As soon as a stranger is introduced into any company, one of the first
questions which all wish to have answered, is, How does that man get his
living? And with reason. He is no whole man until he knows how to earn
a blameless livelihood. Society is barbarous, until every industrious
man can get his living without dishonest customs.
Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer. He fails to make
his place good in the world, unless he not only pays his debt, but also
adds something to the common wealth. Nor can he do justice to his
genius, without making some larger demand on the world than a bare
subsistence. He is by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich.
Wealth has its source in applications of the mind to nature, from the
rudest strokes of spade and axe, up to the last secrets of art.
Intimate ties subsist between thought and all production; because a
better order is equivalent to vast amounts of brute labor. The forces
and the resistances are Nature's, but the mind acts in bringing things
from where they abound to where they are wanted; in wise combining; in
directing the practice of the useful arts, and in the creation of finer
values, by fine art, by eloquence, by song, or the reproductions of
memory. Wealth is in applications of mind to nature, and the art of
getting rich consists not in industry, much less in saving, but in a
better order, in timeliness, in being at the right spot. One man has
stronger arms, or longer legs; another sees by the course of streams,
and growth of markets, where land will be wanted, makes a clearing to
the river, goes to sleep, and wakes up rich. Steam is no stronger now,
than it was a hundred years ago; but is put to better use. A clever
fellow was acquainted with the expansive force of steam; he also saw the
wealth of wheat and grass rotting in Michigan. Then he cunningly screws
on the steam-pipe to the wheat-crop. Puff now, O Steam! The steam puffs
and expands as before, but this time it is dragging all Michigan at its
back to hungry New York and hungry England. Coal lay in ledges under
the ground since the Flood, until a laborer with pick and windlass
brings it to the surface. We may well call it black diamonds. Every
basket is power and civilization. For coal is a portable climate. It
carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle: and it
is the means of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted. Watt and
Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that a
half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by
rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta, and with its
comfort brings its industrial power.
When the farmer's peaches are taken from under the tree, and carried
into town, they have a new look, and a hundredfold value over the fruit
which grew on the same bough, and lies fulsomely on the ground. The
craft of the merchant is this bringing a thing from where it abounds, to
where it is costly.
Wealth begins in a tight roof that keeps the rain and wind out; in a
good pump that yields you plenty of sweet water; in two suits of
clothes, so to change your dress when you are wet; in dry sticks to
burn; in a good double-wick lamp; and three meals; in a horse, or a
locomotive, to cross the land; in a boat to cross the sea; in tools to
work with; in books to read; and so, in giving, on all sides, by tools
and auxiliaries, the greatest possible extension to our powers, as if it
added feet, and hands, and eyes, and blood, length to the day, and
knowledge, and good-will.
Wealth begins with these articles of necessity. And here we must recite
the iron law which Nature thunders in these northern climates. First,
she requires that each man should feed himself. If, happily, his fathers
have left him no inheritance, he must go to work, and by making his
wants less, or his gains more, he must draw himself out of that state of
pain and insult in which she forces the beggar to lie. She gives him no
rest until this is done: she starves, taunts, and torments him, takes
away warmth, laughter, sleep, friends, and daylight, until he has fought
his way to his own loaf. Then, less peremptorily, but still with sting
enough, she urges him to the acquisition of such things as belong to
him. Every warehouse and shop-window, every fruit-tree, every thought
of every hour, opens a new want to him, which it concerns his power and
dignity to gratify. It is of no use to argue the wants down: the
philosophers have laid the greatness of man in making his wants few; but
will a man content himself with a hut and a handful of dried pease? He
is born to be rich. He is thoroughly related; and is tempted out by his
appetites and fancies to the conquest of this and that piece of nature,
until he finds his well-being in the use of his planet, and of more
planets than his own. Wealth requires, besides the crust of bread and
the roof,--the freedom of the city, the freedom of the earth,
travelling, machinery, the benefits of science, music, and fine arts,
the best culture, and the best company. He is the rich man who can
avail himself of all men's faculties. He is the richest man who knows
how to draw a benefit from the labors of the greatest number of men, of
men in distant countries, and in past times. The same correspondence
that is between thirst in the stomach, and water in the spring, exists
between the whole of man and the whole of nature. The elements offer
their service to him. The sea, washing the equator and the poles,
offers its perilous aid, and the power and empire that follow it,--day
by day to his craft and audacity. "Beware of me," it says, "but if you
can hold me, I am the key to all the lands." Fire offers, on its side,
an equal power. Fire, steam, lightning, gravity, ledges of rock, mines
of iron, lead, quicksilver, tin, and gold; forests of all woods; fruits
of all climates; animals of all habits; the powers of tillage; the
fabrics of his chemic laboratory; the webs of his loom; the masculine
draught of his locomotive, the talismans of the machine-shop; all grand
and subtile things, minerals, gases, ethers, passions, war, trade,
government, are his natural playmates, and, according to the excellence
of the machinery in each human being, is his attraction for the
instruments he is to employ. The world is his tool-chest, and he is
successful, or his education is carried on just so far, as is the
marriage of his faculties with nature, or, the degree in which he takes
up things into himself.
