" And
again: "If our merchants did not most of them fail, and the
banks too, my faith in the old laws of this world would be
staggered. The statement that ninety-six in a hundred doing
such business surely break down is perhaps the sweetest fact
that statistics have revealed." The wish was probably father
to the figures; but there is something enlivening in a hatred
of so genuine a brand, hot as Corsican revenge, and sneering
like Voltaire.
Pencils, school-keeping, and trade being thus discarded one
after another, Thoreau, with a stroke of strategy, turned the
position. He saw his way to get his board and lodging for
practically nothing; and Admetus never got less work out of
any servant since the world began. It was his ambition to be
an oriental philosopher; but he was always a very Yankee sort
of oriental. Even in the peculiar attitude in which he stood
to money, his system of personal economics, as we may call
it, he displayed a vast amount of truly down-East
calculation, and he adopted poverty like a piece of business.
Yet his system is based on one or two ideas which, I believe,
come naturally to all thoughtful youths, and are only pounded
out of them by city uncles. Indeed, something essentially
youthful distinguishes all Thoreau's knock-down blows at
current opinion. Like the posers of a child, they leave the
orthodox in a kind of speechless agony.
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