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

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 on this point, and as one not interested in the success or

failure of the present economical and social arrangements. I was more

independent than any farmer in Concord, for I was not anchored to a

house or farm, but could follow the bent of my genius, which is a very

crooked one, every moment. Beside being better off than they already,

if my house had been burned or my crops had failed, I should have been

nearly as well off as before.

I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds as

herds are the keepers of men, the former are so much the freer. Men and

oxen exchange work; but if we consider necessary work only, the oxen

will be seen to have greatly the advantage, their farm is so much the

larger. Man does some of his part of the exchange work in his six weeks

of haying, and it is no boy’s play. Certainly no nation that lived

simply in all respects, that is, no nation of philosophers, would

commit so great a blunder as to use the labor of animals. True, there

never was and is not likely soon to be a nation of philosophers, nor am

I certain it is desirable that there should be. However, _I_ should

never have broken a horse or bull and taken him to board for any work

he might do for me, for fear I should become a horse-man or a herds-man

merely; and if society seems to be the gainer by so doing, are we

certain that what is one man’s gain is not another’s loss, and that the

stable-boy has equal cause with his master to be satisfied? Granted

that some public works would not have been constructed without this

aid, and let man share the glory of such with the ox and horse; does it

follow that he could not have accomplished works yet more worthy of

himself in that case? When men begin to do, not merely unnecessary or

artistic, but luxurious and idle work, with their assistance, it is

inevitable that a few do all the exchange work with the oxen, or, in

other words, become the slaves of the strongest. Man thus not only

works for the animal within him, but, for a symbol of this, he works

for the animal without him. Though we have many substantial houses of

brick or stone, the prosperity of the farmer is still measured by the

degree to which the barn overshadows the house. This town is said to

have the largest houses for oxen, cows, and horses hereabouts, and it

is not behindhand in its public buildings; but there are very few halls

for free worship or free speech in this county. It should not be by

their architecture, but why not even by their power of abstract

thought, that nations should seek to commemorate themselves? How much

more admirable the Bhagvat-Geeta than all the ruins of the East! Towers

and temples are the luxury of princes. A simple and independent mind

does not toil at the bidding of any prince. Genius is not a retainer to

any emperor, nor is its material silver, or gold, or marble, except to

a trifling extent. To what end, pray, is so much stone hammered? In

Arcadia, when I was there, I did not see any hammering stone. Nations

are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of

themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if equal

pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners? One piece of good

sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon. I

love better to see stones in place. The grandeur of Thebes was a vulgar

grandeur. More sensible is a rod of stone wall that bounds an honest

man’s field than a hundred-gated Thebes that has wandered farther from

the true end of life. The religion and civilization which are barbaric

and heathenish build splendid temples; but what you might call

Christianity does not. Most of the stone a nation hammers goes toward

its tomb only. It buries itself alive. As for the Pyramids, there is

nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could

be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for

some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have

drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs. I might

possibly invent some excuse for them and him, but I have no time for

it. As for the religion and love of art of the builders, it is much the

same all the world over, whether the building be an Egyptian temple or

the United States Bank. It costs more than it comes to. The mainspring

is vanity, assisted by the love of garlic and bread and butter. Mr.

Balcom, a promising young architect, designs it on the back of his

Vitruvius, with hard pencil and ruler, and the job is let out to Dobson

& Sons, stonecutters. When the thirty centuries begin to look down on

it, mankind begin to look up at it. As for your high towers and

monuments, there was a crazy fellow once in this town who undertook to

dig through to China, and he got so far that, as he said, he heard the

Chinese pots and kettles rattle; but I think that I shall not go out of

my way to admire the hole which he made. Many are concerned about the

monuments of the West and the East,—to know who built them. For my

part, I should like to know who in those days did not build them,—who

were above such trifling. But to proceed with my statistics.

By surveying, carpentry, and day-labor of various other kinds in the

village in the mean while, for I have as many trades as fingers, I had

earned $13.34. The expense of food for eight months, namely, from July