The strong race is strong on these terms. The Saxons are the merchants
of the world; now, for a thousand years, the leading race, and by
nothing more than their quality of personal independence, and, in its
special modification, pecuniary independence. No reliance for bread and
games on the government, no clanship, no patriarchal style of living by
the revenues of a chief, no marrying-on,--no system of clientship suits
them; but every man must pay his scot. The English are prosperous and
peaceable, with their habit of considering that every man must take care
of himself, and has himself to thank, if he do not maintain and improve
his position in society.
The subject of economy mixes itself with morals, inasmuch as it is a
peremptory point of virtue that a man's independence be secured.
Poverty demoralizes. A man in debt is so far a slave; and Wall-street
thinks it easy for a _millionaire_ to be a man of his word, a man of
honor, but, that, in failing circumstances, no man can be relied on to
keep his integrity. And when one observes in the hotels and palaces of
our Atlantic capitals, the habit of expense, the riot of the senses, the
absence of bonds, clanship, fellow-feeling of any kind, he feels, that,
when a man or a woman is driven to the wall, the chances of integrity
are frightfully diminished, as if virtue were coming to be a luxury
which few could afford, or, as Burke said, "at a market almost too high
for humanity." He may fix his inventory of necessities and of
enjoyments on what scale he pleases, but if he wishes the power and
privilege of thought, the chalking out his own career, and having
society on his own terms, he must bring his wants within his proper
power to satisfy.
The manly part is to do with might and main what you can do. The world
is full of fops who never did anything, and who have persuaded beauties
and men of genius to wear their fop livery, and these will deliver the
fop opinion, that it is not respectable to be seen earning a living;
that it is much more respectable to spend without earning; and this
doctrine of the snake will come also from the elect sons of light; for
wise men are not wise at all hours, and will speak five times from their
taste or their humor, to once from their reason. The brave workman, who
might betray his feeling of it in his manners, if he do not succumb in
his practice, must replace the grace or elegance forfeited, by the merit
of the work done. No matter whether he make shoes, or statues, or laws.
It is the privilege of any human work which is well done to invest the
doer with a certain haughtiness. He can well afford not to conciliate,
whose faithful work will answer for him. The mechanic at his bench
carries a quiet heart and assured manners, and deals on even terms with
men of any condition. The artist has made his picture so true, that it
disconcerts criticism. The statue is so beautiful, that it contracts no
stain from the market, but makes the market a silent gallery for itself.
The case of the young lawyer was pitiful to disgust,--a paltry matter of
buttons or tweezer-cases; but the determined youth saw in it an aperture
to insert his dangerous wedges, made the insignificance of the thing
forgotten, and gave fame by his sense and energy to the name and affairs
of the Tittleton snuffbox factory.
Society in large towns is babyish, and wealth is made a toy. The life
of pleasure is so ostentatious, that a shallow observer must believe
that this is the agreed best use of wealth, and, whatever is pretended,
it ends in cosseting. But, if this were the main use of surplus
capital, it would bring us to barricades, burned towns, and tomahawks,
presently. Men of sense esteem wealth to be the assimilation of nature
to themselves, the converting of the sap and juices of the planet to the
incarnation and nutriment of their design. Power is what they
want,--not candy;--power to execute their design, power to give legs and
feet, form and actuality to their thought, which, to a clear-sighted
man, appears the end for which the Universe exists, and all its
resources might be well applied. Columbus thinks that the sphere is a
problem for practical navigation, as well as for closet geometry, and
looks on all kings and peoples as cowardly landsmen, until they dare fit
him out. Few men on the planet have more truly belonged to it. But he
was forced to leave much of his map blank. His successors inherited his
map, and inherited his fury to complete it.
So the men of the mine, telegraph, mill, map, and survey,--the
monomaniacs, who talk up their project in marts, and offices, and
entreat men to subscribe:--how did our factories get built? how did
North America get netted with iron rails, except by the importunity of
these orators, who dragged all the prudent men in? Is party the madness
of many for the gain of a few? This _speculative_ genius is the madness
of few for the gain of the world. The projectors are sacrificed, but
the public is the gainer. Each of these idealists, working after his
thought, would make it tyrannical, if he could. He is met and
antagonized by other speculators, as hot as he. The equilibrium is
preserved by these counteractions, as one tree keeps down another in the
forest, that it may not absorb all the sap in the ground. And the
supply in nature of railroad presidents, copper-miners,
grand-junctioners, smoke-burners, fire-annihilators, &c., is limited by
the same law which keeps the proportion in the supply of carbon, of
alum, and of hydrogen.
To be rich is to have a ticket of admission to the master-works and
chief men of each race. It is to have the sea, by voyaging; to visit
the mountains, Niagara, the Nile, the desert, Rome, Paris,
Constantinople; to see galleries, libraries, arsenals, manufactories.
The reader of Humboldt's "Cosmos" follows the marches of a man whose
eyes, ears, and mind are armed by all the science, arts, and implements
which mankind have any where accumulated, and who is using these to add
to the stock. So is it with Denon, Beckford, Belzoni, Wilkinson,
Layard, Kane, Lepsius, and Livingston. "The rich man," says Saadi, "is
everywhere expected and at home." The rich take up something more of
the world into man's life. They include the country as well as the town,
the ocean-side, the White Hills, the Far West, and the old European
homesteads of man, in their notion of available material. The world is
his, who has money to go over it. He arrives at the sea-shore, and a
sumptuous ship has floored and carpeted for him the stormy Atlantic, and
made it a luxurious hotel, amid the horrors of tempests. The Persians
say, "'Tis the same to him who wears a shoe, as if the whole earth were
covered with leather."
