connection therewith, the house will come to be esteemed a Sanctuary.
The language of a ruder age has given to common law the maxim that
every man’s house is his castle: the progress of truth will make every
house a shrine. Will not man one day open his eyes and see how dear
he is to the soul of Nature,--how near it is to him? Will he not see,
through all he miscalls accident, that Law prevails for ever and ever;
that his private being is a part of it; that its home is in his own
unsounded heart; that his economy, his labor, his good and bad fortune,
his health and manners, are all a curious and exact demonstration in
miniature of the Genius of the Eternal Providence? When he perceives
the Law, he ceases to despond. Whilst he sees it, every thought and
act is raised, and becomes an act of religion. Does the consecration
of Sunday confess the desecration of the entire week? Does the
consecration of the church confess the profanation of the house? Let
us read the incantation backward. Let the man stand on his feet. Let
religion cease to be occasional; and the pulses of thought that go to
the borders of the universe, let them proceed from the bosom of the
Household.
These are the consolations,--these are the ends to which the household
is instituted and the rooftree stands. If these are sought, and in any
good degree attained, can the State, can commerce, can climate, can
the labor of many for one, yield anything better, or half as good?
Beside these aims, Society is weak and the State an intrusion. I think
that the heroism which at this day would make on us the impression
of Epaminondas and Phocion must be that of a domestic conqueror. He
who shall bravely and gracefully subdue this Gorgon of Convention and
Fashion, and show-men how to lead a clean, handsome, and heroic life
amid the beggarly elements of our cities and villages; whoso shall
teach me how to eat my meat and take my repose, and deal with men,
without any shame following, will restore the life of man to splendor,
and make his own name dear to all history.
FARMING.
FARMING.
The glory of the farmer is that, in the division of labors, it is his
part to create. All trade rests at last on his primitive activity. He
stands close to nature; he obtains from the earth the bread and the
meat. The food which was not, he causes to be. The first farmer was
the first man, and all historic nobility rests on possession and use
of land. Men do not like hard work, but every man has an exceptional
respect for tillage, and a feeling that this is the original calling of
his race, that he himself is only excused from it by some circumstance
which made him delegate it for a time to other hands. If he have
not some skill which recommends him to the farmer, some product for
which the farmer will give him corn, he must himself return into his
due place among the planters. And the profession has in all eyes its
ancient charm, as standing nearest to God, the first cause.
Then the beauty of nature, the tranquillity and innocence of the
countryman, his independence, and his pleasing arts,--the care of bees,
of poultry, of sheep, of cows, the dairy, the care of hay, of fruits,
of orchards and forests, and the reaction of these on the workman, in
giving him a strength and plain dignity, like the face and manners
of nature, all men acknowledge. All men keep the farm in reserve as
an asylum where, in case of mischance, to hide their poverty,--or a
solitude, if they do not succeed in society. And who knows how many
glances of remorse are turned this way from the bankrupts of trade,
from mortified pleaders in courts and senates, or from the victims
of idleness and pleasure? Poisoned by town life and town vices, the
sufferer resolves: ‘Well, my children, whom I have injured, shall go
back to the land, to be recruited and cured by that which should have
been my nursery, and now shall be their hospital.’
The farmer’s office is precise and important, but you must not try to
paint him in rose-color; you cannot make pretty compliments to fate and
gravitation, whose minister he is. He represents the necessities. It is
the beauty of the great economy of the world that makes his comeliness.
He bends to the order of the seasons, the weather, the soils and crops,
as the sails of a ship bend to the wind. He represents continuous hard
labor, year in, year out, and small gains. He is a slow person, timed
to nature, and not to city watches. He takes the pace of seasons,
plants, and chemistry. Nature never hurries: atom by atom, little
by little, she achieves her work. The lesson one learns in fishing,
yachting, hunting, or planting, is the manners of Nature; patience
with the delays of wind and sun, delays of the seasons, bad weather,
excess or lack of water,--patience with the slowness of our feet, with
the parsimony of our strength, with the largeness of sea and land we
must traverse, etc. The farmer times himself to Nature, and acquires
that livelong patience which belongs to her. Slow, narrow man, his rule
is, that the earth shall feed and clothe him; and he must wait for his
crop to grow. His entertainments, his liberties, and his spending must
be on a farmer’s scale, and not on a merchant’s. It were as false for
farmers to use a wholesale and massy expense, as for states to use a
minute economy. But if thus pinched on one side, he has compensatory
advantages. He is permanent, clings to his land as the rocks do. In
the town where I live, farms remain in the same families for seven and
eight generations; and most of the first settlers (in 1635), should
they reappear on the farms to-day, would find their own blood and names
still in possession. And the like fact holds in the surrounding towns.
