Looking for something meaningful to listen to? Visit podcastlibrary.org, a growing home for timeless audiobooks, classic radio dramas, educational talks, history, philosophy, and thousands of hours of spoken word audio, all free to stream. Whether you want to relax, learn something new, or rediscover voices from the past, Podcast Library makes it easy to find something worth hearing. Start listening today at P-O-D-C-A-S-T-L-I-B-R-A-R-Y dot O-R-G.
Looking for something meaningful to listen to? Visit podcastlibrary.org, a growing home for timeless audiobooks, classic radio dramas, educational talks, history, philosophy, and thousands of hours of spoken word audio, all free to stream. Whether you want to relax, learn something new, or rediscover voices from the past, Podcast Library makes it easy to find something worth hearing. Start listening today at P-O-D-C-A-S-T-L-I-B-R-A-R-Y dot O-R-G.
Chapter 1. Economy. LibriVox Part 3. In the savage state, every family owns a shelter as good as the best, and sufficient for its coarser and simpler wants.
But I think that I speak within bounds when I say that, though the birds of the air have their nests, and the foxes their holes, and the savages their wigwams, in modern civilized society not more than one half the families own a shelter. In the large towns and cities, where civilization especially prevails, the number of those who own a shelter is a very small fraction of the whole. The rest pay an annual tax for this outside garment of all, become indispensable summer and winter, which would buy a village of Indian wigwams, but now helps to keep them poor as long as they live. I do not mean to insist here on the disadvantage of hiring compared with owning, but it is evident that the savage owns his shelter because it costs so little, while the civilized man hires his commonly because he cannot afford to own it, nor can he in the long run any better afford to hire.
But, answers one, by merely paying this tax, the poor civilized man secures an abode which is a palace compared with the savages. An annual rent of from twenty-five to a hundred dollars, these are the country rates, entitles him to the benefit of the improvements of centuries. Spacious apartments, clean paint and paper, rumford fireplace, back plastering, Venetian blinds, copper pump, spring lock, a commodious cellar and many other things. But how happens it that he who is said to enjoy these things is so commonly a poor civilized man, while the savage who has them not is rich as a savage?
If it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition of man, and I think that it is, though only the wise improve their advantages, it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings without making them more costly. And the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run. An average house in this neighborhood costs perhaps eight hundred dollars, and to lay up this sum will take from ten to fifteen years of the laborer's life, even if he is not encumbered with a family, estimating the pecuniary value of every man's labor at one dollar a day, for if some receive more, others receive less, so that he must have spent more than half his life commonly before his wigwam will be earned. If we suppose him to pay a rent instead, this is but a doubtful choice of evils.
Would the savage have been wise to exchange his wigwam for a palace on these terms? It may be guessed that I reduce almost the whole advantage of holding this superfluous property as a fund in store against the future, so far as the individual is concerned, mainly to the defraying of funeral expenses, but perhaps a man is not required to bury himself. Nevertheless, this points to an important distinction between civilized man and the savage, and no doubt they have designs on us for our benefit in making the life of the civilized people an institution in which the life of the individual is to a great extent absorbed in order to preserve and perfect that of the race. But I wish to show at what a sacrifice this advantage is at present obtained, and to suggest that we may possibly so live as to secure all the advantage without suffering any of the disadvantage.
What mean ye by saying that the poor yet have always with you, or that the fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge? As I live, saith the Lord God, ye shall not have occasion any more to use this proverb in Israel. Behold, all souls are mine, as the soul of the father's soul also the soul of the son is mine. The soul that sinneth, it shall die.
When I consider my neighbors, the farmers of Concord, who are at least as well off as the other classes, I find that for the most part they have been toiling twenty, thirty, or forty years that they may become the real owners of their farms, which commonly they have inherited with encumbrances or else bought with hired money, and we may regard one-third of that toil as the cost of their houses, but commonly they have not paid for them yet. It is true. The encumbrances sometimes outweigh the value of the farm, so that the farm itself becomes one great encumbrance. And still a man is found to inherit it, being well acquainted with it, as he says.
On applying to the assessors, I am surprised to learn that they cannot at once name a dozen in the town who own their farms free and clear. If you would know the history of these homesteads, inquire at the bank where they are mortgaged. The man who has actually paid for his farm with labor on it is so rare that every neighbor can point to him. I doubt if there are three such men in Concord.