Kings are said to have long arms, but every man should have long arms,
and should pluck his living, his instruments, his power, and his
knowing, from the sun, moon, and stars. Is not then the demand to be
rich legitimate? Yet, I have never seen a rich man. I have never seen
a man as rich as all men ought to be, or, with an adequate command of
nature. The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the
thirst for wealth; but if men should take these moralists at their word,
and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush to rekindle at
all hazards this love of power in the people, lest civilization should
be undone. Men are urged by their ideas to acquire the command over
nature. Ages derive a culture from the wealth of Roman Caesars, Leo
Tenths, magnificent Kings of France, Grand Dukes of Tuscany, Dukes of
Devonshire, Townleys, Vernons, and Peels, in England; or whatever great
proprietors. It is the interest of all men, that there should be
Vaticans and Louvres full of noble works of art; British Museums, and
French Gardens of Plants, Philadelphia Academies of Natural History,
Bodleian, Ambrosian, Royal, Congressional Libraries. It is the interest
of all that there should be Exploring Expeditions; Captain Cooks to
voyage round the world, Rosses, Franklins, Richardsons, and Kanes, to
find the magnetic and the geographic poles. We are all richer for the
measurement of a degree of latitude on the earth's surface. Our
navigation is safer for the chart. How intimately our knowledge of the
system of the Universe rests on that!--and a true economy in a state or
an individual will forget its frugality in behalf of claims like these.
Whilst it is each man's interest, that, not only ease and convenience of
living, but also wealth or surplus product should exist somewhere, it
need not be in his hands. Often it is very undesirable to him. Goethe
said well, "nobody should be rich but those who understand it." Some
men are born to own, and can animate all their possessions. Others
cannot: their owning is not graceful; seems to be a compromise of their
character: they seem to steal their own dividends. They should own who
can administer; not they who hoard and conceal; not they who, the
greater proprietors they are, are only the greater beggars, but they
whose work carves out work for more, opens a path for all. For he is
the rich man in whom the people are rich, and he is the poor man in whom
the people are poor: and how to give all access to the masterpieces of
art and nature, is the problem of civilization. The socialism of our
day has done good service in setting men on thinking how certain
civilizing benefits, now only enjoyed by the opulent, can be enjoyed by
all. For example, the providing to each man the means and apparatus of
science, and of the arts. There are many articles good for occasional
use, which few men are able to own. Every man wishes to see the ring of
Saturn, the satellites and belts of Jupiter and Mars; the mountains and
craters in the moon: yet how few can buy a telescope! and of those,
scarcely one would like the trouble of keeping it in order, and
exhibiting it. So of electrical and chemical apparatus, and many the
like things. Every man may have occasion to consult books which he does
not care to possess, such as cyclopedias, dictionaries, tables, charts,
maps, and public documents: pictures also of birds, beasts, fishes,
shells, trees, flowers, whose names he desires to know.
There is a refining influence from the arts of Design on a prepared
mind, which is as positive as that of music, and not to be supplied from
any other source. But pictures, engravings, statues, and casts, beside
their first cost, entail expenses, as of galleries and keepers for the
exhibition; and the use which any man can make of them is rare, and
their value, too, is much enhanced by the numbers of men who can share
their enjoyment. In the Greek cities, it was reckoned profane, that any
person should pretend a property in a work of art, which belonged to all
who could behold it. I think sometimes,--could I only have music on my
own terms;--could I live in a great city, and know where I could go
whenever I wished the ablution and inundation of musical waves,--that
were a bath and a medicine.
If properties of this kind were owned by states, towns, and lyceums,
they would draw the bonds of neighborhood closer. A town would exist to
an intellectual purpose. In Europe, where the feudal forms secure the
permanence of wealth in certain families, those families buy and
preserve those things, and lay them open to the public. But in America,
where democratic institutions divide every estate into small portions,
after a few years, the public should step into the place of these
proprietors, and provide this culture and inspiration for the citizen.
Man was born to be rich, or, inevitably grows rich by the use of his
faculties; by the union of thought with nature. Property is an
intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning,
promptness, and patience in the players. Cultivated labor drives out
brute labor. An infinite number of shrewd men, in infinite years, have
arrived at certain best and shortest ways of doing, and this accumulated
skill in arts, cultures, harvestings, curings, manufactures,
navigations, exchanges, constitutes the worth of our world to-day.
Commerce is a game of skill, which every man cannot play, which few men
can play well. The right merchant is one who has the just average of
faculties we call _common sense_; a man of a strong affinity for facts,
who makes up his decision on what he has seen. He is thoroughly
persuaded of the truths of arithmetic. There is always a reason, _in
the man_, for his good or bad fortune, and so, in making money. Men
talk as if there were some magic about this, and believe in magic, in
all parts of life. He knows, that all goes on the old road, pound for
pound, cent for cent,--for every effect a perfect cause,--and that good
luck is another name for tenacity of purpose. He insures himself in
every transaction, and likes small and sure gains. Probity and
closeness to the facts are the basis, but the masters of the art add a
certain long arithmetic. The problem is, to combine many and remote
operations, with the accuracy and adherence to the facts, which is easy
in near and small transactions; so to arrive at gigantic results,
without any compromise of safety. Napoleon was fond of telling the
story of the Marseilles banker, who said to his visitor, surprised at
the contrast between the splendor of the banker's chateau and
hospitality, and the meanness of the counting-room in which he had seen
him,--"Young man, you are too young to understand how masses are
formed,--the true and only power,--whether composed of money, water, or
men, it is all alike,--a mass is an immense centre of motion, but it
must be begun, it must be kept up:"--and he might have added, that the
way in which it must be begun and kept up, is, by obedience to the law
of particles.
