Gboreau 



" pounding beans " to be better than " the pound- 

 ing of empires." There is the error. What we 

 sadly need is an infusion of intellect into the lower 

 strata of man's activities. There will always be 

 brains and to spare in professional life, great 

 leaders who will reach the artificial element that 

 crowds the cities, and happily leaves undisturbed 

 the simple folk who live nearer to nature. Thoreau 

 would have been lost, or at best would have been 

 but one of many, had he overcome his repugnance 

 to mere formality, and met his neighbors in a dress- 

 suit. We cannot imagine him acting any one of 

 the innumerable white lies of modern society. In 

 such slavish toggery he would have excited as much 

 of ridicule as he now commands of admiration. In 

 his lifelong battle for sincerity and simplicity, he 

 knew the field upon which he was to fight ; knew 

 it better than any antagonist he met, and left it a 

 conqueror. 



As we glance over modern biography, we find 

 there are countless examples of youth born in the 

 ranks of the lowly who have aspired to better 

 things, and seized knowledge as a cable by which 

 to draw themselves upward, and spent their re- 

 maining days at a higher level and in an atmos- 

 phere that was but a source of wonderment to their 

 ancestors. This sounds very noble ; it is noble ; 

 but in Thoreau's case there was an inversion of this 

 order, and the intellectuality that Emerson de- 

 plored as dissipated was put to the very highest 

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