What has been said of the merchants, that a very large majority, even ninety-seven in a hundred, are sure to fail, is equally true of the farmers. With regard to the merchants, however, one of them says pertinently that a great part of their failures are not genuine pecuniary failures, but merely failures to fulfill their engagements, because it is inconvenient. That is, it is the moral... Hey, Ontario, come on down to Bed-MGM Casino and check out our newest exclusive, The Price is Right Fortune Pick.
Don't miss out. Play exciting casino games based on the iconic game show. Only at Bed-MGM. Access to The Price is Right Fortune Pick is only available at Bed-MGM Casino.
Bed-MGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. Nineteen plus a wager, Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact CONNECTS-ONTARIO at 1-865-312-600 to seek to an advisor free of charge.
Bed-MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Character that breaks down. But this puts an infinitely worse face on the matter and suggests besides that probably not even the other three succeed in saving their souls, but are perchance bankrupt in a worse sense than they who fail honestly. Bankruptcy and repudiation are the springboards from which much of our civilization vaults and turns its somersets.
But the savage stands on the unelastic plank of famine. Yet the middle sex cattle show goes off here with Eclat annually as if all the joints of the agricultural machine were suant. The farmer is endeavoring to solve the problem of a livelihood by a formula more complicated than the problem itself. To get his shoestrings, he speculates in herds of cattle.
With consummate skill, he has set his trap with a hair spring to catch comfort and independence. And then, as he turned away, got his own leg into it. This is the reason he is poor. And for a similar reason, we are all poor in respect to a thousand savage comforts, though surrounded by luxuries.
As Chapman sings, quote, The false society of men for earthly greatness. All heavenly comforts rarefies to err. And when the farmer has got his house, he may not be the richer, but the poorer for it. And it be the house that has got him.
As I understand it, that was a valid objection urged by Momus against the house which Minerva made, that she, quote, had not made it movable, by which means a bad neighborhood might be avoided, end quote. And it may still be urged, for our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them. And the bad neighborhood to be avoided is our own scurvy selves. I know one or two families, at least in this town, who for nearly a generation have been wishing to sell their houses in the outskirts and move into the village, but have not been able to accomplish it.
And only death will set them free. Granted that the majority are able at last either to own or hire the modern house with all its improvements. While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.
And if the civilized man's pursuits are no worthier than the savages, if he is employed the greater part of his life in obtaining gross necessaries and comforts merely, why should he have a better dwelling than the former? But how do the poor minority fare? Perhaps it will be found that just in proportion, as some have been placed in outward circumstances above the savage, others have been degraded below him. The luxury of one class is counterbalanced by the indigence of another.
On the one side is the palace, on the other are the almshouse and silent poor. The myriads who built the pyramids to be the tombs of the pharaohs were fed on garlic, and it may be were not decently varied themselves. The mason who finishes the cornice of the palace returns at night perchance to a hut not so good as a wigwam. It is a mistake to suppose that, in a country where the usual evidences of civilization exist, the condition of a very large body of the inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of savages.
I refer to the degraded poor, not now to the degraded rich. To know this, I should not need to look farther than to the shanties which everywhere border our railroads, that last improvement in civilization, where I see in my daily walks human beings living in skies and all winter with an open door for the sake of light, without any visible, often imaginable, woodpile, and the forms of both old and young are permanently contracted by the long habit of shrinking from cold and misery and the development of all their limbs and faculties is checked. It certainly is fair to look at that class by whose labor the works which distinguish this generation are accomplished. Such too, to a greater or less extent, is the condition of the operatives of every denomination in England, which is the great workhouse of the world.
Or, I could refer you to Ireland, which is marked as one of the white or enlightened spots on the map. Contrast the physical condition of the Irish with that of the North American Indian or the South Sea Islander or any other savage race before it was degraded by contact with the civilized man. Yet I have no doubt that that people's rulers are as wise as the average of civilized rulers. Their condition only proves what squalidness may consist with civilization.
I hardly need refer now to the laborers in our southern states who produce the staple exports of this country and are themselves a staple production of the South. But to confine myself to those who are said to be in moderate circumstances, most men appear never to have considered what a house is and are actually, though needlessly, poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have. As if one were to wear any sort of coat which the tailor might cut out for him or gradually leaving off palm leaf. Hey Ontario, come on down to Bed MGM Casino and check out our newest exclusive The Price is Right Fortune Pick.
Don't miss out. Play exciting casino games based on the iconic game show. Only at Bed MGM. Access to The Price is Right Fortune Pick is only available at Bed MGM Casino.
Bed MGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus a major Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your family or someone close to you, please contact Connus Ontario at 186-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge.