Success consists in close appliance to the laws of the world, and, since
those laws are intellectual and moral, an intellectual and moral
obedience. Political Economy is as good a book wherein to read the life
of man, and the ascendency of laws over all private and hostile
influences, as any Bible which has come down to us.
Money is representative, and follows the nature and fortunes of the
owner. The coin is a delicate meter of civil, social, and moral
changes. The farmer is covetous of his dollar, and with reason. It is
no waif to him. He knows how many strokes of labor it represents. His
bones ache with the day's work that earned it. He knows how much land
it represents;--how much rain, frost, and sunshine. He knows that, in
the dollar, he gives you so much discretion and patience, so much
hoeing, and threshing. Try to lift his dollar; you must lift all that
weight. In the city, where money follows the skit of a pen, or a lucky
rise in exchange, it comes to be looked on as light. I wish the farmer
held it dearer, and would spend it only for real bread; force for force.
The farmer's dollar is heavy, and the clerk's is light and nimble; leaps
out of his pocket; jumps on to cards and faro-tables: but still more
curious is its susceptibility to metaphysical changes. It is the finest
barometer of social storms, and announces revolutions.
Every step of civil advancement makes every man's dollar worth more. In
California, the country where it grew,--what would it buy? A few years
since, it would buy a shanty, dysentery, hunger, bad company, and crime.
There are wide countries, like Siberia, where it would buy little else
to-day, than some petty mitigation of suffering. In Rome, it will buy
beauty and magnificence. Forty years ago, a dollar would not buy much in
Boston. Now it will buy a great deal more in our old town, thanks to
railroads, telegraphs, steamers, and the contemporaneous growth of New
York, and the whole country. Yet there are many goods appertaining to a
capital city, which are not yet purchasable here, no, not with a
mountain of dollars. A dollar in Florida is not worth a dollar in
Massachusetts. A dollar is not value, but representative of value, and,
at last, of moral values. A dollar is rated for the corn it will buy,
or to speak strictly, not for the corn or house-room, but for Athenian
corn, and Roman house-room,--for the wit, probity, and power, which we
eat bread and dwell in houses to share and exert. Wealth is mental;
wealth is moral. The value of a dollar is, to buy just things: a dollar
goes on increasing in value with all the genius, and all the virtue of
the world. A dollar in a university, is worth more than a dollar in a
jail; in a temperate, schooled, law-abiding community, than in some sink
of crime, where dice, knives, and arsenic, are in constant play.
The "Bank-Note Detector" is a useful publication. But the current
dollar, silver or paper, is itself the detector of the right and wrong
where it circulates. Is it not instantly enhanced by the increase of
equity? If a trader refuses to sell his vote, or adheres to some odious
right, he makes so much more equity in Massachusetts; and every acre in
the State is more worth, in the hour of his action. If you take out of
State-street the ten honestest merchants, and put in ten roguish
persons, controlling the same amount of capital,--the rates of insurance
will indicate it; the soundness of banks will show it: the highways will
be less secure: the schools will feel it; the children will bring home
their little dose of the poison: the judge will sit less firmly on the
bench, and his decisions be less upright; he has lost so much support
and constraint,--which all need; and the pulpit will betray it, in a
laxer rule of life. An apple-tree, if you take out every day for a
number of days, a load of loam, and put in a load of sand about its
roots,--will find it out. An apple-tree is a stupid kind of creature,
but if this treatment be pursued for a short time, I think it would
begin to mistrust something. And if you should take out of the powerful
class engaged in trade a hundred good men, and put in a hundred bad, or,
what is just the same thing, introduce a demoralizing institution, would
not the dollar, which is not much stupider than an apple-tree, presently
find it out? The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by
society. Every man who removes into this city, with any purchasable
talent or skill in him, gives to every man's labor in the city, a new
worth. If a talent is anywhere born into the world, the community of
nations is enriched; and, much more, with a new degree of probity. The
expense of crime, one of the principal charges of every nation, is so
far stopped. In Europe, crime is observed to increase or abate with the
price of bread. If the Rothschilds at Paris do not accept bills, the
people at Manchester, at Paisley, at Birmingham, are forced into the
highway, and landlords are shot down in Ireland. The police records
attest it. The vibrations are presently felt in New York, New Orleans,
and Chicago. Not much otherwise, the economical power touches the
masses through the political lords. Rothschild refuses the Russian
loan, and there is peace, and the harvests are saved. He takes it, and
there is war, and an agitation through a large portion of mankind, with
every hideous result, ending in revolution, and a new order.
Wealth brings with it its own checks and balances. The basis of
political economy is non-interference. The only safe rule is found in
the self-adjusting meter of demand and supply. Do not legislate.
Meddle, and you snap the sinews with your sumptuary laws. Give no
bounties: make equal laws: secure life and property, and you need not
give alms. Open the doors of opportunity to talent and virtue, and they
will do themselves justice, and property will not be in bad hands. In a
free and just commonwealth, property rushes from the idle and imbecile,
to the industrious, brave, and persevering.
