passing through Chancery, has settled somewhere else, there to
become once more a patron of the arts.

  The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead
downward. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to
have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the
wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself.
If you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular,
which is to go down perpendicularly. Those services which the
community will most readily pay for, it is most disagreeable to
render. You are paid for being something less than a man. The State
does not commonly reward a genius any more wisely. Even the poet
laureate would rather not have to celebrate the accidents of
royalty. He must be bribed with a pipe of wine; and perhaps another
poet is called away from his muse to gauge that very pipe. As for my
own business, even that kind of surveying which I could do with most
satisfaction my employers do not want. They would prefer that I should
do my work coarsely and not too well, ay, not well enough. When I
observe that there are different ways of surveying, my employer
commonly asks which will give him the most land, not which is most
correct. I once invented a rule for measuring cord-wood, and tried
to introduce it in Boston; but the measurer there told me that the
sellers did not wish to have their wood measured correctly- that he
was already too accurate for them, and therefore they commonly got
their wood measured in Charlestown before crossing the bridge.

  The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get "a
good job," but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a
pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so
well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends,
as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. Do
not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for
love of it.

  It is remarkable that there are few men so well employed, so much to
their minds, but that a little money or fame would commonly buy them
off from their present pursuit. I see advertisements for active young
men, as if activity were the whole of a young man's capital. Yet I
have been surprised when one has with confidence proposed to me, a
grown man, to embark in some enterprise of his, as if I had absolutely
nothing to do, my life having been a complete failure hitherto. What a
doubtful compliment this to pay me! As if he had met me half-way
across the ocean beating up against the wind, but bound nowhere, and
proposed to me to go along with him! If I did, what do you think the
underwriters would say? No, no! I am not without employment at this
stage of the voyage. To tell the truth, I saw an advertisement for
able-bodied seamen, when I was a boy, sauntering in my native port,
and as soon as I came of age I embarked.

  The community has no bribe that will tempt a wise man. You may raise
money enough to tunnel a mountain, but you cannot raise money enough
to hire a man who is minding his own business. An efficient and
valuable man does what he can, whether the community pay him for it or
not. The inefficient offer their inefficiency to the highest bidder,
and are forever expecting to be put into office. One would suppose
that they were rarely disappointed.

  Perhaps I am more than usually jealous with respect to my freedom. I
feel that my connection with and obligation to society are still
very slight and transient. Those slight labors which afford me a
livelihood, and by which it is allowed that I am to some extent
serviceable to my contemporaries, are as yet commonly a pleasure to
me, and I am not often reminded that they are a necessity. So far I am
successful. But I foresee that if my wants should be much increased,
the labor required to supply them would become a drudgery. If I should
sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to
do, I am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living
for. I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess
of pottage. I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious,
and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than
he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living. All
great enterprises are self-supporting. The poet, for instance, must
sustain his body by his poetry, as a steam planing-mill feeds its
boilers with the shavings it makes. You must get your living by
loving. But as it is said of the merchants that ninety-seven in a
hundred fail, so the life of men generally, tried by this standard, is
a failure, and bankruptcy may be surely prophesied.

  Merely to come into the world the heir of a fortune is not to be
born, but to be still-born, rather. To be supported by the charity
of friends, or a government pension- provided you continue to breathe-
by whatever fine synonyms you describe these relations, is to go
into the almshouse. On Sundays the poor debtor goes to church to
take an account of stock, and finds, of course, that his outgoes
have been greater than his income. In the Catholic Church, especially,
they go into chancery, make a clean confession, give up all, and think
to start again. Thus men will lie on their backs, talking about the
fall of man, and never make an effort to get up.

  As for the comparative demand which men make on life, it is an
important difference between two, that the one is satisfied with a
level success, that his marks can all be hit by point-blank shots, but
the other, however low and unsuccessful his life may be, constantly
elevates his aim, though at a very slight angle to the horizon. I
should much rather be the last man- though, as the Orientals say,
"Greatness doth not approach him who is forever looking down; and
all those who are looking high are growing poor."

  It is remarkable that there is little or nothing to be remembered
written on the subject of getting a living; how to make getting a