Society and solitude: Twelve chapters
among landlords and loomlords, namely, the dogma that men breed too
fast for the powers of the soil; that men multiply in a geometrical
ratio, whilst corn only in an arithmetical; and hence that, the more
prosperous we are, the faster we approach these frightful limits: nay,
the plight of every new generation is worse than of the foregoing,
because the first comers take up the best lands; the next, the second
best; and each succeeding wave of population is driven to poorer, so
that the land is ever yielding less returns to enlarging hosts of
eaters. Henry Carey of Philadelphia replied: ‘Not so, Mr. Malthus, but
just the opposite of so is the fact.’
The first planter, the savage, without helpers, without tools, looking
chiefly to safety from his enemy,--man or beast,--takes poor land. The
better lands are loaded with timber, which he cannot clear; they need
drainage, which he cannot attempt. He cannot plough, or fell trees, or
drain the rich swamp. He is a poor creature; he scratches with a sharp
stick, lives in a cave or a hutch, has no road but the trail of the
moose or bear; he lives on their flesh when he can kill one, on roots
and fruits when he cannot. He falls, and is lame; he coughs, he has a
stitch in his side, he has a fever and chills: when he is hungry, he
cannot always kill and eat a bear;--chances of war,--sometimes the bear
eats him. ’Tis long before he digs or plants at all, and then only a
patch. Later he learns that his planting is better than hunting; that
the earth works faster for him than he can work for himself,--works
for him when he is asleep, when it rains, when heat overcomes him. The
sun-stroke which knocks him down brings his corn up. As his family
thrive, and other planters come up around him, he begins to fell trees,
and clear good land; and when, by and by, there is more skill, and
tools and roads, the new generations are strong enough to open the
lowlands, where the wash of mountains has accumulated the best soil,
which yield a hundred-fold the former crops. The last lands are the
best lands. It needs science and great numbers to cultivate the best
lands, and in the best manner. Thus true political economy is not
mean, but liberal, and on the pattern of the sun and sky. Population
increases in the ratio of morality: credit exists in the ratio of
morality.
Meantime we cannot enumerate the incidents and agents of the farm
without reverting to their influence on the farmer. He carries out
this cumulative preparation of means to their last effect. This crust
of soil which ages have refined he refines again for the feeding
of a civil and instructed people. The great elements with which he
deals cannot leave him unaffected, or unconscious of his ministry;
but their influence somewhat resembles that which the same Nature has
on the child,--of subduing and silencing him. We see the farmer with
pleasure and respect, when we think what powers and utilities are
so meekly worn. He knows every secret of labor: he changes the face
of the landscape. Put him on a new planet, and he would know where
to begin; yet there is no arrogance in his bearing, but a perfect
gentleness. The farmer stands well on the world. Plain in manners as
in dress, he would not shine in palaces; he is absolutely unknown and
inadmissible therein; living or dying, he never shall be heard of in
them; yet the drawing-room heroes put down beside him would shrivel in
his presence,--he solid and unexpressive, they expressed to gold-leaf.
But he stands well on the world,--as Adam did, as an Indian does, as
Homer’s heroes, Agamemnon or Achilles, do. He is a person whom a poet
of any clime--Milton, Firdusi, or Cervantes--would appreciate as being
really a piece of the old Nature, comparable to sun and moon, rainbow
and flood; because he is, as all natural persons are, representative of
Nature as much as these.
That uncorrupted behavior which we admire in animals and in young
children belongs to him, to the hunter, the sailor,--the man who
lives in the presence of Nature. Cities force growth, and make men
talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial. What
possesses interest for us is the _naturel_ of each, his constitutional
excellence. This is forever a surprise, engaging and lovely; we cannot
be satiated with knowing it, and about it; and it is this which the
conversation with Nature cherishes and guards.
WORKS AND DAYS.
WORKS AND DAYS.
Our nineteenth century is the age of tools. They grow out of our
structure. “Man is the metre of all things,” said Aristotle; “the hand
is the instrument of instruments, and the mind is the form of forms.”
The human body is the magazine of inventions, the patent-office,
where are the models from which every hint was taken. All the tools
and engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs and senses. One
definition of man is “an intelligence served by organs.” Machines can
only second, not supply, his unaided senses. The body is a metre. The
eye appreciates finer differences than art can expose. The apprentice
clings to his foot-rule, a practised mechanic will measure by his thumb
and his arm with equal precision; and a good surveyor will pace sixteen
rods more accurately than another man can measure them by tape. The
sympathy of eye and hand by which an Indian or a practised slinger hits
his mark with a stone, or a wood-chopper or a carpenter swings his axe
to a hair-line on his log, are examples; and there is no sense or organ
which is not capable of exquisite performance.
Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of our science; and such is
the mechanical determination of our age, and so recent are our best
contrivances, that use has not dulled our joy and pride in them; and
we pity our fathers for dying before steam and galvanism, sulphuric
ether and ocean telegraphs, photograph and spectroscope arrived, as
cheated out of half their human estate. These arts open great gates of
a future, promising to make the world plastic and to lift human life
out of its beggary to a godlike ease and power.
