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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. LibraVox, Part 5.
One young man of my acquaintance who has inherited some acres told me that he thought he should live as I did, if he had the means. I would not have anyone adopt my mode of living on any account. For beside that before he has fairly learned it, I may have found out another for myself, I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible. But I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his fathers or his mothers or his neighbors instead.
The youth may build, or plant, or sail. Only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells me he would like to do. It is by a mathematical point only that we are wise, as the sailor or the fugitive slave keeps the pole star in his eye. But that is sufficient guidance for all our life.
We may not arrive at our port within a calculable period, but we would preserve the true course. Undoubtedly in this case, what is true for one is true or still for a thousand, as a large house is not proportionally more expensive than a small one, since one roof may cover one's cellar underly and one wall separate several apartments. But for my part, I prefer the solitary dwelling. Moreover it will commonly be cheaper to build the whole yourself than to convince another of the advantage of the common wall.
And when you have done this, the common partition, to be much cheaper, must be a thin one, and that other may prove a bad neighbor and also not keep his side in repair. The only cooperation which is commonly possible is exceedingly partial and superficial, and what little true cooperation there is, is as if it were not being a harmony inaudible to men. If a man has faith, he will cooperate with equal faith everywhere. If he has not faith, he will continue to live like the rest of the world, whatever company he is joined to.
To cooperate in the highest, as well as the lowest sense, means to get our living together. I heard it proposed lately that two young men should travel together over the world, the one without money, earning his means as he went, before the mast and behind the plow, the other carrying a bill of exchange in his pocket. It was easy to see that they could not long be companions or co-operate, since one would not operate at all. They would part at the first interesting crisis in their adventures.
Above all, as I have implied, the man who goes alone can start today. But he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready, and it may be a long time before they get off. But all this is very selfish I have heard some of my townsmen say. I confess that I have hitherto indulged very little in philanthropic enterprises.
I have made some sacrifices to a sense of duty, and among others have sacrificed this pleasure also. There are those who have used all their arts to persuade me to undertake the support of some poor family in the town. And if I had nothing to do, for the devil finds employment for the idol, I might try my hand at some such pastime as that. However, when I have thought to indulge myself in this respect and lay their heaven under an obligation by maintaining certain poor persons in all respects as comfortably as I maintain myself, and have even ventured so far as to make them the offer, they have won an all unhesitatingly preferred to remain poor.
While my town's men and women are devoted in so many ways to the good of their fellows, I trust that one at least may be spared to other and less humane pursuits. You must have a genius for charity, as well as for anything else. As for doing good, that is one of the professions which are full. Moreover, I have tried it fairly, and strangers it may seem am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution.
Probably I should not consciously and deliberately forsake my particular calling to do the good which society demands of me, to save the universe from annihilation. And I believe that a like but infinitely greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preserves it. But I would not stand between any man and his genius, and to him who does this work, which I decline, with his whole heart and soul and life I would say persevere, even if the world call it doing evil, as it is most likely they will. I am far from supposing that my case is a peculiar one, no doubt many of my readers would make a similar defense.
When I am doing something, and I will not engage that my neighbors shall pronounce it good, I do not hesitate to say that I should be a capital fellow to hire, but what that is, it is for my employer to find out. What good I do, in the common sense of that word, must be aside from my main path, and for the most part wholly unintended. Men say, practically, begin where you are and such as you are, without aiming mainly to become of more worth, and with kindness a forethought go about doing good. So I were to preach it all in this strain, I should say rather set about being good.
As if the sun should stop when he had kindled his fires up to the splendor of a moon or a star of the sixth magnitude, and go about like Robin Goodfellow peeping in at every cottage window, inspiring lunatics and tainting meats and making darkness visible, instead of steadily increasing his genial heat and beneficence, till he is of such brightness that no mortal can look him in the face. And then, and in the meanwhile too, going about the world in his own orbit, doing it good. Rather, as a truer philosopher has discovered, the world going about him getting good. When Faton, wishing to prove his heavenly birth by his beneficence, had the sun's chariot but one day, and drove out of the beaten track he burned several blocks of houses in the lower streets of heaven, and scorched the surface of the earth and dried up every spring and made the great desert of Sahara, till at length Jupiter hurled him headlong to the earth with a thunderbolt, and the sun, through grief at his death, did not shine for a year.