The laws of nature play through trade, as a toy-battery exhibits the
effects of electricity. The level of the sea is not more surely kept,
than is the equilibrium of value in society, by the demand and supply:
and artifice or legislation punishes itself, by reactions, gluts, and
bankruptcies. The sublime laws play indifferently through atoms and
galaxies. Whoever knows what happens in the getting and spending of a
loaf of bread and a pint of beer; that no wishing will change the
rigorous limits of pints and penny loaves; that, for all that is
consumed, so much less remains in the basket and pot; but what is gone
out of these is not wasted, but well spent, if it nourish his body, and
enable him to finish his task;--knows all of political economy that the
budgets of empires can teach him. The interest of petty economy is this
symbolization of the great economy; the way in which a house, and a
private man's methods, tally with the solar system, and the laws of give
and take, throughout nature; and, however wary we are of the falsehoods
and petty tricks which we suicidally play off on each other, every man
has a certain satisfaction, whenever his dealing touches on the
inevitable facts; when he sees that things themselves dictate the price,
as they always tend to do, and, in large manufactures, are seen to do.
Your paper is not fine or coarse enough,--is too heavy, or too thin.
The manufacturer says, he will furnish you with just that thickness or
thinness you want; the pattern is quite indifferent to him; here is his
schedule;--any variety of paper, as cheaper or dearer, with the prices
annexed. A pound of paper costs so much, and you may have it made up in
any pattern you fancy.
There is in all our dealings a self-regulation that supersedes
chaffering. You will rent a house, but must have it cheap. The owner
can reduce the rent, but so he incapacitates himself from making proper
repairs, and the tenant gets not the house he would have, but a worse
one; besides, that a relation a little injurious is established between
landlord and tenant. You dismiss your laborer, saying, "Patrick, I
shall send for you as soon as I cannot do without you." Patrick goes
off contented, for he knows that the weeds will grow with the potatoes,
the vines must be planted, next week, and, however unwilling you may be,
the cantelopes, crook-necks, and cucumbers will send for him. Who but
must wish that all labor and value should stand on the same simple and
surly market? If it is the best of its kind, it will. We must have
joiner, locksmith, planter, priest, poet, doctor, cook, weaver, ostler;
each in turn, through the year.
If a St. Michael's pear sells for a shilling, it costs a shilling to
raise it. If, in Boston, the best securities offer twelve _per cent._
for money, they have just six _per cent._ of insecurity. You may not
see that the fine pear costs you a shilling, but it costs the community
so much. The shilling represents the number of enemies the pear has,
and the amount of risk in ripening it. The price of coal shows the
narrowness of the coal-field, and a compulsory confinement of the miners
to a certain district. All salaries are reckoned on contingent, as well
as on actual services. "If the wind were always southwest by west,"
said the skipper, "women might take ships to sea." One might say, that
all things are of one price; that nothing is cheap or dear; and that the
apparent disparities that strike us, are only a shopman's trick of
concealing the damage in your bargain. A youth coming into the city
from his native New Hampshire farm, with its hard fare still fresh in
his remembrance, boards at a first-class hotel, and believes he must
somehow have outwitted Dr. Franklin and Malthus, for luxuries are cheap.
But he pays for the one convenience of a better dinner, by the loss of
some of the richest social and educational advantages. He has lost what
guards! what incentives! He will perhaps find by and by, that he left
the Muses at the door of the hotel, and found the Furies inside. Money
often costs too much, and power and pleasure are not cheap. The ancient
poet said, "the gods sell all things at a fair price."
There is an example of the compensations in the commercial history of
this country. When the European wars threw the carrying-trade of the
world, from 1800 to 1812, into American bottoms, a seizure was now and
then made of an American ship. Of course, the loss was serious to the
owner, but the country was indemnified; for we charged threepence a
pound for carrying cotton, sixpence for tobacco, and so on; which paid
for the risk and loss, and brought into the country an immense
prosperity, early marriages, private wealth, the building of cities, and
of states: and, after the war was over, we received compensation over
and above, by treaty, for all the seizures. Well, the Americans grew
rich and great. But the pay-day comes round. Britain, France, and
Germany, which our extraordinary profits had impoverished, send out,
attracted by the fame of our advantages, first their thousands, then
their millions, of poor people, to share the crop. At first, we employ
them, and increase our prosperity: but, in the artificial system of
society and of protected labor, which we also have adopted and enlarged,
there come presently checks and stoppages. Then we refuse to employ
these poor men. But they will not so be answered. They go into the poor
rates, and, though we refuse wages, we must now pay the same amount in
the form of taxes. Again, it turns out that the largest proportion of
crimes are committed by foreigners. The cost of the crime, and the
expense of courts, and of prisons, we must bear, and the standing army
of preventive police we must pay. The cost of education of the
posterity of this great colony, I will not compute. But the gross
amount of these costs will begin to pay back what we thought was a net
gain from our transatlantic customers of 1800. It is vain to refuse this
payment. We cannot get rid of these people, and we cannot get rid of
their will to be supported. That has become an inevitable element of
our politics; and, for their votes, each of the dominant parties courts
and assists them to get it executed. Moreover, we have to pay, not what
would have contented them at home, but what they have learned to think
necessary here; so that opinion, fancy, and all manner of moral
considerations complicate the problem.
