s 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 is 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 advertis