There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted. It is human, it is divine, carrion. If I knew for certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life, as from that dry and parching wind of the African deserts called the Simum, which fills the mouth and nose and ears and eyes with dust till you are suffocated, for fear that I should get some of his good done to me, some of its virus mingled with my blood. No, in this case I would rather suffer evil the natural way.
A man is not a good man to me because he will feed me if I should be starving or warm me if I should be freezing or pull me out of a ditch if I should ever fall into one. I can find you a Newfoundland dog that will do as much. Philanthropy is not love for one's fellow man in the broadest sense. Howard was no doubt an exceedingly kind and worthy man in his way and has his reward, but comparatively speaking, what are a hundred howards to us, if their philanthropy do not help us in our best estate when we are most worthy to be helped?
I never heard of a philanthropic meeting in which it was sincerely proposed to do any good to me, or the like of me. The Jesuits were quite balked by those Indians who, being burned at the stake, suggested a new mode of torture to their tormentors. Being superior to physical suffering, it sometimes chanced that they were superior to any consolation which the missionaries could offer, and the law to do as you would be done by fell with less persuasiveness on the ears of those who, for their part, did not care how they were done by, who loved their enemies after a new fashion, and came very near freely forgiving them all they did. Be sure that you give the poor the aid they most need, though it be your example which leaves them far behind.
If you give money, spend yourself with it, and do not merely abandon it to them? We make curious mistakes sometimes. Often the poor man is not so cold and hungry as he is dirty and ragged and gross. It is partly his taste, and not merely his misfortune.
If you give him money, he will perhaps buy more rags with it. I always want to pity the clumsy Irish laborers who cut ice on the pond in such mean and ragged clothes, while I shivered in my more tidy and somewhat more fashionable garments. Till one bitter cold day, one who had slipped into the water, came to my house to warm him, and I saw him strip off three pairs of pants and two pairs of sockings, here he got down to the skin. Though they were dirty and ragged enough it is true, and that he could afford to refuse the extra garments which I offered him.
He had so many intro ones. This? Come on down to Ben M. G On me a flannel shirt than a whole slop shop on him.
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil, to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve. It is the pious slave breeder devoting the proceeds of every tenth slave to buy a Sunday's liberty for the rest. Some show their kindness to the poor by employing them in their kitchens. Would they not be kinder if they employed themselves there?
You boast of spending a tenth part of your income in charity. Maybe you should spend the nine tenths so, and done with it. Society recovers only a tenth part of the property then. Is this owing to the generosity of him and whose possession it is found, or to the remissness of the officers of justice?
Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently appreciated by mankind. Nay, it is greatly overrated. It is our selfishness which overrates it. A robust poor man, one sunny day here in Concord, praised a fellow townsman to me because, as he said, he was kind to the poor, meaning himself.
The kind uncles and ants of the race are more esteemed than its true spiritual fathers and mothers. I once heard a reverend lecturer on England, a man of learning and intelligence after enumerating her scientific literary and political worthies, Shakespeare, Bacon, Cromwell, Milton, Newton, and others, speak next of her Christian heroes, whom, as if his profession required it of him, he elevated to a place far above all the rest, as the greatest of the great. They were pen, howard, and Mrs. Frye.
Everyone must feel the falsehood and cant of this. The last were not England's best men and women. Only perhaps her best philanthropists. I would not subtract anything from the praise that is due to philanthropy, but merely to man justice for all who by their lives and works are a blessing to mankind.
I do not value chiefly a man's uprightness and benevolence, which are, as it were, his stem and leaves, those plants of whose greenness withered we make herb tea for the sick serve but a humble use, and are most employed by quacks. I want the flower and fruit of a man, that some fragrance be waffered over from him to me and some ripeness flavor our intercourse. His goodness must not be a partial and transitory act, but a constant superfluity which costs him nothing in which he is unconscious. This is a charity that hides a multitude of sins.
