ement 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 wilt 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 synonymes 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 sta