which the student requires at

      Cambridge or elsewhere cost him or somebody else ten times as great a

      sacrifice of life as they would with proper management on both sides.

      Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things

      which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important

      item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which

      he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries

      no charge is made. The mode of founding a college is, commonly, to get

      up a subscription of dollars and cents, and then following blindly the

      principles of a division of labor to its extreme, a principle which

      should never be followed but with circumspection,—to call in a

      contractor who makes this a subject of speculation, and he employs

      Irishmen or other operatives actually to lay the foundations, while the

      students that are to be are said to be fitting themselves for it; and

      for these oversights successive generations have to pay. I think that

      it would be _better than this_, for the students, or those who desire

      to be benefited by it, even to lay the foundation themselves. The

      student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by

      systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an

      ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience

      which alone can make leisure fruitful. “But,” says one, “you do not

      mean that the students should go to work with their hands instead of

      their heads?” I do not mean that exactly, but I mean something which he

      might think a good deal like that; I mean that they should not _play_

      life, or _study_ it merely, while the community supports them at this

      expensive game, but earnestly _live_ it from beginning to end. How

      could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment

      of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as

      mathematics. If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and

      sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common course, which is

      merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor, where any

      thing is professed and practised but the art of life;—to survey the

      world through a telescope or a microscope, and never with his natural

      eye; to study chemistry, and not learn how his bread is made, or

      mechanics, and not learn how it is earned; to discover new satellites

      to Neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, or to what vagabond

      he is a satellite himself; or to be devoured by the monsters that swarm

      all around him, while contemplating the monsters in a drop of vinegar.

      Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month,—the boy who

      had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted,

      reading as much as would be necessary for this,—or the boy who had

      attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the mean while,

      and had received a Rodgers’ penknife from his father? Which would be

      most likely to cut his fingers?... To my astonishment I was informed on

      leaving college that I had studied navigation!—why, if I had taken one

      turn down the harbor I should have known more about it. Even the _poor_

      student studies and is taught only _political_ economy, while that

      economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even

      sincerely professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he

      is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt

      irretrievably.

      As with our colleges, so with a hundred “modern improvements”; there is

      an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. The

      devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last for his early

      share and numerous succeeding investments in them. Our inventions are

      wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious

      things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which

      it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston

      or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph

      from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing

      important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man

      who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but

      when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his

      hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and

      not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and

      bring the old world some