Life Without Principle

by Henry David Thoreau

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  courtliness, knee-buckles and small-clothes, out of date.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

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