Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 5, 1895 - Miscellanies, Volume II

HENRY DAVID THOREAU
of this nation is not illustrated by a thought,' he
writes ; ' it is not warmed by a sentiment ; there is
nothing in it for which a man should lay down his
life, nor even his gloves.' And again : ' If our mer-
chants 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 re-
venge, and sneering like Voltaire.
Pencils, school-keeping, and trade being thus dis-
carded 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 pecuhar atti-
tude 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
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