There are a few measures of economy which will bear to be named without
disgust; for the subject is tender, and we may easily have too much of
it; and therein resembles the hideous animalcules of which our bodies
are built up,--which, offensive in the particular, yet compose valuable
and effective masses. Our nature and genius force us to respect ends,
whilst we use means. We must use the means, and yet, in our most
accurate using, somehow screen and cloak them, as we can only give them
any beauty, by a reflection of the glory of the end. That is the good
head, which serves the end, and commands the means. The rabble are
corrupted by their means: the means are too strong for them, and they
desert their end.
1. The first of these measures is that each man's expense must proceed
from his character. As long as your genius buys, the investment is
safe, though you spend like a monarch. Nature arms each man with some
faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any
other, and thus makes him necessary to society. This native
determination guides his labor and his spending. He wants an equipment
of means and tools proper to his talent. And to save on this point,
were to neutralize the special strength and helpfulness of each mind. Do
your work, respecting the excellence of the work, and not its
acceptableness. This is so much economy, that, rightly read, it is the
sum of economy. Profligacy consists not in spending years of time or
chests of money,--but in spending them off the line of your career. The
crime which bankrupts men and states, is, job-work;--declining from your
main design, to serve a turn here or there. Nothing is beneath you, if
it is in the direction of your life: nothing is great or desirable, if
it is off from that. I think we are entitled here to draw a straight
line, and say, that society can never prosper, but must always be
bankrupt, until every man does that which he was created to do.
Spend for your expense, and retrench the expense which is not yours.
Allston, the painter, was wont to say, that he built a plain house, and
filled it with plain furniture, because he would hold out no bribe to
any to visit him, who had not similar tastes to his own. We are
sympathetic, and, like children, want everything we see. But it is a
large stride to independence,--when a man, in the discovery of his
proper talent, has sunk the necessity for false expenses. As the
betrothed maiden, by one secure affection, is relieved from a system of
slaveries,--the daily inculcated necessity of pleasing all,--so the man
who has found what he can do, can spend on that, and leave all other
spending. Montaigne said, "When he was a younger brother, he went brave
in dress and equipage, but afterward his chateau and farms might answer
for him." Let a man who belongs to the class of nobles, those, namely,
who have found out that they can do something, relieve himself of all
vague squandering on objects not his. Let the realist not mind
appearances. Let him delegate to others the costly courtesies and
decorations of social life. The virtues are economists, but some of the
vices are also. Thus, next to humility, I have noticed that pride is a
pretty good husband. A good pride is, as I reckon it, worth from five
hundred to fifteen hundred a year. Pride is handsome, economical: pride
eradicates so many vices, letting none subsist but itself, that it seems
as if it were a great gain to exchange vanity for pride. Pride can go
without domestics, without fine clothes, can live in a house with two
rooms, can eat potato, purslain, beans, lyed corn, can work on the soil,
can travel afoot, can talk with poor men, or sit silent well-contented
in fine saloons. But vanity costs money, labor, horses, men, women,
health, and peace, and is still nothing at last, a long way leading
nowhere.--Only one drawback; proud people are intolerably selfish, and
the vain are gentle and giving.
Art is a jealous mistress, and, if a man have a genius for painting,
poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy, he makes a bad husband, and
an ill provider, and should be wise in season, and not fetter himself
with duties which will embitter his days, and spoil him for his proper
work. We had in this region, twenty years ago, among our educated men,
a sort of Arcadian fanaticism, a passionate desire to go upon the land,
and unite farming to intellectual pursuits. Many effected their
purpose, and made the experiment, and some became downright ploughmen;
but all were cured of their faith that scholarship and practical
farming, (I mean, with one's own hands,) could be united.
With brow bent, with firm intent, the pale scholar leaves his desk to
draw a freer breath, and get a juster statement of his thought, in the
garden-walk. He stoops to pull up a purslain, or a dock, that is choking
the young corn, and finds there are two: close behind the last, is a
third; he reaches out his hand to a fourth; behind that, are four
thousand and one. He is heated and untuned, and, by and by, wakes up
from his idiot dream of chickweed and red-root, to remember his morning
thought, and to find, that, with his adamantine purposes, he has been
duped by a dandelion. A garden is like those pernicious machineries we
read of, every month, in the newspapers, which catch a man's coat-skirt
or his hand, and draw in his arm, his leg, and his whole body to
irresistible destruction. In an evil hour he pulled down his wall, and
added a field to his homestead. No land is bad, but land is worse. If
a man own land, the land owns him. Now let him leave home, if he dare.
Every tree and graft, every hill of melons, row of corn, or quickset
hedge, all he has done, and all he means to do, stand in his way, like
duns, when he would go out of his gate. The devotion to these vines and
trees he finds poisonous. Long free walks, a circuit of miles, free his
brain, and serve his body. Long marches are no hardship to him. He
believes he composes easily on the hills. But this pottering in a few
square yards of garden is dispiriting and drivelling. The smell of the
plants has drugged him, and robbed him of energy. He finds a catalepsy
in his bones. He grows peevish and poor-spirited. The genius of
reading and of gardening are antagonistic, like resinous and vitreous
electricity. One is concentrative in sparks and shocks: the other is
diffuse strength; so that each disqualifies its workman for the other's
duties.
An engraver whose hands must be of an exquisite delicacy of stroke,
should not lay stone walls. Sir David Brewster gives exact instructions
for microscopic observation:--"Lie down on your back, and hold the
single lens and object over your eye," &c. &c. How much more the seeker
of abstract truth, who needs periods of isolation, and rapt
concentration, and almost a going out of the body to think!