This hard work will always be done by one kind of man; not by scheming
speculators, nor by soldiers, nor professors, nor readers of Tennyson;
but by men of endurance,--deep-chested, long-winded, tough, slow and
sure, and timely. The farmer has a great health, and the appetite of
health, and means to his end: he has broad lands for his home, wood
to burn great fires, plenty of plain food; his milk, at least, is
unwatered; and for sleep, he has cheaper and better and more of it than
citizens.
He has grave trusts confided to him. In the great household of Nature,
the farmer stands at the door of the bread-room, and weighs to each
his loaf. It is for him to say whether men shall marry or not. Early
marriages and the number of births are indissolubly connected with
abundance of food; or, as Burke said, “Man breeds at the mouth.” Then
he is the Board of Quarantine. The farmer is a hoarded capital of
health, as the farm is the capital of wealth; and it is from him that
the health and power, moral and intellectual, of the cities came.
The city is always recruited from the country. The men in cities who
are the centres of energy, the driving-wheels of trade, politics, or
practical arts, and the women of beauty and genius are the children or
grandchildren of farmers, and are spending the energies which their
fathers’ hardy, silent life accumulated in frosty furrows, in poverty,
necessity, and darkness.
He is the continuous benefactor. He who digs a well, constructs a stone
fountain, plants a grove of trees by the roadside, plants an orchard,
builds a durable house, reclaims a swamp, or so much as puts a stone
seat by the wayside, makes the land so far lovely and desirable, makes
a fortune which he cannot carry away with him, but which is useful to
his country long afterwards. The man that works at home helps society
at large with somewhat more of certainty than he who devotes himself to
charities. If it be true that, not by votes of political parties, but
by the eternal laws of political economy, slaves are driven out of a
slave State as fast as it is surrounded by free States, then the true
abolitionist is the farmer, who, heedless of laws and constitutions,
stands all day in the field, investing his labor in the land, and
making a product with which no forced labor can compete.
We commonly say that the rich man can speak the truth, can afford
honesty, can afford independence of opinion and action;--and that is
the theory of nobility. But it is the rich man in a true sense, that is
to say, not the man of large income and large expenditure, but solely
the man whose outlay is less than his income and is steadily kept so.
In English factories, the boy that watches the loom, to tie the thread
when the wheel stops to indicate that a thread is broken, is called a
_minder_. And in this great factory of our Copernican globe, shifting
its slides; rotating its constellations, times, and tides; bringing
now the day of planting, then of watering, then of weeding, then of
reaping, then of curing and storing,--the farmer is the _minder_. His
machine is of colossal proportions,--the diameter of the water-wheel,
the arms of the levers, the power of the battery, are out of all
mechanic measure;--and it takes him long to understand its parts and
its working. This pump never “sucks”; these screws are never loose;
this machine is never out of gear; the vat and piston, wheels and
tires, never wear out, but are self-repairing.
Who are the farmer’s servants? Not the Irish, nor the coolies, but
Geology and Chemistry, the quarry of the air, the water of the brook,
the lightning of the cloud, the castings of the worm, the plough of the
frost. Long before he was born, the sun of ages decomposed the rocks,
mellowed his land, soaked it with light and heat, covered it with
vegetable film, then with forests, and accumulated the sphagnum whose
decays made the peat of his meadow.
Science has shown the great circles in which nature works; the manner
in which marine plants balance the marine animals, as the land plants
supply the oxygen which the animals consume, and the animals the carbon
which the plants absorb. These activities are incessant. Nature works
on a method of _all for each and each for all_. The strain that is made
on one point bears on every arch and foundation of the structure. There
is a perfect solidarity. You cannot detach an atom from its holdings,
or strip off from it the electricity, gravitation, chemic affinity, or
the relation to light and heat, and leave the atom bare. No, it brings
with it its universal ties.
