"I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I could name, - if ten honest men only, ay, if one honest man, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison."

This sounded hollow then, but when that embodiment of American justice and mercy, John Brown, lay bleeding in a Virginia prison, a dozen years later, the significance of Thoreau's words began to be seen; and when a few years after our countrymen were dying by hundreds of thousands to complete what Brown, with his single life, had begun, the whole truth, as Thoreau had seen it, flashed in the eyes of the nation.

In this same essay of 1846, on "Civil Disobedience," the ultimate truth concerning government is stated in a passage which also does justice to Daniel Webster, our "logic-fencer and parliamentary Hercules," as Carlyle called him in a letter to Emerson in 1839. Thoreau said:

"Statesmen and legislators, standing so completely within the institution (of government) never distinctly and nakedly behold it. They speak of moving society, but have no restingplace without it. They are wont to forget that the world is not governed by policy and expediency. Webster never goes behind government, and so cannot speak with authority about it. His words are wisdom to those legislators who contemplate no essential reform in the existing government; but for thinkers, and those who legislate for all time, he never once glances at the subject. Yet compared with the cheap professions of most reformers, and the still cheaper wisdom and eloquence of politicians in general, his are almost the only sensible and valuable words, and we thank heaven for him. Comparatively, he is always strong, original, and, above all, practical; still his quality is not wisdom, but prudence. Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing. For eighteen hundred years the New Testament has been written; yet where is the legislator who has wisdom and practical talent enough to avail himself of the light which it sheds on the science of government?"

Such a legislator, proclaiming his law

from the scaffold, at last appeared in John Brown:

"I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that whatsoever I would that men should do unto me, I should do even so to them.' It teaches me further to remember them that are in bonds as bound with them.' I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say that I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that, to have interfered as I have done in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right."

Before these simple words of Brown, down went Webster and all his industry in behalf of the "compromises of the Constitution." When Thoreau heard them, and saw the matchless behavior of his noble old friend, he recognized the hour and the

man.

"For once," he cried in the church-vestry at Concord, "we are lifted into the region of truth and manhood. No man, in America, has ever stood up so persistently and effectively for the dignity of human nature; knowing himself for a man, and the equal of any and all governments. The only government that I recognize, and it

matters not how few are at the head of it, or how is that power which establishes

small its army,
justice in the land.">

Words like these have proved immortal when spoken in the cell of Socrates, and they lose none of their vitality, coming from the Concord philosopher.

The weakness of Webster was in his moral principles; he could not resist temptation; could not keep out of debt; could not avoid those obligations which the admiration or the selfishness of his friends forced upon him, and which left him, in his old age, neither independence nor gratitude. Thoreau's strength was in his moral nature, and in his obstinate refusal to mortgage himself, his time, or his opinions, even to the State or the Church. The haughtiness of his independence kept him from a thousand temptations that beset men of less courage and self-denial.

CHAPTER XIII.

LIFE, DEATH, AND IMMORTALITY.

THE life of Thoreau naturally divides itself into three parts: his Apprenticeship, from birth to the summer of 1837, when he left Harvard College; his Journey-work (Wanderjahre) from 1837 to 1849, when he appeared as an author, with his first book; and his Mastership, not of a college, a merchantman, or a mechanic art, but of the trade and mystery of writing. He had aspired to live and study and practice, so that he could write-to use his own words "sentences which suggest far more than they say, which have an atmosphere about them, which do not report an old, but make a new impression." To frame such sentences as these, he said, "as durable as a Roman aqueduct," was the art of writing coveted by him; "sentences which are expressive, towards which so many volumes, so much life went; which lie like boulders