Bed MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with I-Gaming Ontario. Hat or cap of woodchuck skin complain of hard times because he could not afford to buy him a crown. It is possible to invent a house still more convenient and luxurious than we have which yet all would admit that man could not afford to pay for. Shall we always study to obtain more of these things and not sometimes to be content with less?
Shall the respectable citizen thus gravely teach by precept and example the necessity of the young man's providing a certain number of superfluous glow shoes and umbrellas and empty guest chambers for empty guests before he dies? Why should not our furniture be as simple as the Arabs or the Indians? When I think of the benefactors of the race whom we have apotheosized as messengers from heaven bearers of divine gifts to man I do not see in my mind any retinue at their heels any carload of fashionable furniture or what if I were to allow would it not be a singular allowance that our furniture should be more complex than the Arabs in proportion as we are morally and intellectually his superiors. At present our houses are cluttered and defiled with it and a good housewife would sweep out the greater part into the dust hole and not leave her morning's work undone Morning work By the blushes of Aurora and the music of Memnon what should be man's morning work in this world?
I had three pieces of limestone on my desk but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still and threw them out the window in disgust How then could I have a furnished house? I would rather sit in the open air for no dust gathers on the grass unless where man has broken ground. It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions which the herd so diligently follow the traveler who stops at the best houses so called soon discovers this for the publicans presume him to be a sardanapalus and if he resigned himself to their tender mercies he would soon be completely emasculated i think that in the railroad car we are inclined to spend more on luxury than on safety and convenience and it threatens without attaining these to become no better than a modern drawing room with its divans and ottomans and sunshades and a hundred other oriental things which we are taking west with us invented for the ladies of the harem and the effeminate natives of the celestial empire which jonathan should be ashamed to know the names of i would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion i would rather ride on earth in an ox cart with a free circulation than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion train and breathe a malaria all the way the very simplicity and nakedness of man's life in the primitive ages imply this advantage at least that they left him still but a sojourner in nature when he was refreshed with food and sleep he contemplated his journey again he dwelt as it were in a tent in this world and was either threading the valleys or crossing the plains or climbing the mountaintops but lo men have become the tools of their tools the man who independently plucked the fruits when he was hungry has become a farmer and he who stood under a tree for shelter a housekeeper we now no longer camp as for a night but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven we have adopted christianity merely as an improved method of agriculture we have built for this world a family mansion and for the next a family tomb the best works of art are the expression of man's struggle to free himself from this condition but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten there is actually no place in this village for a work of fine art if any had come down to us to stand for our lives our houses and streets furnish no proper pedestal for it there is not a nail to hang a picture on or a shelf to receive the bust of a hero or a saint when i consider how our houses are built and paid for or not paid for and their internal economy managed and sustained i wonder that the floor does not give way under the visitor while he is admiring the gugahs upon the mantelpiece and let him through into the cellar to some solid and honest though earthy foundation i cannot but perceive that this so-called rich and refined life is a thing jumped at and i do not get on in the enjoyment of the fine arts which adorn it my attention being wholly occupied with the jump for i remember that the greatest genuine leap due to human muscles alone on record is that of certain wandering arabs who are said to have cleared 25 feet on level ground without factitious support man is sure to come to earth again beyond that distance the first question which i am tempted to put to the proprietor of such great impropriety is who bolsters you are you one of the 97 who fail or the three who succeed answer me these questions and then perhaps i may look at your baubles and find them ornamental the cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls must be stripped and our lives must be stripped and beautiful housekeeping and beautiful living be laid for a foundation now a taste for the beautiful is most cultivated outdoors where there is no house and no housekeeper old johnson in his wonder-working providence speaking of the first settlers of this town with whom he was contemporary tells us that quote they burrow themselves in the earth for their first shelter under some hillside and casting the soil aloft upon timber they make a smoky fire against the earth at the highest side end quote they did not quote provide them houses end quote says he quote till the earth by the lord's blessing brought forth bread to feed them end quote and the first year's crop was so light that quote they were forced to cut their bread very thin for a long season end quote the secretary of the province of new netherland writing in dutch in 1650 for the information of those who wish to take up land there states more particularly that quote those in new netherland and especially in new england who have no means to build farmhouses at first according to their wishes dig a square pit in the ground cellar fashion six or seven feet deep as long and as broad as they think proper case the earth inside with wood all around the wall and line the wood with a bark of trees or something else to prevent the caving in of the earth floor the cellar with plank and wainscot it