For it matters not how small the beginning may seem
to be; what is once well done is done for ever." Such was
his theory of civil disobedience.
And the upshot? A friend paid the tax for him; continued
year by year to pay it in the sequel; and Thoreau was free to
walk the woods unmolested. It was a FIASCO, but to me it
does not seem laughable; even those who joined in the
laughter at the moment would be insensibly affected by this
quaint instance of a good man's horror for injustice. We may
compute the worth of that one night's imprisonment as
outweighing half a hundred voters at some subsequent
election: and if Thoreau had possessed as great a power of
persuasion as (let us say) Falstaff, if he had counted a
party however small, if his example had been followed by a
hundred or by thirty of his fellows, I cannot but believe it
would have greatly precipitated the era of freedom and
justice. We feel the misdeeds of our country with so little
fervour, for we are not witnesses to the suffering they
cause; but when we see them wake an active horror in our
fellow-man, when we see a neighbour prefer to lie in prison
rather than be so much as passively implicated in their
perpetration, even the dullest of us will begin to realise
them with a quicker pulse.
Not far from twenty years later, when Captain John Brown was
taken at Harper's Ferry, Thoreau was the first to come
forward in his defence.
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