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Boards................................$ 8.03 1/2, (mostly shanty
boards.)
Refuse shingles for roof and sides.... 4.00
Laths................................. 1.25
Two second-hand windows with glass.... 2.43
One thousand old brick................ 4.00
Two casks of lime..................... 2.40 (That was high.)
Hair.................................. 0.31 (More than I needed.)
Mantle-tree iron...................... 0.15
Nails................................. 3.90
Hinges and screws..................... 0.14
Latch................................. 0.10
Chalk................................. 0.01
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Transportation........................ 1.40 (I carried a good
part on my back.)
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In all................................$ 28.12 1/2
These are all the materials, excepting the timber, stones, and sand, which I claimed by squatter's
right. I have also a small woodshed adjoining, made chiefly of the stuff which was left after
building the house.
I intend to build me a house which will surpass any on the main street in 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 anything 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
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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 meanwhile, 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 weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that
will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the
whooping cough. After all, the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most
important messages; he is not an evangelist, nor does he come round eating locusts and wild
honey. I doubt if Flying Childers ever carried a peck of corn to mill.
One says to me, "I wonder that you do not lay up money; you love to travel; you might take the
cars and go to Fitchburg today and see the country." But I am wiser than that. I have learned that [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]