2. Spend after your genius, _and by system_. Nature goes by rule, not by
sallies and saltations. There must be system in the economies. Saving
and unexpensiveness will not keep the most pathetic family from ruin,
nor will bigger incomes make free spending safe. The secret of success
lies never in the amount of money, but in the relation of income to
outgo; as if, after expense has been fixed at a certain point, then new
and steady rills of income, though never so small, being added, wealth
begins. But in ordinary, as means increase, spending increases faster,
so that, large incomes, in England and elsewhere, are found not to help
matters;--the eating quality of debt does not relax its voracity. When
the cholera is in the potato, what is the use of planting larger crops?
In England, the richest country in the universe, I was assured by shrewd
observers, that great lords and ladies had no more guineas to give away
than other people; that liberality with money is as rare, and as
immediately famous a virtue as it is here. Want is a growing giant whom
the coat of Have was never large enough to cover. I remember in
Warwickshire, to have been shown a fair manor, still in the same name as
in Shakspeare's time. The rent-roll, I was told, is some fourteen
thousand pounds a year: but, when the second son of the late proprietor
was born, the father was perplexed how to provide for him. The eldest
son must inherit the manor; what to do with this supernumerary? He was
advised to breed him for the Church, and to settle him in the
rectorship, which was in the gift of the family; which was done. It is
a general rule in that country, that bigger incomes do not help anybody.
It is commonly observed, that a sudden wealth, like a prize drawn in a
lottery, or a large bequest to a poor family, does not permanently
enrich. They have served no apprenticeship to wealth, and, with the
rapid wealth, come rapid claims: which they do not know how to deny, and
the treasure is quickly dissipated.
A system must be in every economy, or the best single expedients are of
no avail. A farm is a good thing, when it begins and ends with itself,
and does not need a salary, or a shop, to eke it out. Thus, the cattle
are a main link in the chain-ring. If the non-conformist or aesthetic
farmer leaves out the cattle, and does not also leave out the want which
the cattle must supply, he must fill the gap by begging or stealing.
When men now alive were born, the farm yielded everything that was
consumed on it. The farm yielded no money, and the farmer got on
without. If he fell sick, his neighbors came in to his aid: each gave a
day's work; or a half day; or lent his yoke of oxen, or his horse, and
kept his work even: hoed his potatoes, mowed his hay, reaped his rye;
well knowing that no man could afford to hire labor, without selling his
land. In autumn, a farmer could sell an ox or a hog, and get a little
money to pay taxes withal. Now, the farmer buys almost all he
consumes,--tin-ware, cloth, sugar, tea, coffee, fish, coal,
railroad-tickets, and newspapers.
A master in each art is required, because the practice is never with
still or dead subjects, but they change in your hands. You think
farm-buildings and broad acres a solid property: but its value is
flowing like water. It requires as much watching as if you were
decanting wine from a cask. The farmer knows what to do with it, stops
every leak, turns all the streamlets to one reservoir, and decants wine:
but a blunderhead comes out of Cornhill, tries his hand, and it all
leaks away. So is it with granite streets, or timber townships, as with
fruit or flowers. Nor is any investment so permanent, that it can be
allowed to remain without incessant watching, as the history of each
attempt to lock up an inheritance through two generations for an unborn
inheritor may show.
When Mr. Cockayne takes a cottage in the country, and will keep his cow,
he thinks a cow is a creature that is fed on hay, and gives a pail of
milk twice a day. But the cow that he buys gives milk for three months;
then her bag dries up. What to do with a dry cow? who will buy her?
Perhaps he bought also a yoke of oxen to do his work; but they get blown
and lame. What to do with blown and lame oxen? The farmer fats his,
after the spring-work is done, and kills them in the fall. But how can
Cockayne, who has no pastures, and leaves his cottage daily in the cars,
at business hours, be pothered with fatting and killing oxen? He plants
trees; but there must be crops, to keep the trees in ploughed land.
What shall be the crops? He will have nothing to do with trees, but
will have grass. After a year or two, the grass must be turned up and
ploughed: now what crops? Credulous Cockayne!
3. Help comes in the custom of the country, and the rule of _Impera
parendo_. The rule is not to dictate, nor to insist on carrying out
each of your schemes by ignorant wilfulness, but to learn practically
the secret spoken from all nature, that things themselves refuse to be
mismanaged, and will show to the watchful their own law. Nobody need
stir hand or foot. The custom of the country will do it all. I know
not how to build or to plant; neither how to buy wood, nor what to do
with the house-lot, the field, or the wood-lot, when bought. Never
fear: it is all settled how it shall be, long beforehand, in the custom
of the country, whether to sand, or whether to clay it, when to plough,
and how to dress, whether to grass, or to corn; and you cannot help or
hinder it. Nature has her own best mode of doing each thing, and she
has somewhere told it plainly, if we will keep our eyes and ears open.
If not, she will not be slow in undeceiving us, when we prefer our own
way to hers. How often we must remember the art of the surgeon, which,
in replacing the broken bone, contents itself with releasing the parts
from false position; they fly into place by the action of the muscles.
On this art of nature all our arts rely.