Nature, like a cautious testator, ties up her estate so as not to
bestow it all on one generation, but has a forelooking tenderness and
equal regard to the next and the next, and the fourth, and the fortieth
age.
There lie the inexhaustible magazines. The eternal rocks, as we call
them, have held their oxygen or lime undiminished, entire, as it was.
No particle of oxygen can rust or wear, but has the same energy as
on the first morning. The good rocks, those patient waiters, say to
him: ‘We have the sacred power as we received it. We have not failed
of our trust, and now--when in our immense day the hour is at last
struck--take the gas we have hoarded; mingle it with water; and let it
be free to grow in plants and animals, and obey the thought of man.’
The earth works for him; the earth is a machine which yields almost
gratuitous service to every application of intellect. Every plant is a
manufacturer of soil. In the stomach of the plant development begins.
The tree can draw on the whole air, the whole earth, on all the rolling
main. The plant is all suction-pipe,--imbibing from the ground by its
root, from the air by its leaves, with all its might.
The air works for him. The atmosphere, a sharp solvent, drinks the
essence and spirit of every solid on the globe,--a menstruum which
melts the mountains into it. Air is matter subdued by heat. As the sea
is the grand receptacle of all rivers, so the air is the receptacle
from which all things spring, and into which they all return. The
invisible and creeping air takes form and solid mass. Our senses are
sceptics, and believe only the impression of the moment, and do not
believe the chemical fact that these huge mountain-chains are made up
of gases and rolling wind. But Nature is as subtle as she is strong.
She turns her capital day by day; deals never with dead, but ever
with quick subjects. All things are flowing, even those that seem
immovable. The adamant is always passing into smoke. The plants imbibe
the materials which they want from the air and the ground. They burn,
that is, exhale and decompose their own bodies into the air and earth
again. The animal burns, or undergoes the like perpetual consumption.
The earth burns,--the mountains burn and decompose,--slower, but
incessantly. It is almost inevitable to push the generalization up into
higher parts of nature, rank over rank into sentient beings. Nations
burn with internal fire of thought and affection, which wastes while
it works. We shall find finer combustion and finer fuel. Intellect is
a fire: rash and pitiless it melts this wonderful bone-house which is
called man. Genius even, as it is the greatest good, is the greatest
harm. Whilst all thus burns,--the universe in a blaze kindled from
the torch of the sun,--it needs a perpetual tempering, a phlegm, a
sleep, atmospheres of azote, deluges of water, to check the fury of the
conflagration; a hoarding to check the spending; a centripetence equal
to the centrifugence: and this is invariably supplied.
The railroad dirt-cars are good excavators; but there is no porter
like Gravitation, who will bring down any weights which man cannot
carry, and if he wants aid, knows where to find his fellow-laborers.
Water works in masses, and sets its irresistible shoulder to your mills
or your ships, or transports vast boulders of rock in its iceberg a
thousand miles. But its far greater power depends on its talent of
becoming little, and entering the smallest holes and pores. By this
agency, carrying in solution elements needful to every plant, the
vegetable world exists.
But as I said, we must not paint the farmer in rose-color. Whilst these
grand energies have wrought for him, and made his task possible, he is
habitually engaged in small economies, and is taught the power that
lurks in petty things. Great is the force of a few simple arrangements;
for instance, the powers of a fence. On the prairie you wander a
hundred miles, and hardly find a stick or a stone. At rare intervals,
a thin oak opening has been spared, and every such section has been
long occupied. But the farmer manages to procure wood from far, puts
up a rail fence, and at once the seeds sprout and the oaks rise. It
was only browsing and fire which had kept them down. Plant fruit-trees
by the roadside, and their fruit will never be allowed to ripen. Draw
a pine fence about them, and for fifty years they mature for the
owner their delicate fruit. There is a great deal of enchantment in a
chestnut rail or picketed pine boards.
Nature suggests every economical expedient somewhere on a great
scale. Set out a pine-tree, and it dies in the first year, or lives a
poor spindle. But Nature drops a pine-cone in Mariposa, and it lives
fifteen centuries, grows three or four hundred feet high, and thirty
in diameter,--grows in a grove of giants, like a colonnade of Thebes.
