Page:Anti-slavery and reform papers by Thoreau, Henry David.djvu/130

 Life without Principle. I I-Q perpeudicularly. 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 there- fore they commonly got their wood measured in Charles- town before crossinj^ the bridgre.

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 irom their