overhead for a ceiling raise a roof of spars clear up and cover the spars with bark or green sods so that they can live dry and warm in these houses with their entire families for two three and four years it being understood that partitions are run through these cellars which are adapted to the size of the family the wealthy and principal men in new england in the beginning of the colonies commenced their first dwelling houses in this fashion for two reasons firstly in order not to waste time in building and not to want food the next season secondly in order not to discourage poor laboring people whom they brought over in numbers from fatherland in the course of three or four years when the country became adapted to agriculture they built themselves handsome houses spending on them several thousands end quote in this course which our ancestors took there was a show of prudence at least as if their principle were to satisfy the more pressing wants first but are the more pressing wants satisfied now when i think of acquiring for myself one of our luxurious dwellings i am deterred for so to speak the country is not yet adapted to human culture and we are still forced to cut our spiritual bread far thinner than our forefathers did their wheaton not that all architectural ornament is to be neglected even in the rudest periods but let our houses first be lined with beauty where they come in contact with our lives like the tenement of the shellfish and not overlaid with it but alas i have been inside one or two of them and know what they are lined with though we are not so degenerate but that we might possibly live in a cave or a wigwam or wear skins today it certainly is better to accept the advantages though so dearly bought which the invention and industry of mankind offer in such a neighborhood as this boards and shingles lime and bricks are cheaper and more easily obtained than suitable caves or whole logs or bark in sufficient quantities or even well-tempered clay of or flat stones i speak understandingly on this subject for i have made myself acquainted with it both theoretically and practically with a little more wit we might use these materials so as to become richer than the richest now are and make our civilization a blessing the civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage but to make haste to my own experiment near the end of march 1845 i borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by walden pond nearest to where i intended to build my house and began cut down some tall arrowy white pines still in their youth for timber it is difficult to begin without borrowing but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit your fellow man to have an interest in your enterprise the owner of the axe as he released his hold on it said that it was the apple of his eye but i returned it sharper than i received it it was a pleasant hillside where i worked covered with pine woods through which i looked out on the hey ontario come on down to benmgm casino and check out our newest exclusive the price is right fortune pick don't miss out play exciting casino games based on the iconic game show only at benmgm access to the price is right fortune pick is only available at benmgm casino benmgm and game sets remind you to play responsibly 19 plus two major ontario only please play responsibly if you have questions or concerns about your family or someone close to you please contact connet ontario at 186531 2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge benmgm operates pursuant to an operating agreement with i gaming ontario pond and a small open field in the woods where pines and hickories were springing up the ice in the pond was not yet dissolved though there were some open spaces and it was all dark colored and saturated with water there were some slight flurries of snow during the days that i worked there but for the most part when i came out onto the railroad on my way home its yellow sand heap stretched away gleaming in the hazy atmosphere and the rails shone in the spring sun and i heard the lark and poohy and other birds already come to commence another year with us they were pleasant spring days in which the winter of man's discontent was thawing as well as the earth and the life that had lain torpid began to stretch itself one day when my axe had come off and i had cut a green hickory for a wedge driving it with a stone and had placed the hole to soak in a pond hole in order to swell the wood i saw a striped snake run into the water and he lay on the bottom apparently without inconvenience as long as i stay there or more than a quarter of an hour perhaps because he had not yet fairly come out of the torpid state it appeared to me that for a likely reason men remain in their present low and primitive condition but if they should feel the influence of the spring of springs arousing them they would of necessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life i had previously seen the snakes in frosty mornings in my path with portions of their bodies still numb and inflexible waiting for the sun to thaw them on the first of april it rained and melted the ice and in the early part of the day which was very foggy i heard a stray goose groping about over the pond and cackling as if lost or like the spirit of the fog so i went on for some days cutting and hewing timber and also studs and rafters all with my narrow axe not having many communicable or scholar-like thoughts singing to myself men say they know many things but lo they have taken wings the arts and sciences and a thousand appliances the wind that blows is all that anybody knows i hewed the main timbers six inches square most of the studs on two sides only and the rafters and floor timbers on one side leaving the rest of the park on so that they were just as straight and much stronger than the sawed ones each stick was carefully mortised or tenoned by its stump for i had borrowed other tools by this time my days in the woods were not very long ones yet i usually carried my dinner of bread and butter and read the newspaper in which it was wrapped at noon sitting amid the green pine boughs which i had cut off and to my bread was imparted some of their fragrance for my hands were covered with a thick coat of pitch before i had done i was more the friend than the foe of the pine tree though i had cut down