Page:Anti-slavery and reform papers by Thoreau, Henry David.djvu/20

Rh should be men first, and subjects afterwards. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right." Policy, he insists, is not morality. "What is wanted is men, not of policy, but of probity. . . . The fate of the country does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning." At the same time it must be noted that he admits that many reforms are needed, and while asserting anarchism as the ideal of the future, does not deny that wise legislation may be advisable in the present. What he demands is "not at once no government, but at once a better government."

Thoreau's anarchism is, in brief, the claim for the individual man of the right of free growth and natural development from within—the same claim that has been advanced in other words by Whitman, and Tolstoi, and Ibsen, and William Morris, and other prophets of democracy in the old world and the new. Such a belief does not indicate in Thoreau's case, any more than in the others named, a selfish indifference to the great questions that agitate mankind; on the contrary, there is evidence enough in this very essay on "Civil Disobedience" to convince any impartial reader of the earnest feeling by which the writer was inspired—even if he had not given further practical proof of his zeal for humanity in the course taken by him in the great party—or shall we call it national—strife of negro emancipation.

How should our "stoico-epicurean adiaphorist" care