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

on the tops of pillars,—even these

      forms of conscious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing

      than the scenes which I daily witness. The twelve labors of Hercules

      were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have

      undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could

      never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any

      labor. They have no friend Iolas to burn with a hot iron the root of

      the hydra’s head, but as soon as one head is crushed, two spring up.

      I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited

      farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more

      easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the

      open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with

      clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them

      serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is

      condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging

      their graves as soon as they are born? They have got to live a man’s

      life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they

      can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well nigh crushed and

      smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing

      before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never

      cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and

      wood-lot! The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary

      inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a

      few cubic feet of flesh.

      But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon

      plowed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called

      necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up

      treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through

      and steal. It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the

      end of it, if not before. It is said that Deucalion and Pyrrha created

      men by throwing stones over their heads behind them:—

      Inde genus durum sumus, experiensque laborum,

      Et documenta damus quâ simus origine nati.

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

      “From thence our kind hard-hearted is, enduring pain and care,

      Approving that our bodies of a stony nature are.”

      So much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle, throwing the

      stones over their heads behind them, and not seeing where they fell.

      Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere

      ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and

      superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be

      plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and

      tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure

      for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the

      manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the

      market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he

      remember well his ignorance—which his growth requires—who has so often

      to use his knowledge? We should feed and clothe him gratuitously

      sometimes, and recruit him with our cordials, before we judge of him.

      The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be

      preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat

      ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.

      Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are

      sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath. I have no doubt that some of

      you who read this book are unable to pay for all the dinners which you

      have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing

      or are already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed

      or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour. It is very evident

      what mean and sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been

      whetted by experience; always on the limits, trying to get into

      business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called

      by the Latins _æs alienum_, another’s brass, for some of their coins

      were made of brass; still living, and dying, and buried by this other’s

      brass; always promising to pay, promising to pay, tomorrow, and dying

      today, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many

      modes, only not state-prison offences; lying, flattering, voting,

      contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civility or dilating into an

      atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your

      neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his

      carriage, or import his groceries for him; making yourselves sick, that

      you may lay up something against a sick day, something to be tucked

      away in an old chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more

      safely, in the brick bank; no matter where, no matter how much or how

      little.

      I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, as to

      attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called Negro

      Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both

      north and south. It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to

      have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of

      yourself. Talk of a divinity in man! Look at the teamster on the

      highway, wending to market by day or night; does any divinity stir

      within him? His highest duty to fodder and water his horses! What is

      his destiny to him compared with the shipping interests? Does not he

      drive for Squire Make-a-stir? How godlike, how immortal, is he? See how

      he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being

      immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of

      himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant

      compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself,

      that