3.90
Hinges and screws,............... 0.14
Latch,........................... 0.10
Chalk,........................... 0.01
Transportation,.................. 1.40 I carried a good part
———— on my back.
In all,..................... $28.12½
These are all the materials excepting the timber stones and sand, which
I claimed by squatter’s right. I have also a small wood-shed adjoining,
made chiefly of the stuff which was left after building the house.
I intend to build me a house which will surpass any on the main street
in Concord in grandeur and luxury, as soon as it pleases me as much and
will cost me no more than my present one.
I thus found that the student who wishes for a shelter can obtain one
for a lifetime at an expense not greater than the rent which he now
pays annually. If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is
that I brag for humanity rather than for myself; and my shortcomings
and inconsistencies do not affect the truth of my statement.
Notwithstanding much cant and hypocrisy,—chaff which I find it
difficult to separate from my wheat, but for which I am as sorry as any
man,—I will breathe freely and stretch myself in this respect, it is
such a relief to both the moral and physical system; and I am resolved
that I will not through humility become the devil’s attorney. I will
endeavor to speak a good word for the truth. At Cambridge College the
mere rent of a student’s room, which is only a little larger than my
own, is thirty dollars each year, though the corporation had the
advantage of building thirty-two side by side and under one roof, and
the occupant suffers the inconvenience of many and noisy neighbors, and
perhaps a residence in the fourth story. I cannot but think that if we
had more true wisdom in these respects, not only less education would
be needed, because, forsooth, more would already have been acquired,
but the pecuniary expense of getting an education would in a great
measure vanish. Those conveniences which the student requires at
Cambridge or elsewhere cost him or somebody else ten times as great a
sacrifice of life as they would with proper management on both sides.
Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things
which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important
item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which
he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries
no charge is made. The mode of founding a college is, commonly, to get
up a subscription of dollars and cents, and then following blindly the
principles of a division of labor to its extreme, a principle which
should never be followed but with circumspection,—to call in a
contractor who makes this a subject of speculation, and he employs
Irishmen or other operatives actually to lay the foundations, while the
students that are to be are said to be fitting themselves for it; and
for these oversights successive generations have to pay. I think that
it would be _better than this_, for the students, or those who desire
to be benefited by it, even to lay the foundation themselves. The
student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by
systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an
ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience
which alone can make leisure fruitful. “But,” says one, “you do not
mean that the students should go to work with their hands instead of
their heads?” I do not mean that exactly, but I mean something which he
might think a good deal like that; I mean that they should not _play_
life, or _study_ it merely, while the community supports them at this
expensive game, but earnestly _live_ it from beginning to end. How
could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment
of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as
mathematics. If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and
sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common course, which is
merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor, where any
thing is professed and practised but the art of life;—to survey the
world through a telescope or a microscope, and never with his natural
eye; to study chemistry, and not learn how his bread is made, or
mechanics, and not learn how it is earned; to discover new satellites
to Neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, or to what vagabond
he is a satellite himself; or to be devoured by the monsters that swarm
all around him, while contemplating the monsters in a drop of vinegar.
Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month,—the boy who
had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted,
reading as much as would be necessary for this,—or the boy who had
attended