some of them having become better acquainted with it sometimes a rambler in the wood was attracted by the sound of my axe and we chatted pleasantly over the chips which i had made by the middle of april for i made no haste in my work but rather made the most of it my house was framed and ready for the raising i had already bought the shanty of james collins an irishman who worked on the fitchburg railroad for boards james collins shanty was considered an uncommonly fine one when i called to see it he was not at home i walked about the outside at first unobserved from within the windows were so deep and high it was of small dimensions with a peaked cottage roof and not much else to be seen the dirt being raised five feet all around as if it were a compost heap the roof was the soundest part though a good deal warped and made brittle by the sun door sill there was none but a perennial passage for the hens under the door board mrs c came to the door and asked me to view it from the inside the hens were driven in by my approach it was dark and had a dirt floor for the most part dank clammy and agui-ish only here aboard and there aboard which would not bear removal she lighted the lamp to show me the inside of the roof and the walls and also that the board floor extended under the bed warning me not to step into the cellar a sort of dust hole two feet deep in her own words they were good boards overhead good boards all around and a good window of two whole squares originally only the cat had passed out that way lately there was a stove a bed and a place to sit an infant in the house where it was born a silk parasol guilt-framed looking glass and a patent new coffee mill nailed to an oak sapling all told the bargain was soon concluded for james had in the meantime returned i to pay four dollars and twenty-five cents tonight he to vacate at five tomorrow morning selling to nobody else meanwhile i to take possession at six it were well he said to be there early and anticipate certain indistinct but wholly unjust claims on the score of ground rent and fuel this he assured me was the only encumbrance at six i passed him and his family on the road one large bundle held there all bed coffee mill looking glass hens all but the cat she took to the woods and became a wild cat and as i learned afterward trod in a trap set for woodchucks and so became a dead cat at last i took down this dwelling the same morning drawing the nails and removed it to the pond side by small cartloads spreading the boards on the grass there to bleach and warp back again in the sun one early thrush gave me a note or two as i drove along the woodland path i was informed treacherously by a young patrick that neighbor seeley an irishman in the intervals of the carting transferred the still tolerable straight and drivable nails staples and spikes to his pocket and then stood when i came back to pass the time of day and look freshly up unconcerned with spring thoughts at the devastation there being a dearth of work as he said he was there to represent spectatordom and help make the seemingly insignificant event one with the removal of the gods of troy i dug my cellar in the side of a hill sloping to the south where a woodchuck had formerly dug his burrow down through sumac and blackberry roots in the lowest stain of vegetation six feet square by seven deep to a fine sand where potatoes would not freeze in any winter the sides were left shelving and not stoned but the sun having never shone on them the sand still keeps its place it was but two hours work i took particular pleasure in this breaking of ground for in almost all latitudes men dig into the earth for an equitable temperature under the most splendid house in the city is still to be found the cellar where they store their roots as of old and long after the superstructure has disappeared posterity remark its dent in the earth the house is still but a sort of porch at the entrance of a burrow at length in the beginning of may with the help of some of my acquaintances rather to improve so good an occasion for neighborliness than from any necessity i set up the frame of my house no man was ever more honored in the character of his raisers than i they are destined i trust to assist at the raising of loftier structures one day i began to occupy my house on the fourth of july as soon as it was boarded and roofed for the boards were carefully feather edged and lapped so that it was perfectly impervious to rain but before boarding i laid the foundation of a chimney at one end bringing two cartloads of stones up the hill from the pond in my arms i built the chimney after my hoeing in the fall before a fire became necessary for warmth doing my cooking in the meanwhile out of doors on the ground early in the morning which mode i still think is in some respects more convenient and agreeable than the usual one when it stormed before my bread was baked i fixed a few boards over the fire and sat under them to watch my loaf and passed some pleasant hours in that way in those days when my hands were much employed i read but little but the least scraps of paper which lay on the ground my holder or tablecloth afforded me as much entertainment in fact answered the same purpose as the iliad it would be worthwhile to build still more deliberately than i did considering for instance what foundation a door a window a cellar a garret have in the nature of man and perchance never raising any superstructure until we found a better reason for it than our temporal necessities even there is some of the same fitness in a man's building his own house that there is in a bird's building its own nest who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough the poetic faculty would be universally developed as birds universally sing when they are so engaged but alas we do like cowbirds and cuckoos which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built and cheer no traveler with their chattering and unmusical notes shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction to the carpenter what does architecture amount to in the experience of the mass of men i never in all my walks came across a man engaged in so simple and natural an occupation as building his house we belong to the community it is not the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a man it is as much the preacher and the merchant