Ask the tree how it was done. It did not grow on a ridge, but in a
basin, where it found deep soil, cold enough and dry enough for the
pine; defended itself from the sun by growing in groves, and from the
wind by the walls of the mountain. The roots that shot deepest, and
the stems of happiest exposure, drew the nourishment from the rest,
until the less thrifty perished and manured the soil for the stronger,
and the mammoth Sequoias rose to their enormous proportions. The
traveller who saw them remembered his orchard at home, where every
year, in the destroying wind, his forlorn trees pined like suffering
virtue. In September, when the pears hang heaviest, and are taking
from the sun their gay colors, comes usually a gusty day which shakes
the whole garden, and throws down the heaviest fruit in bruised
heaps. The planter took the hint of the Sequoias, built a high wall,
or--better--surrounded the orchard with a nursery of birches and
evergreens. Thus he had the mountain basin in miniature; and his pears
grew to the size of melons, and the vines beneath them ran an eighth of
a mile. But this shelter creates a new climate. The wall that keeps off
the strong wind keeps off the cold wind. The high wall reflecting the
heat back on the soil gives that acre a quadruple share of sunshine,
“Enclosing in the garden square
A dead and standing pool of air,”
and makes a little Cuba within it, whilst all without is Labrador.
The chemist comes to his aid every year by following out some new hint
drawn from nature, and now affirms that this dreary space occupied by
the farmer is needless: he will concentrate his kitchen-garden into a
box of one or two rods square, will take the roots into his laboratory;
the vines and stalks and stems may go sprawling about in the fields
outside, he will attend to the roots in his tub, gorge them with food
that is good for them. The smaller his garden, the better he can feed
it, and the larger the crop. As he nursed his Thanksgiving turkeys on
bread and milk, so he will pamper his peaches and grapes on the viands
they like best. If they have an appetite for potash, or salt, or iron,
or ground bones, or even now and then for a dead hog, he will indulge
them. They keep the secret well, and never tell on your table whence
they drew their sunset complexion or their delicate flavors.
See what the farmer accomplishes by a cartload of tiles: he alters
the climate by letting off water which kept the land cold through
constant evaporation, and allows the warm rain to bring down into
the roots the temperature of the air and of the surface-soil; and he
deepens the soil, since the discharge of this standing water allows
the roots of his plants to penetrate below the surface to the subsoil,
and accelerates the ripening of the crop. The town of Concord is
one of the oldest towns in this country, far on now in its third
century. The selectmen have once in every five years perambulated the
boundaries, and yet, in this very year, a large quantity of land has
been discovered and added to the town without a murmur of complaint
from any quarter. By drainage we went down to a subsoil we did not
know, and have found there is a Concord under old Concord, which we are
now getting the best crops from; a Middlesex under Middlesex; and, in
fine, that Massachusetts has a basement story more valuable, and that
promises to pay a better rent, than all the superstructure. But these
tiles have acquired by association a new interest. These tiles are
political economists, confuters of Malthus and Ricardo; they are so
many Young Americans announcing a better era,--more bread. They drain
the land, make it sweet and friable; have made English Chat Moss a
garden, and will now do as much for the Dismal Swamp. But beyond this
benefit, they are the text of better opinions and better auguries for
mankind.
There has been a nightmare bred in England of indigestion and spleen
among landlords and loomlords, namely, the dogma that men breed too
fast for the powers of the soil; that men multiply in a geometrical
ratio, whilst corn only in an arithmetical; and hence that, the more
prosperous we are, the faster we approach these frightful limits: nay,
the plight of every new generation is worse than of the foregoing,
because the first comers take up the best lands; the next, the second
best; and each succeeding wave of population is driven to poorer, so
that the land is ever yielding less returns to enlarging hosts of
eaters. Henry Carey of Philadelphia replied: ‘Not so, Mr. Malthus, but
just the opposite of so is the fact.’
