Society and solitude: Twelve chapters
seat by the wayside, makes the land so far lovely and desirable, makes
a fortune which he cannot carry away with him, but which is useful to
his country long afterwards. The man that works at home helps society
at large with somewhat more of certainty than he who devotes himself to
charities. If it be true that, not by votes of political parties, but
by the eternal laws of political economy, slaves are driven out of a
slave State as fast as it is surrounded by free States, then the true
abolitionist is the farmer, who, heedless of laws and constitutions,
stands all day in the field, investing his labor in the land, and
making a product with which no forced labor can compete.
We commonly say that the rich man can speak the truth, can afford
honesty, can afford independence of opinion and action;--and that is
the theory of nobility. But it is the rich man in a true sense, that is
to say, not the man of large income and large expenditure, but solely
the man whose outlay is less than his income and is steadily kept so.
In English factories, the boy that watches the loom, to tie the thread
when the wheel stops to indicate that a thread is broken, is called a
_minder_. And in this great factory of our Copernican globe, shifting
its slides; rotating its constellations, times, and tides; bringing
now the day of planting, then of watering, then of weeding, then of
reaping, then of curing and storing,--the farmer is the _minder_. His
machine is of colossal proportions,--the diameter of the water-wheel,
the arms of the levers, the power of the battery, are out of all
mechanic measure;--and it takes him long to understand its parts and
its working. This pump never “sucks”; these screws are never loose;
this machine is never out of gear; the vat and piston, wheels and
tires, never wear out, but are self-repairing.
Who are the farmer’s servants? Not the Irish, nor the coolies, but
Geology and Chemistry, the quarry of the air, the water of the brook,
the lightning of the cloud, the castings of the worm, the plough of the
frost. Long before he was born, the sun of ages decomposed the rocks,
mellowed his land, soaked it with light and heat, covered it with
vegetable film, then with forests, and accumulated the sphagnum whose
decays made the peat of his meadow.
Science has shown the great circles in which nature works; the manner
in which marine plants balance the marine animals, as the land plants
supply the oxygen which the animals consume, and the animals the carbon
which the plants absorb. These activities are incessant. Nature works
on a method of _all for each and each for all_. The strain that is made
on one point bears on every arch and foundation of the structure. There
is a perfect solidarity. You cannot detach an atom from its holdings,
or strip off from it the electricity, gravitation, chemic affinity, or
the relation to light and heat, and leave the atom bare. No, it brings
with it its universal ties.
Nature, like a cautious testator, ties up her estate so as not to
bestow it all on one generation, but has a forelooking tenderness and
equal regard to the next and the next, and the fourth, and the fortieth
age.
There lie the inexhaustible magazines. The eternal rocks, as we call
them, have held their oxygen or lime undiminished, entire, as it was.
No particle of oxygen can rust or wear, but has the same energy as
on the first morning. The good rocks, those patient waiters, say to
him: ‘We have the sacred power as we received it. We have not failed
of our trust, and now--when in our immense day the hour is at last
struck--take the gas we have hoarded; mingle it with water; and let it
be free to grow in plants and animals, and obey the thought of man.’
The earth works for him; the earth is a machine which yields almost
gratuitous service to every application of intellect. Every plant is a
manufacturer of soil. In the stomach of the plant development begins.
The tree can draw on the whole air, the whole earth, on all the rolling
main. The plant is all suction-pipe,--imbibing from the ground by its
root, from the air by its leaves, with all its might.
The air works for him. The atmosphere, a sharp solvent, drinks the
essence and spirit of every solid on the globe,--a menstruum which
melts the mountains into it. Air is matter subdued by heat. As the sea
is the grand receptacle of all rivers, so the air is the receptacle
from which all things spring, and into which they all return. The
invisible and creeping air takes form and solid mass. Our senses are
sceptics, and believe only the impression of the moment, and do not
believe the chemical fact that these huge mountain-chains are made up
of gases and rolling wind. But Nature is as subtle as she is strong.
She turns her capital day by day; deals never with dead, but ever
with quick subjects. All things are flowing, even those that seem
immovable. The adamant is always passing into smoke. The plants imbibe
the materials which they want from the air and the ground. They burn,
that is, exhale and decompose their own bodies into the air and earth
again. The animal burns, or undergoes the like perpetual consumption.
The earth burns,--the mountains burn and decompose,--slower, but
incessantly. It is almost inevitable to push the generalization up into
higher parts of nature, rank over rank into sentient beings. Nations
burn with internal fire of thought and affection, which wastes while
it works. We shall find finer combustion and finer fuel. Intellect is
a fire: rash and pitiless it melts this wonderful bone-house which is
called man. Genius even, as it is the greatest good, is the greatest
harm. Whilst all thus burns,--the universe in a blaze kindled from
the torch of the sun,--it needs a perpetual tempering, a phlegm, a
sleep, atmospheres of azote, deluges of water, to check the fury of the
conflagration; a hoarding to check the spending; a centripetence equal
to the centrifugence: and this is invariably supplied.