and the farmer where is this division of labor to end and what object does it finally serve no doubt another may also think for me but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself true there are architects so called in this country and i have heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth a necessity and hence a beauty as if it were a revelation to him well very well perhaps from his point of view but only a little better than the common bilatantism a sentimental reformer in architecture he began at the cornice not at the foundation it was only how to put a core of truth within the ornaments that every sugarplum in fact hey ontario come on down to benmgm casino and check out our newest exclusive the price is right fortune pick don't miss out please sign casino games based on the iconic game show only at benmgm access to the price is right fortune pick is only available at benmgm casino benmgm and game sets remind you to play responsibly 19 plus two major ontario only please play responsibly if you have questions or concerns about your family or someone close to you please contact contact ontario at 186-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge benmgm operates pursuant to an operating agreement with igaming ontario might have an almond or caraway seed in it though i hold that almonds are most wholesome without the sugar and not how the inhabitant the indweller might build truly within and without and let the ornaments take care of themselves what reasonable man ever supposed that ornaments were something outward and in the skin merely that the tortoise got his spotted shell or the shellfish its mother of pearl tints by such a contract as the inhabitants of broadway their trinity church but a man has no more to do with the style of architecture of his house than a tortoise with that of its shell nor need the soldier be so idle as to try to paint the precise color of his virtue on his standard the enemy will find it out he may turn pale when the trial comes this man seemed to me to lean over the cornice and timidly whisper his half truth to the rude occupants who really knew it better than he what of architectural beauty i now see i know has gradually grown from within outward out of the necessities and character of the indweller who is the only builder out of some unconscious truthfulness and nobleness without ever a thought for the appearance and what additional beauty of this kind is destined to be produced will be preceded by a like unconscious beauty of life the most interesting dwellings in this country as a painter knows are the most unpretending humble log huts and cottages of the poor commonly it is the life of the inhabitants whose shells they are and not any peculiarity in their surfaces merely which make them picturesque and equally interesting will be the citizen's suburban box when his life shall be as simple and as agreeable to the imagination and there is as little straining after effect in the style of his dwelling a great proportion of architectural ornaments are literally hollow and a september gale would strip them off like borrowed plumes without injury to the substantials they can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar what if an equal ado were made about the ornaments of style in literature and the architects of our bibles spent as much time about their cornices as the architects of our churches do so are made the bellette and the beaux-zars and their professors much it concerns a man forsooth how a few sticks are slanted over him or under him and what colors are daubed upon his box it would signify somewhat if in any earnest sense he slanted them and daubed it but the spirit having departed out of the tenant it is of a peace with constructing his own coffin the architecture of the grave and carpenter is but another name for coffin maker one man says in his despair or indifference to life take up a handful of the earth at your feet and paint your house that color is he thinking of his last and narrow house toss up a copper for it as well what an abundance of leisure he must have why do you take up a handful of dirt better paint your house your own complexion let it turn pale or blush for you an enterprise to improve the style of cottage architecture when you have got my ornaments ready i will wear them before winter i built a chimney and shingled the sides of my house which were already impervious to rain with imperfect and sappy shingles made of the first slice of the log whose edges i was obliged to straighten with the plane i have thus a tight shingled and plastered house ten feet wide by fifteen long and eight feet posts with a garret and a closet a large window on each side two trap doors one door at the end and a brick fireplace opposite the exact cost of my house paying the usual price for such materials as i used but not counting the work all of which was done by myself was as follows and i give the details because very few are able to tell exactly what their houses cost and fewer still if any the separate cost of the various materials which compose them boards eight dollars three cents plus mostly shanty boards refuse shingles for roof sides four dollars lats a dollar twenty five two secondhand windows with glass two dollars forty three cents one thousand old brick four dollars two casks of lime two dollars forty cents that was high hair thirty one cents more than i needed metal tree iron fifteen cents nails three dollars ninety cents hinges and screws fourteen cents latch ten cents chalk one cent transportation one dollar forty cents i carried a good part on my back in all twenty eight dollars and twelve cents plus these are all the materials excepting the timber stones and sand which i claimed by swatter'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 the 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 innoble 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 wish 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 practiced but the art and life to serve 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 burned 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 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 attended the lectures on metallurgy at the institute in the meanwhile and had received a rogers 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 end chapter one part three