The philanthropist too often surrounds mankind with the remembrance of his own cast-off griefs as an atmosphere and calls it sympathy. We should impart our courage and not our despair, our health and ease and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread by contagion, from what southern plains comes up the voice of wailing. Under what latitudes reside the heathen to whom we would send light. Who is that intemperate and brutal man whom we would redeem?
If anything ail a man, so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even, for that is the seat of sympathy, he forthwith sets about reforming the world. Being a microcosm himself he discovers, and it is a true discovery, and he is the man to make it, that the world has been eating green apples. Through his eyes, in fact, the globe itself is a great green apple, which there is a danger awful to think of, that the children of men will nibble before it is ripe. And straightway, his drastic philanthropy seeks out the Eskimo, and the Patagonian, and embraces the populous Indian and Chinese villages, and thus by a few years of philanthropic activity, the powers and the meanwhile using him for their own ends, no doubt, he cures himself of his dyspepsia, the globe acquires a faint blush on one or both of its cheeks, as if it were beginning to be ripe, and life loses its crudity, and is once more sweet and wholesome to live.
I never dreamed of an enormity greater than I have committed, I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself. I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his sympathy with his fellows in distress, but though he be the holiest son of God, is his private ale. Let this be righted, let the spring come to him, the morning rise over his couch, and he will forsake his generous companions without apology. My excuse for not lecturing against the use of tobacco is, that I never chew it.
There is a penalty which reformed tobacco-chures have to pay. Though there are things enough I have chewed which I could lecture against, if you should ever be betrayed into any of these philanthropies, do not let your left hand know what your right hand does for it is not worth knowing. Rescue the drowning and tie your shoestrings, take your time, and set about some free labor. Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints.
Our hymn-books resound with a melodious cursing of God and enduring him forever. One would say that even the prophets and redeemers had rather consoled the fears, then confirmed the hopes of man. There is nowhere recorded a simple and irrepressible satisfaction with the gift of life. Any memorable praise of God.
All health and success does me good. However, far off and withdrawn it may appear. All disease and failure helps to make me sad and does me evil. However much sympathy it may have with me or I with it.
If then, we would indeed restore mankind by truly Indian, Botanic, Magnetic, or Natural means, let us first be as simple and well as nature ourselves. Dispel the clouds which hang over our own brows and take up a little life into our pores. Do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become one of the worthies of the world. I read in the Goulistan, or flower garden of Sheik Saadi of Shiraz, that, quote, they asked a wise man saying, of the many celebrated trees which the most high God has created lofty and unbradius, they call none Azad, or free, accepting the Cyprus which bears no fruit.
What mystery is there in this? He replied. Each has its appropriate produce, and appointing season, during the continuance of which it is fresh and blooming, and during their absence dry and withered. To neither of which states is the Cyprus exposed, being always flourishing, and of this nature are the Azads or religious independence.
Fix not thy heart on that which is transitory, for the Dijla or Tigris will continue to flow through Baghdad after the race of Khadifs is extinct. If thy hand has plenty, be liberal as the date tree, but if it affords nothing to give away, be an Azad, or free man, like the Cyprus, end quote. Complimental verses, the pretensions of poverty, quote, thou dost presume too much Purnidi wretch to claim a station in the firmament, because thy humble cotid or thy tub, nurses some lazy or pedantic virtue in the cheap sunshine or by shady springs, with roots and pot herbs, where thy right hand, tearing those humane passions from the mine, upon whose stocks fair blooming virtues flourish, de-gradeth nature and be numbeth sense, and gorgon-like, turns active men to stone. We not require the dull society of your necessitated temperance, or that unnatural stupidity that knows nor joy nor sorrow, nor your forced, falsely exalted passive fortitude above the active.
This low abject brood that fix their seats in mediocrity become your servile minds. But we advance such virtues only as admit excess. Brave, bounteous acts, regal magnificence, all seen prudence, magnanimity, that knows no bound, and that heroic virtue for which antiquity hath left no name, but patterns only, such as Hercules, Achilles, Thesis. Back to thy loath to sell, and when thou seest the new enlightened sphere, study to know, what those were these were.