political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom? Is it a freedom to
be slaves, or a freedom to be free, of which we boast? We are a nation
of politicians, concerned about the outmost defences only of
freedom. It is our children's children who may perchance be really
free. We tax ourselves unjustly. There is a part of us which is not
represented. It is taxation without representation. We quarter troops,
we quarter fools and cattle of all sorts upon ourselves. We quarter
our gross bodies on our poor souls, till the former eat up all the
latter's substance.
With respect to a true culture and manhood, we are essentially
provincial still, not metropolitan- mere Jonathans. We are provincial,
because we do not find at home our standards; because we do not
worship truth, but the reflection of truth; because we are warped
and narrowed by an exclusive devotion to trade and commerce and
manufactures and agriculture and the like, which are but means, and
not the end.
So is the English Parliament provincial. Mere country bumpkins, they
betray themselves, when any more important question arises for them to
settle, the Irish question, for instance- the English question why did
I not say? Their natures are subdued to what they work in. Their "good
breeding" respects only secondary objects. The finest manners in the
world are awkwardness and fatuity when contrasted with a finer
intelligence. They appear but as the fashions of past days- mere
courtliness, knee-buckles and small-clothes, out of date. It is the
vice, but not the excellence of manners, that they are continually
being deserted by the character; they are cast-off-clothes or
shells, claiming the respect which belonged to the living creature.
You are presented with the shells instead of the meat, and it is no
excuse generally, that, in the case of some fishes, the shells are
of more worth than the meat. The man who thrusts his manners upon me
does as if he were to insist on introducing me to his cabinet of
curiosities, when I wished to see himself. 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, having authority to consult about
Transalpine interests only, and not the affairs of Rome. A praetor
or proconsul would suffice to settle the questions which absorb the
attention of the English Parliament and the American Congress.
Government and legislation! these I thought were respectable
professions. We have heard of heaven-born Numas, Lycurguses, and
Solons, in the history of the world, whose names at least may stand
for ideal legislators; but think of legislating to regulate the
breeding of slaves, or the exportation of tobacco! What have divine
legislators to do with the exportation or the importation of
tobacco? what humane ones with the breeding of slaves? Suppose you
were to submit the question to any son of God- and has He no
children in the Nineteenth Century? is it a family which is
extinct?- in what condition would you get it again? What shall a State
like Virginia say for itself at the last day, in which these have been
the principal, the staple productions? What ground is there for
patriotism in such a State? I derive my facts from statistical
tables which the States themselves have published.
A commerce that whitens every sea in quest of nuts and raisins,
and makes slaves of its sailors for this purpose! I saw, the other
day, a vessel which had been wrecked, and many lives lost, and her
cargo of rags, juniper berries, and bitter almonds were strewn along
the shore. It seemed hardly worth the while to tempt the dangers of
the sea between Leghorn and New York for the sake of a cargo of
juniper berries and bitter almonds. America sending to the Old World
for her bitters! Is not the sea-brine, is not shipwreck, bitter enough
to make the cup of life go down here? Yet such, to a great extent,
is our boasted commerce; and there are those who style themselves
statesmen and philosophers who are so blind as to think that
progress and civilization depend on precisely this kind of interchange
and activity- the activity of flies about a molasses- hogshead. Very
well, observes one, if men were oysters. And very well, answer I, if
men were mosquitoes.
Lieutenant Herndon, whom our government sent to explore the
Amazon, and, it is said, to extend the area of slavery, observed
that there was wanting there "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 what are
the "artificial wants" to be encouraged? Not the love of luxuries,
like the tobacco and slaves of, I believe, his native Virginia, nor
the ice and granite and other material wealth of our native New
England; nor are "the great resources of a country" that fertility
or barrenness of soil which produces these. The chief want, in every
State that I have been into, was a high and earnest purpose in its
inhabitants. This alone draws out "the great resources" of Nature, and
at last taxes her beyond her resources; for man naturally dies out
of her. When we want culture more than potatoes, and illumination more
than sugar-plums, then the great resources of a world are taxed and
drawn out, and the result, or staple production, is, not slaves, nor
operatives, but men- those rare fruits called heroes, saints, poets,
philosophers, and redeemers.
In short, as a snow-drift is formed where there is a lull in the
wind, so, one would say, where there is a lull of truth, an
institution springs up. But the truth blows right on over it,
nevertheless, and at length blows it down.
What is called politics is comparatively something so superficial
and inhuman, that practically I have never fairly recognized that it
concerns me at all. The newspapers, I perceive, devote some of their
columns specially to politics or government without charge; and
this, one would say, is all that saves it; but as I love literature
and to some extent the truth also, I never read those columns at any
rate. I do not wish to blunt my sense of right so much. I have not got
to answer for having read a single President's Message. A strange
age of the world this, when empires, kingdoms, and republics come
a-begging to a private man's door, and utter their complaints at his
elbow! I cannot take up a newspaper but I find that some wretched
government or other, hard pushed and on its last legs, is
interceding with me, the reader, to vote for it- more importunate than
an Italian beggar; and if I have a mind to look at its certificate,
made, perchance, by some benevolent merchant's clerk, or the skipper
that brought it over, for it cannot speak a word of English itself,
I shall probably read of the eruption of some Vesuvius, or the
overflowing of some Po, true or forged, which brought it into this
condition. I do not hesitate, in such
a case, to suggest work, or
the almshouse; or why not keep its castle in silence, as I do
commonly? The poor President, what with preserving his popularity
and doing 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, government
will go down on its knees to him, for this is the only treason in
these days.
Those things which now most engage the attention of men, as politics
and the daily routine, are, it is true, vital functions of human
society, but should be unconsciously performed, like the corresponding
functions of the physical body. They are infrahuman, a kind of
vegetation. I sometimes awake to a half-consciousness of them going on
about me, as a man may become conscious of some of the processes of
digestion in a morbid state, and so have the dyspepsia, as it is
called. It is as if a thinker submitted himself to be rasped by the
great gizzard of creation. Politics is, as it were, the gizzard of
society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are
its two opposite halves- sometimes split into quarters, it may be,
which grind on each other. Not only individuals, but states, have thus
a confirmed dyspepsia, which expresses itself, you can imagine by what
sort of eloquence. Thus our life is not altogether a forgetting, but
also, alas! to a great extent, a remembering, of that which we
should never have been conscious of, certainly not in our waking
hours. Why should we not meet, not always as dyspeptics, to tell our
had dreams, but sometimes as eupeptics, to congratulate each other
on the ever-glorious morning? I do not make an exorbitant demand,
surely.
THE END
.
Henry David Thoreau, Life Without Principle
(Series: # )
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