Henry David Thoreau 185 



once." Yet in after years, when it became 

 needful to support his family, he turned pa- 

 tiently to this mechanical art. He tried school- 

 teaching. "As I did not teach for the benefit 

 of my fellow-men," he says, "but simply for a 

 livelihood, this was a failure." He tried trade 

 with the same results. As I have already said, 

 his contempt for business and business men 

 was utter. He says: "If our merchants did 

 not most of them fail and the banks too, my 

 faith in the old rules of this world would be 

 staggered. The statement that ninety-nine 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. 



"The cost of a thing," says Thoreau, "is 

 the amount of what I will call life which is re- 

 quired to be exchanged for it, immediately or 

 in the long run." The idea may be common- 

 place, and yet most of us will admit a leavening 

 of truth in it while declining to make an ex- 

 periment. Do you want one thousand a year, 

 or two thousand a year? Do you want ten 

 thousand a year? And can you afford what 