Our century, to be sure, had inherited a tolerable apparatus. We had
the compass, the printing-press, watches, the spiral spring, the
barometer, the telescope. Yet so many inventions have been added,
that life seems almost made over new; and as Leibnitz said of Newton,
“that if he reckoned all that had been done by mathematicians from the
beginning of the world down to Newton, and what had been done by him,
his would be the better half,” so one might say that the inventions
of the last fifty years counterpoise those of the fifty centuries
before them. For the vast production and manifold application of iron
is new; and our common and indispensable utensils of house and farm
are new; the sewing-machine, the power-loom, the McCormick reaper,
the mowing-machines, gas-light, lucifer-matches, and the immense
productions of the laboratory, are new in this century, and one franc’s
worth of coal does the work of a laborer for twenty days.
Why need I speak of steam, the enemy of space and time, with its
enormous strength and delicate applicability, which is made in
hospitals to bring a bowl of gruel to a sick man’s bed, and can twist
beams of iron like candy-braids, and vies with the forces which
upheaved and doubled over the geologic strata? Steam is an apt scholar
and a strong-shouldered fellow, but it has not yet done all its work.
It already walks about the field like a man, and will do anything
required of it. It irrigates crops, and drags away a mountain. It
must sew our shirts, it must drive our gigs; taught by Mr. Babbage,
it must calculate interest and logarithms. Lord Chancellor Thurlow
thought it might be made to draw bills and answers in chancery. If
that were satire, it is yet coming to render many higher services of
a mechanico-intellectual kind, and will leave the satire short of the
fact.
How excellent are the mechanical aids we have applied to the human
body, as in dentistry, in vaccination, in the rhinoplastic treatment;
in the beautiful aid of ether, like a finer sleep; and in the boldest
promiser of all,--the transfusion of the blood,--which, in Paris, it
was claimed, enables a man to change his blood as often as his linen!
What of this dapper caoutchouc and gutta-percha, which make water-pipes
and stomach-pumps, belting for mill-wheels, and diving bells, and
rain-proof coats for all climates, which teach us to defy the wet,
and put every man on a footing with the beaver and the crocodile?
What of the grand tools with which we engineer, like kobolds and
enchanters,--tunnelling Alps, canalling the American Isthmus, piercing
the Arabian desert? In Massachusetts, we fight the sea successfully
with beach-grass and broom,--and the blowing sand-barrens with pine
plantations. The soil of Holland, once the most populous in Europe,
is below the level of the sea. Egypt, where no rain fell for three
thousand years, now, it is said, thanks Mehemet Ali’s irrigations and
planted forests for late-returning showers. The old Hebrew king said,
“He makes the wrath of man to praise him.” And there is no argument of
theism better than the grandeur of ends brought about by paltry means.
The chain of western railroads from Chicago to the Pacific has planted
cities and civilization in less time than it costs to bring an orchard
into bearing.
What shall we say of the ocean telegraph, that extension of the eye and
ear, whose sudden performance astonished mankind as if the intellect
were taking the brute earth itself into training, and shooting the
first thrills of life and thought through the unwilling brain?
There does not seem any limit to these new informations of the same
Spirit that made the elements at first, and now, through man, works
them. Art and power will go on as they have done,--will make day out
of night, time out of space, and space out of time.
Invention breeds invention. No sooner is the electric telegraph
devised, than gutta-percha, the very material it requires, is found.
The aeronaut is provided with gun-cotton, the very fuel he wants for
his balloon. When commerce is vastly enlarged, California and Australia
expose the gold it needs. When Europe is over-populated, America and
Australia crave to be peopled; and so, throughout, every chance is
timed, as if Nature, who made the lock, knew where to find the key.
Another result of our arts is the new intercourse which is surprising
us with new solutions of the embarrassing political problems. The
intercourse is not new, but the scale is new. Our selfishness would
have held slaves, or would have excluded from a quarter of the planet
all that are not born on the soil of that quarter. Our politics are
disgusting; but what can they help or hinder when from time to time
the primal instincts are impressed on masses of mankind, when the
nations are in exodus and flux? Nature loves to cross her stocks,--and
German, Chinese, Turk, Russ, and Kanaka were putting out to sea, and
intermarrying race with race; and commerce took the hint, and ships
were built capacious enough to carry the people of a county.
This thousand-handed art has introduced a new element into the state.
The science of power is forced to remember the power of science.
Civilization mounts and climbs. Malthus, when he stated that the mouths
went on multiplying geometrically, and the food only arithmetically,
forgot to say that the human mind was also a factor in political
economy, and that the augmenting wants of society would be met by an
augmenting power of invention.
Yes, we have a pretty artillery of tools now in our social
arrangements: we ride four times as fast as our fathers did; travel,
grind, weave, forge, plant, till, and excavate better. We have new