The first planter, the savage, without helpers, without tools, looking
chiefly to safety from his enemy,--man or beast,--takes poor land. The
better lands are loaded with timber, which he cannot clear; they need
drainage, which he cannot attempt. He cannot plough, or fell trees, or
drain the rich swamp. He is a poor creature; he scratches with a sharp
stick, lives in a cave or a hutch, has no road but the trail of the
moose or bear; he lives on their flesh when he can kill one, on roots
and fruits when he cannot. He falls, and is lame; he coughs, he has a
stitch in his side, he has a fever and chills: when he is hungry, he
cannot always kill and eat a bear;--chances of war,--sometimes the bear
eats him. ’Tis long before he digs or plants at all, and then only a
patch. Later he learns that his planting is better than hunting; that
the earth works faster for him than he can work for himself,--works
for him when he is asleep, when it rains, when heat overcomes him. The
sun-stroke which knocks him down brings his corn up. As his family
thrive, and other planters come up around him, he begins to fell trees,
and clear good land; and when, by and by, there is more skill, and
tools and roads, the new generations are strong enough to open the
lowlands, where the wash of mountains has accumulated the best soil,
which yield a hundred-fold the former crops. The last lands are the
best lands. It needs science and great numbers to cultivate the best
lands, and in the best manner. Thus true political economy is not
mean, but liberal, and on the pattern of the sun and sky. Population
increases in the ratio of morality: credit exists in the ratio of
morality.
Meantime we cannot enumerate the incidents and agents of the farm
without reverting to their influence on the farmer. He carries out
this cumulative preparation of means to their last effect. This crust
of soil which ages have refined he refines again for the feeding
of a civil and instructed people. The great elements with which he
deals cannot leave him unaffected, or unconscious of his ministry;
but their influence somewhat resembles that which the same Nature has
on the child,--of subduing and silencing him. We see the farmer with
pleasure and respect, when we think what powers and utilities are
so meekly worn. He knows every secret of labor: he changes the face
of the landscape. Put him on a new planet, and he would know where
to begin; yet there is no arrogance in his bearing, but a perfect
gentleness. The farmer stands well on the world. Plain in manners as
in dress, he would not shine in palaces; he is absolutely unknown and
inadmissible therein; living or dying, he never shall be heard of in
them; yet the drawing-room heroes put down beside him would shrivel in
his presence,--he solid and unexpressive, they expressed to gold-leaf.
But he stands well on the world,--as Adam did, as an Indian does, as
Homer’s heroes, Agamemnon or Achilles, do. He is a person whom a poet
of any clime--Milton, Firdusi, or Cervantes--would appreciate as being
really a piece of the old Nature, comparable to sun and moon, rainbow
and flood; because he is, as all natural persons are, representative of
Nature as much as these.
That uncorrupted behavior which we admire in animals and in young
children belongs to him, to the hunter, the sailor,--the man who
lives in the presence of Nature. Cities force growth, and make men
talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial. What
possesses interest for us is the _naturel_ of each, his constitutional
excellence. This is forever a surprise, engaging and lovely; we cannot
be satiated with knowing it, and about it; and it is this which the
conversation with Nature cherishes and guards.
WORKS AND DAYS.
WORKS AND DAYS.
Our nineteenth century is the age of tools. They grow out of our
structure. “Man is the metre of all things,” said Aristotle; “the hand
is the instrument of instruments, and the mind is the form of forms.”
The human body is the magazine of inventions, the patent-office,
where are the models from which every hint was taken. All the tools
and engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs and senses. One
definition of man is “an intelligence served by organs.” Machines can
only second, not supply, his unaided senses. The body is a metre. The
eye appreciates finer differences than art can expose. The apprentice
clings to his foot-rule, a practised mechanic will measure by his thumb
and his arm with equal precision; and a good surveyor will pace sixteen
rods more accurately than another man can measure them by tape. The
sympathy of eye and hand by which an Indian or a practised slinger hits
his mark with a stone, or a wood-chopper or a carpenter swings his axe
to a hair-line on his log, are examples; and there is no sense or organ
which is not capable of exquisite performance.
Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of our science; and such is
the mechanical determination of our age, and so recent are our best
contrivances, that use has not dulled our joy and pride in them; and
we pity our fathers for dying before steam and galvanism, sulphuric
ether and ocean telegraphs, photograph and spectroscope arrived, as
cheated out of half their human estate. These arts open great gates of
a future, promising to make the world plastic and to lift human life
out of its beggary to a godlike ease and power.