Message #136414

[Mindwarp]

I have thus a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide by
fifteen long, and eight-feet posts, with a garret and a closet, a
large window on each side, two trap-doors, one door at the end, and
a brick fireplace opposite. The exact cost of my house, paying the
usual price for such materials as I used, but not counting the work,
all of which was done by myself, was as follows; and I give the
details because very few are able to tell exactly what their houses
cost, and fewer still, if any, the separate cost of the various
materials which compose them:

  Boards................................$  8.03 1/2, (mostly shanty

                                                         boards.)

  Refuse shingles for roof and sides....   4.00

  Laths.................................   1.25

  Two second-hand windows with glass....   2.43

  One thousand old brick................   4.00

  Two casks of lime.....................   2.40 (That was high.)

  Hair..................................   0.31 (More than I needed.)

  Mantle-tree iron......................   0.15

  Nails.................................   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................................$ 28.12 1/2

  These are all the materials, excepting the timber, stones, and sand,
which I claimed by squatter's right. I have also a small woodshed
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
anything 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 the lectures on metallurgy at the
Institute in the meanwhile, and had received a Rodgers penknife from
his father? Which would be most likely to cut his fingers?... To my
astonishment I was informed on leaving college that I had studied
navigation!- why, if I had taken one turn down the harbor I should
have known more about it. Even the poor student studies and is
taught only political economy, while that economy of living which is
synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in our
colleges. The consequence is, that while he is reading Adam Smith,
Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably.