THE DUTY TO DIG
I
A young man sat by the roadside, milking. And as he milked, one drove
up in her limousine and stopped and said unto him:
“Young man, why are you not at the front?”
The young man milked on, for that was the thing to do. Then, with still
more slackers in her voice, the woman said a second time unto him:
“Young man, why are you not at the front?”
“Because, ma’am, the milk is at this end,” he answered.
And the chauffeur, throwing the clutch of the limousine into third
speed ahead, drove off, thinking.
But the young man milking had already thought. To milk is to think. If
“darning is premeditated poverty,” then there is no saner occupation
for human hands, none more thought-inducing, unless it be milking.
Anyhow, when the Great War came on, I went over to a neighbor’s and
bought a cow; I made me a new milking-stool with spread sturdy legs;
and I sat down to face the situation calmly, where I might see it
steadily and whole. I had tried the professorial chair; I had tried the
editorial chair; I had even tried that Siege Perilous, the high-backed,
soft-seated chair of plush behind the pulpit. I may never preach again;
but if I do, it will be on condition that I sit on a three-legged
milking stool instead of on that upholstered pillowy throne of plush.
Whence cometh wisdom? and where is the place of understanding? The
flaming flambeaux on the Public Library say, “The light is in here”;
the [Greek: Ph B K] key in the middle of the professorial waistcoat
says, “It is in here.” But I say, let the flambeaux be replaced by
round-headed stocking-darners, as the sign of premeditated poverty; and
the dangling Key by a miniature milking-stool, as the symbol of the
wisdom that knows which end of a cow to milk.
Not one of those students in the University who earned [Greek: Ph B
K] last year knew how to milk, and only a few, I believe, of their
professors. One of these, with a Ph.D. from Germany, whose key had
charmed his students across their whole college course, asked me what
breed of cattle heifers were. Might not his teaching have been quite
as practical, had there dangled from his watch-chain those four years,
not this key to the catacombs of knowledge, but a little jeweled
milking-stool?
I too might wear a key, especially as I came innocently by mine, having
had one _thrust_ upon me; still, as I was born on a farm, and grew up
in the fields, and am likely to end my days as I have lived them, here
in the woods, this [Greek: Ph B K] key does not fit the lock to the
door of knowledge that opens widest to me.
I have read a little on the aorist tense, and on the Ygdrasyl tree;
a little, I say, on many things, from the animal aardvark, here and
there, to zythum, a soft drink of the ancient Egyptians, picking a few
rusty locks with this skeleton key; but the doors that open wide at my
approach are those to my house, my barn, and the unwithholding fields.
I know the road home, clear to the end; I know profoundly to come in
when it rains; and I move with absolute certainty to the right end of
the cow when it is time to milk.
I am aware of a certain arrogance in this, a show of pride, and that
unbottomed pomp of those who wear the [Greek: Ph B K] key dangling at
their vests,--as if I could milk _any_ cow! or might have in my barn
the world’s champion cow! I have only a grade Jersey in my barn; and as
for milking heifers with their first calves--I _have_ milked them. But
breaking in a heifer is really a young man’s job.
So I find myself at the middle of my years, stripped of outward signs,
as I hope I am inwardly purged, of all vain shows of wisdom (quite too
humble, truly!), falling in as unnaturally as the birds with the fool
daylight-saving plan, the ways of the sun, who knoweth his going down,
being quite good enough for me.
II
But how far run the ways of nature from the devious ways of men! The
ways of Mullein Hill from the ways of a military camp! The Great War
came and passed and left the earth a vast human grave. But through it
all seedtime and harvest came to Mullein Hill, leaving only more and
more abundant life. The Great War is an illustration on the grandest
scale of what man, departing from the simple ways of nature, will do to
man. War is the logic of our present way of living. I am not concerned
with war in this book, but with the sources of life and literature. I
have a cure for war, however, here on Mullein Hill; and this cure is
the very elixir of life and literature.
War could have destroyed, but it did not change, my going or coming
here in the hills. My garden went on as it had for years gone on. There
was a little more of it, for there was more need in the village; there
was a little larger yield of its reasonableness and joy and beans. But
I did not plough up my front lawn for potatoes. Years before I had
provided myself with a back yard, and got it into tilth for potatoes,
keeping the front lawn green for the cow.
Though she is only a grade Jersey, the cow is a pretty creature,
and gives a rural, ruminant touch to our approach, along with the
lilacs and the hens. Hitched here on the front lawn the cow suggests
economy, too. She is more than a wagon hitched to a star. She is a
mowing-machine, and a rake and tedder, and a churn. The gods with her
do my mowing, gather up and cure my hay, and turn it into cream.
Every cow gives some skim milk--which we need for the chickens, for
cooking, and cottage cheese. Life is not all cream. If I speak of gods
doing my chores, I will say they do not milk for me in the mornings,
and that it is one of the boys who milks at night. A cow clipping your
lawn is poetry and cream too, but caring for the creature is often skim
milk and prose. Milking ought to be done regularly. Get a cow and you
find her cud a kind of pendulum to all creation, the time to milk being
synchronized twice daily to the stars.
I did not plant war-potatoes on my front lawn, partly because they
would not grow there, and partly because, in times of peace, I had
prepared for war-potatoes; and partly because I think a front lawn
looks better in cows than in potatoes. If thou shouldst
“So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan ...
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon,”
--should we not all live so that, when war comes, we need not plough up
the beds for potatoes where the portulaca and poppy ought to blow?
But what a confession here! When war comes! As if I expected war to
come again! Many of us are fighting feebly against both the thought and
the hideous thing. But many more are preparing for it. Our generals of
the late war are going up and down the land preaching preparedness,
as they always have. We learn nothing. They know everything. Their
profession is war. Can a man lay down his life for a profession he does
not believe in? The military men believe in war.
But so do we all as a people. War is the oldest, most honored
profession in the world. In all of the fifty years of its history, the
great University, of which, for almost half of that time, I have been a
teacher, had never conferred an honorary degree. For fifty years it had
carried a single laurel wreath in its hand to crown some honored head.
Prophets came and went; poets came and went; scientists came and went;
scholars came and went; but still the University, dedicated to life
and learning, waited with its single wreath a yet more honorable brow.
Then came Foch, the professional soldier. Study for nearly ten thousand
students was suspended; a holiday was proclaimed; a great assembly was
called; and here, with speech and song and academic garb, with national
colors mingling and waving palms, the laurel wreath was placed upon
the soldier’s brow. And this University, founded in the name of the
Prince of Peace, dedicated to Christian life and learning, crowned the
profession of arms as it can crown no other profession, and gave its
highest sanction to bloody war.
I do not fail of gratitude to Foch. I only stand in horror that he is,
and had to be. I would have had the Nation at the pier to meet him,
but clothed in sackcloth, and every citizen with ashes on his head. I,
too, would have suspended study and work everywhere for an hour; and,
stretching crape across the Arctic Circle till the sign of mourning
hid Matamoras and Cape Sable, I would have called an assembly of the
continent, and begged this half of the hemisphere to cry, “O God, the
foolishness and futility of war!”
The Duty to Dig is older than the practice of war. It was designed to
prevent war; and to-day it is the only biological remedy certain to
cure war. I must not stop here to explain its therapeutics as applied
to war, for I am dealing with another theme. But just before the war
broke upon the world, I wrote an editorial for a paper I was serving,
advocating that a hive of my bees be sent to the German Emperor and
one also to the war lord of Austria. I had extra hives for the British
Prime Minister, the Tiger of France, Mr. William Randolph Hearst, and
Mr. Theodore Roosevelt. If I could have interested these gentlemen, and
a few others, in bee-keeping, I could save the world from war.
The editorial and the offer of bees were both rejected by the careful
editor. “I must stay strictly neutral,” was his timid excuse. At the
very time I was writing, the Reverend Price Collier, a former Hingham
preacher, was publishing a book called “Germany and the Germans,”
in which he set forth the old theory of military preparedness as a
preventive of war. Speaking of the German army (this was in 1913), he
says:
It is the best all-round democratic university in the world; it is
a necessary antidote for the physical lethargy of the German race;
it is essential to discipline; it is a cement for holding Germany
together; it gives a much-worried and many-times-beaten people
confidence; the poverty of the great bulk of its officers keeps
the level of social expenditure on a sensible scale; it offers a
brilliant example, in a material age, of men scorning ease for the
service of their country; it keeps the peace in Europe; and until
there is a second coming of a Christ of pity and patience and peace,
it is as good a substitute for that far-off divine event as puzzled
man has to offer.
It is a minister of the Gospel who makes this profound observation.
But it sounds like our present Secretary of War, a banker, and like
our present Commanding General, a professional soldier. Here is sure
proof that the human race cannot learn the essential things, and so, is
doomed.
But I wish I might try my bees. This old hoax of preventing war by
preparing men to fight has been so often tried! And we are at it again.
But no nation has tried my simple and inexpensive substitute of bees
and plough-shares, and pruning hooks. They have tried, from time out
of memory, to beat their swords and spears into garden tools, but a
sword makes a mighty poor ploughshare. It has never been successfully
done. The manufacturing process is wrong. It takes the temper out of
good garden steel first to heat it in the fires of war. We must reverse
the process: turn the virgin metal into garden steel first, and give
every man a hoe, and a ploughshare, and a pruning hook; then he will
never have need for sword and spear.
III
Instead of universal military training, I would advocate a hive of
bees for everybody, or a backyard garden. A house should have both
lawn and garden, even though the gooseberries crowd the house out to
the roadside, where the human house instinctively edges to see the
neighbors in their new pony-coats go by. Let my front door stand open;
while over the back stoop the old-fashioned roses and the grape-vines
draw a screen.
But give me a house with a yard rather than a hole in the wall, a city
tenement, or a flat. The whole trend of society is toward the city, or
camp, military, rather than agricultural. The modern city is a social
camp. Life is becoming a series of mass movements, military maneuvers,
at the command of social leaders. Industry has long been militarized
both in form and spirit, and is rapidly perfecting its organization.
Today, 1923, there are more than a hundred different automobile
manufacturing concerns in this country. Only those capable of “quantity
production” will survive. Already the manufacturers see the entire
industry reduced to five different concerns. This is strictly military,
the making of society into a vast, and vaster machine, which, too great
at last for control, will turn upon and crush its makers.
We are all conscripted. The Draft Board of industrialism allows no
exemptions. The only way I see is to desert, to take to the woods, as
I have done, to return individually to a simple, elemental manner of
life out of the soil. But who can pay the social cost? Our social or
camp psychology is better understood and more easily handled than the
mind of the lone scout within us. We are gregarious by nature; we hunt
in packs, we collect into crowds. Yet we are selves, separate, single,
each of us a cave-man as well as cliff-dweller, a Remus as well as a
Romulus. The city-building brother killed his country brother. And the
murder still goes on.
Out of a commentary on the Bible I take the following observation,
partly for its charm, but also because it holds a profound truth:
God’s people from the earliest time had never been builders of
cities. The earliest account of city-building is that of the city of
Enoch by Cain, and all the subsequent mention of city-building is in
connection with the apostate families of the earth, such as Nimrod
and his descendants, the Canaanites and the Egyptians. Sodom is one
of the earliest mentioned cities properly so called, and the story of
it is not encouraging for the people of God.
But which is the city whose story is encouraging to the people of
God? Not Boston’s, nor New York’s, nor London’s, nor Vienna’s. Vienna
is starving; the country is bankrupt Austria’s governmental machine
is a total wreck; but the peasant goes his way, suffering little
inconvenience, though the crown is not to-day worth the paper it is
printed on. The peasant lives on the land, not on the bank; he gets
his simple life directly out of the soil instead of a pay envelope; he
has no New York, New Haven and Hartford stock, worth one hundred and
eighty-six dollars yesterday, and ten dollars to-day, to-morrow, and
until he starves. He has a piece of land and, impossible as it sounds
on paper, lives on it, and out of it, and in it, an almost independent
life, as the wage-slave and the coupon-victim cannot live.
We shall face a famine, so long as our door-yards are all lawn in
front and all garbage-can behind. We have farmers enough--one to every
eight of our population, I believe--who might produce sufficient raw
potatoes; but Aroostook County is barely contiguous to the United
States, and such a barrage of frost was laid down across its borders
this last winter that, if one brought potatoes out of Aroostook between
December and March, he had to bear them in his bosom.
Aroostook County is the greatest potato-patch in the world; the
American imagination loves to hover over the tubered tracts of
Aroostook, the _richest_ county in the world; loves to feel that the
world could be fed from Aroostook, were it not for the triple alliance
of the cold and the contiguity and a railroad that runs, if not like
a broken tooth, then like a foot out of joint, into these remote
dreamlands of Maine.
Woe to them that go down to the railroads for help; and stay on engines
and trust in empties, because they are many; and in officials, because
they are very strong. Now the officials are men and not God, and their
engines steel and not spirit. Why should a rational, spiritual human
society trust its well-being to such paltry powers, when all the forces
of nature are at its command?
I will put more trust in an acre of land than in a Continental
Congress. I had rather have a hoe at my right hand than an army of
bank presidents. Give me the rising and the setting sun, the four
seasons, and the peasant’s portion; and you may have the portion of the
president.
I said we have farmers enough to raise all we need. We have more
than enough. We have more than enough bankers; more than enough
automobile-makers; more than enough store-keepers; more than enough
coal-miners; more than enough cooks and janitors. But we have nowhere
near enough landowners and peasants. Nothing in the world would so
straighten out society as to declare next year a Year of Jubilee, and
give every man, not a job, but his birthright, a piece of land.
We are over-organized and almost de-individualized. But the time must
again come when every man shall dig and every woman spin, and every
family build its own automobile, distill its own petrol, and work out
its taxes on the road. We shall always hold to the social principle of
the division of labor--I plough for you; and you shoe my horse for me.
But we have carried the principle, in our over-organization, to the
point where a man’s whole part in the world’s work consists in putting
on the left hind wheel of endless automobiles.
An eight-hour day will not save that man. And he is typical of all men
to-day. Only by his acceptance of the duty to dig can he be saved,
and society with him. The principle of the division of labor has been
misapplied: instead of specialization and the narrowing of each man’s
portion, it should be applied broadly, multiplying his labors. Work is
creative; it is self-expression; and I should let no man do for me
what I can do. He robs me of living who robs me of doing.
The theory of present-day society--specialization, organization,
combination, quantity production--is a fatal application of a perfectly
sound principle. Six automobile combinations which in a year can
destroy a hundred lesser combinations, can in another year destroy all
but one of each other; and that remaining one, having nothing now to
destroy, must turn and destroy itself.
IV
But I am concerned with life and literature. How does the organization
of society affect books, admitting that it affects life? What is a book
but a life?--and a more abundant life? Everybody who has lived has a
book to write. But only those who have lived abundantly should write
their books. Starve a nation spiritually, as ours is being starved;
reduce its life to a mechanical routine; rob its labor of all creative
quality, and how shall it write?
The duty to dig applies first to the spirit. There is sound economy in
it if one’s political economy is sound. I do not say money. Economy
and money are not equivalent terms. I digged as a duty last year; and
as a result I did not buy a potato from the “combine” in Maine; I
nearly got on without a pound of beef from Chicago; and could have made
my honey serve for Cuban sugar. The same amount of time spent putting
left hind wheels on automobiles might have brought me more money, and
so, more beef and potatoes and sugar, and so, more gout and rheumatism.
The duty to dig comprehends a great deal more than ordinary economy.
I would not imply that I can handle the Beef Trust and the potato
pirates and the sugar barons with my humble hoe; or snap my fingers
in the face of Standard Oil, and say, “Go to, I’ll have none of your
twenty-eight-cent gas!” I do say that several million bee-keepers and
potato-patchers, and hen-coopers, keeping busy in their back yards, as
I keep busy in mine, could mightily relieve the railroad congestion,
and save gasoline, and cut in on the demand for Chicago beef and
cold-storage eggs, and generally lower the high cost of living.
It is not because there are “millions in it” that I would have the
banker plant his back yard to beans. Thoreau planted two acres and
a half to beans and potatoes (on a weak market, however), with a
“pecuniary profit of $8.71-1/2.” Here is no very great financial
inducement to a busy banker, or to a ward boss. Still, who better than
the ward boss or the banker could afford a private beanfield?
I say it is not for the sake of this $8.71-1/2 profit of Thoreau’s that
we must dig; but rather for that chapter on the bean field in Walden
Pond, which proves the real worth of digging.
There can hardly be a form of labor so elemental, so all-demanding,
so abundantly yielding of the fruits of life, as digging. Yet there
are those who doubt the wisdom of digging because things can be bought
cheaper at the store; and those who question their right to dig when
they can hire a man to dig for them; and there are those who hate to
dig, who contemn duty, who, if they plant, will plant a piece of fallow
land with golf-balls only, and hoe it with brassies, niblicks, cleeks,
and spooners, saying with Chaucer’s Monk:
“... how shall the world be servèd?
Let Austyn have his swynk to his reservèd.”
Golf is an ancient game, no doubt, but not so old as gardening, though
golf’s primordial club and vocabulary seem like things long left over,
bits of that Missing-Link Period between our arboreal and cave-day
past. Except for calling the cows from the meadow, or fighting in
war, there is nothing we do that requires words and weapons, tools,
instruments, implements, utensils, apparatus, machinery, or mechanisms
so lacking in character and comeliness as the words and clubs of
golf. The gurglings of infants seem articulate, even to unparental
ears, compared with the jargon of golf; and as for billiard-cues,
baseball-bats, pikes, spades, shillalahs, and teething-rings, they have
the touch of poetry on them; whereas the golf-club was conceived and
shaped in utter unimaginativeness.
Golf is not an ancient game: it has the mark of the Machine upon it;
the Preadamites could not have figured the game out. Gardening, on
the other hand, if we trust Holy Writ, was an institution founded
before the Fall, incorporated with the social order from the start--an
inherent, essential element in the constitution of human things:
“Great nature’s _primal_ course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast,”
--which civilization doth murder as Macbeth murdered sleep.
Golf belongs to civilization strictly, not to the human race, being one
of life’s post-Edenic precautions, like psychopathic hospitals, jails,
and homes for the feeble-minded. A golf course is a little-wanderers’
home; and if we must have golf courses, let their hazards be carefully
constructed on worthless land, and let the Civil Service Board examine
the caddies, whether they be fit guards for the golfers, lest some
small boy be wasted who might have tended real sheep on Norfolk Downs
or have weeded in a garden.
It is a duty to dig, to nail the Stars and Stripes to a lima-bean pole,
and plant the banner square in the middle of the garden. Profits?
pleasures? Both sorts will grow, especially the pleasures, which really
are part of the profits, till they fairly smother the weeds; not the
least of these being your sense of living and your right to live,
which comes out of actually hoeing your own row--a literal row of
beans or corn or tomatoes.
Somebody must feed the soldiers; but nobody must needs feed me. It is
not necessary that I live, however necessary I find it to eat; eating,
like sleeping and breathing and keeping warm, being strictly a private
enterprise that nobody but I need see as necessary or be responsible
for.