Of the two eminent engineers in the recent construction of railways in
England, Mr. Brunel went straight from terminus to terminus, through
mountains, over streams, crossing highways, cutting ducal estates in
two, and shooting through this man's cellar, and that man's attic
window, and so arriving at his end, at great pleasure to geometers, but
with cost to his company. Mr. Stephenson, on the contrary, believing
that the river knows the way, followed his valley, as implicitly as our
Western Railroad follows the Westfield River, and turned out to be the
safest and cheapest engineer. We say the cows laid out Boston. Well,
there are worse surveyors. Every pedestrian in our pastures has
frequent occasion to thank the cows for cutting the best path through
the thicket, and over the hills: and travellers and Indians know the
value of a buffalo-trail, which is sure to be the easiest possible pass
through the ridge.
When a citizen, fresh from Dock-square, or Milk-street, comes out and
buys land in the country, his first thought is to a fine outlook from
his windows: his library must command a western view: a sunset every
day, bathing the shoulder of Blue Hills, Wachusett, and the peaks of
Monadnoc and Uncanoonuc. What, thirty acres, and all this magnificence
for fifteen hundred dollars! It would be cheap at fifty thousand. He
proceeds at once, his eyes dim with tears of joy, to fix the spot for
his corner-stone. But the man who is to level the ground, thinks it
will take many hundred loads of gravel to fill the hollow to the road.
The stonemason who should build the well thinks he shall have to dig
forty feet: the baker doubts he shall never like to drive up to the
door: the practical neighbor cavils at the position of the barn; and the
citizen comes to know that his predecessor the farmer built the house in
the right spot for the sun and wind, the spring, and water-drainage, and
the convenience to the pasture, the garden, the field, and the road. So
Dock-square yields the point, and things have their own way. Use has
made the farmer wise, and the foolish citizen learns to take his
counsel. From step to step he comes at last to surrender at discretion.
The farmer affects to take his orders; but the citizen says, You may ask
me as often as you will, and in what ingenious forms, for an opinion
concerning the mode of building my wall, or sinking my well, or laying
out my acre, but the ball will rebound to you. These are matters on
which I neither know, nor need to know anything. These are questions
which you and not I shall answer.
Not less, within doors, a system settles itself paramount and tyrannical
over master and mistress, servant and child, cousin and acquaintance.
'Tis in vain that genius or virtue or energy of character strive and cry
against it. This is fate. And 'tis very well that the poor husband
reads in a book of a new way of living, and resolves to adopt it at
home: let him go home and try it, if he dare.
4. Another point of economy is to look for seed of the same kind as you
sow: and not to hope to buy one kind with another kind. Friendship buys
friendship; justice, justice; military merit, military success. Good
husbandry finds wife, children, and household. The good merchant large
gains, ships, stocks, and money. The good poet fame, and literary
credit; but not either, the ether. Yet there is commonly a confusion of
expectations on these points. Hotspur lives for the moment; praises
himself for it; and despises Furlong, that he does not. Hotspur, of
course, is poor; and Furlong a good provider. The odd circumstance is,
that Hotspur thinks it a superiority in himself, this improvidence,
which ought to be rewarded with Furlong's lands.
I have not at all completed my design. But we must not leave the topic,
without casting one glance into the interior recesses. It is a doctrine
of philosophy, that man is a being of degrees; that there is nothing in
the world, which is not repeated in his body; his body being a sort of
miniature or summary of the world: then that there is nothing in his
body, which is not repeated as in a celestial sphere in his mind: then,
there is nothing in his brain, which is not repeated in a higher sphere,
in his moral system.
5. Now these things are so in Nature. All things ascend, and the royal
rule of economy is, that it should ascend also, or, whatever we do must
always have a higher aim. Thus it is a maxim, that money is another
kind of blood. _Pecunia alter sanguis_: or, the estate of a man is only
a larger kind of body, and admits of regimen analogous to his bodily
circulations. So there is no maxim of the merchant, _e.g._, "Best use
of money is to pay debts;" "Every business by itself;" "Best time is
present time;" "The right investment is in tools of your trade;" or the
like, which does not admit of an extended sense. The counting-room
maxims liberally expounded are laws of the Universe. The merchant's
economy is a coarse symbol of the soul's economy. It is, to spend for
power, and not for pleasure. It is to invest income; that is to say, to
take up particulars into generals; days into integral eras,--literary,
emotive, practical, of its life, and still to ascend in its investment.
The merchant has but one rule, _absorb and invest_: he is to be
capitalist: the scraps and filings must be gathered back into the
crucible; the gas and smoke must be burned, and earnings must not go to
increase expense, but to capital again. Well, the man must be
capitalist. Will he spend his income, or will he invest? His body and
every organ is under the same law. His body is a jar, in which the
liquor of life is stored. Will he spend for pleasure? The way to ruin
is short and facile. Will he not spend, but hoard for power? It passes
through the sacred fermentations, by that law of Nature whereby
everything climbs to higher platforms, and bodily vigor becomes mental
and moral vigor. The bread he eats is first strength and animal
spirits: it becomes, in higher laboratories, imagery and thought; and in
still higher results, courage and endurance. This is the right compound
interest; this is capital doubled, quadrupled, centupled; man raised to
his highest power.
The true thrift is always to spend on the higher plane; to invest and
invest, with keener avarice, that he may spend in spiritual creation,
and not in augmenting animal existence. Nor is the man enriched, in
repeating the old experiments of animal sensation, nor unless through
new powers and ascending pleasures, he knows himself by the actual
experience of higher good, to be already on the way to the highest.