The railroad dirt-cars are good excavators; but there is no porter
like Gravitation, who will bring down any weights which man cannot
carry, and if he wants aid, knows where to find his fellow-laborers.
Water works in masses, and sets its irresistible shoulder to your mills
or your ships, or transports vast boulders of rock in its iceberg a
thousand miles. But its far greater power depends on its talent of
becoming little, and entering the smallest holes and pores. By this
agency, carrying in solution elements needful to every plant, the
vegetable world exists.
But as I said, we must not paint the farmer in rose-color. Whilst these
grand energies have wrought for him, and made his task possible, he is
habitually engaged in small economies, and is taught the power that
lurks in petty things. Great is the force of a few simple arrangements;
for instance, the powers of a fence. On the prairie you wander a
hundred miles, and hardly find a stick or a stone. At rare intervals,
a thin oak opening has been spared, and every such section has been
long occupied. But the farmer manages to procure wood from far, puts
up a rail fence, and at once the seeds sprout and the oaks rise. It
was only browsing and fire which had kept them down. Plant fruit-trees
by the roadside, and their fruit will never be allowed to ripen. Draw
a pine fence about them, and for fifty years they mature for the
owner their delicate fruit. There is a great deal of enchantment in a
chestnut rail or picketed pine boards.
Nature suggests every economical expedient somewhere on a great
scale. Set out a pine-tree, and it dies in the first year, or lives a
poor spindle. But Nature drops a pine-cone in Mariposa, and it lives
fifteen centuries, grows three or four hundred feet high, and thirty
in diameter,--grows in a grove of giants, like a colonnade of Thebes.
Ask the tree how it was done. It did not grow on a ridge, but in a
basin, where it found deep soil, cold enough and dry enough for the
pine; defended itself from the sun by growing in groves, and from the
wind by the walls of the mountain. The roots that shot deepest, and
the stems of happiest exposure, drew the nourishment from the rest,
until the less thrifty perished and manured the soil for the stronger,
and the mammoth Sequoias rose to their enormous proportions. The
traveller who saw them remembered his orchard at home, where every
year, in the destroying wind, his forlorn trees pined like suffering
virtue. In September, when the pears hang heaviest, and are taking
from the sun their gay colors, comes usually a gusty day which shakes
the whole garden, and throws down the heaviest fruit in bruised
heaps. The planter took the hint of the Sequoias, built a high wall,
or--better--surrounded the orchard with a nursery of birches and
evergreens. Thus he had the mountain basin in miniature; and his pears
grew to the size of melons, and the vines beneath them ran an eighth of
a mile. But this shelter creates a new climate. The wall that keeps off
the strong wind keeps off the cold wind. The high wall reflecting the
heat back on the soil gives that acre a quadruple share of sunshine,
“Enclosing in the garden square
A dead and standing pool of air,”
and makes a little Cuba within it, whilst all without is Labrador.
The chemist comes to his aid every year by following out some new hint
drawn from nature, and now affirms that this dreary space occupied by
the farmer is needless: he will concentrate his kitchen-garden into a
box of one or two rods square, will take the roots into his laboratory;
the vines and stalks and stems may go sprawling about in the fields
outside, he will attend to the roots in his tub, gorge them with food
that is good for them. The smaller his garden, the better he can feed
it, and the larger the crop. As he nursed his Thanksgiving turkeys on
bread and milk, so he will pamper his peaches and grapes on the viands
they like best. If they have an appetite for potash, or salt, or iron,
or ground bones, or even now and then for a dead hog, he will indulge
them. They keep the secret well, and never tell on your table whence
they drew their sunset complexion or their delicate flavors.
See what the farmer accomplishes by a cartload of tiles: he alters
the climate by letting off water which kept the land cold through
constant evaporation, and allows the warm rain to bring down into
the roots the temperature of the air and of the surface-soil; and he
deepens the soil, since the discharge of this standing water allows
the roots of his plants to penetrate below the surface to the subsoil,
and accelerates the ripening of the crop. The town of Concord is
one of the oldest towns in this country, far on now in its third
century. The selectmen have once in every five years perambulated the
boundaries, and yet, in this very year, a large quantity of land has
been discovered and added to the town without a murmur of complaint
from any quarter. By drainage we went down to a subsoil we did not
know, and have found there is a Concord under old Concord, which we are
now getting the best crops from; a Middlesex under Middlesex; and, in
fine, that Massachusetts has a basement story more valuable, and that
promises to pay a better rent, than all the superstructure. But these
tiles have acquired by association a new interest. These tiles are
political economists, confuters of Malthus and Ricardo; they are so
many Young Americans announcing a better era,--more bread. They drain
the land, make it sweet and friable; have made English Chat Moss a
garden, and will now do as much for the Dismal Swamp. But beyond this
benefit, they are the text of better opinions and better auguries for
mankind.
There has been a nightmare bred in England of indigestion and spleen