The soldier must carry a shovel nowadays, but he will require a
hoe, too, and a pruning hook, and a ploughshare, before he will be
self-supporting. With such a kit war could support war forever,
which is the Rathenau plan of war, with everything German left out,
consequently everything of war left out. The soldier cannot feed
himself. The crew of a battleship cannot be expected to catch their own
cod and flounders. They must leave that to the trawlers, those human
boats, with human crews who fish for a living. Men of the navy must
die for a living. The captain of a United States destroyer, writing
to his wife, says, “I think that the only real anxiety is lest we
may not get into the big game at all. I do not think that any of us
are bloodthirsty or desirous of glory or advancement, but we have to
justify our existence.”
So does every human being; yet an existence that can be justified
only by fighting and dying is too unproductive, too far from
self-supporting, to warrant the sure calling and election of many of
us. No Grand-Banker ever wrote so to his wife, though he might be
returning with all his salt unwet; no college professor ever wrote
so--not if he could get into his garden--in spite of his pupils, his
college president, the trustees, and Mr. Carnegie’s Efficiency Board.
Teaching may not justify a professor’s existence, though it ought to
justify his salary; so, every time I start for the University, I put a
dozen or two of eggs into my book-bag, that I may have a right to the
tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city.
I am not independent of society. I do not wish to be independent. I
wish to be debtor to all and have all debtors to me. But we buy too
much and sell too much of life, and raise too little. We _pay_ for all
we get. Sometimes we get all we pay for, but not often; and if we never
did, still life has so thoroughly adopted the business standard, that
we had rather keep on paying than trying to grow our way.
Business is a way of living by proxy; money is society’s proxy for
every sort of implement and tool. To produce something, however--some
actual wealth, a pennyweight of gold-dust, a pound of honey, a dozen
eggs, a book, a boy, a bunch of beets; some real wealth out of the
soil, out of my loins, out of my brains, out of my muscles and the sap
of the maple, the rains and sunshine and the soil, out of the rich
veins of the earth or the swarming waters of the sea--this is to be;
and to be myself, and not a proxy, is to lose my life and save it, and
to justify my existence.
I have to buy a multitude of things--transportation, coal, dentistry,
news, flour, and clothes. I have paid in money for them. I have also
paid in real wealth, having given, to balance my charge on society, an
equivalent in raw cabbage, pure honey, fresh eggs, and the like, from
my own created store. I am doubtless in debt to society, but I have
tried to give wealth for wealth, not the symbol of it merely; and last
year, as I balanced my books, I think the world was in debt to me by
several bunches of beets. I do not boast of the beets, though they take
me out of the debtor’s prison where most of us live. I can face the
world, however, with those beets; I have gone over the top, have done
my bit, with beets.
The oldest duty on the human conscience is the duty to dig. I am a
college teacher, and that is an honorable, if futile, profession. The
Scriptures say: “He gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some,
evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers”; but, before there were
any such multifarious and highly specialized needs, it was said unto
our first father: “Replenish the earth and subdue it”--a universal
human need, a call to duty, from which no Draft Board of civilization
can rightly exempt us.
Wealth is not created, not even increased, in trade. When was one
pennyweight of gold on ’change by any magic metallurgy of trade made
two pennyweight? The magic of the second pennyweight is the metallurgy
of the pick and shovel and cradle rocking the shining sands of the
Yukon. Real wealth is only circulated in trade. It comes from primal
sources--from the gold-fields, the cotton-fields, the corn-fields, the
fir-clad sides of Katahdin, the wide gray waters of the Grand Banks,
the high valleys of the sheeped Sierras, and from back yards, like
mine, that bring forth thirty- and sixty- and an hundred-fold.
And this is as profoundly true of life and literature as it is of
cotton and lumber and gold.
Give me a garden and the wages of hoeing my row. And if not a garden,
then a little house of hens, a coop of pigeons, a colony of bees--even
in the city I should keep bees, if I had to keep them in the attic or
on the roof. Not every one can have a garden, but every one can either
plant a tree, or raise one pig, or keep a cow or goat, or feed a few
hens, or raise a flock of pigeons, or do something that will bring him
personally into contact with real things, and make it possible for him
to help pay his way with real wealth, and in part, at least, to justify
his existence, and his book.