rvard there would have been no Thoreau. Having earned his
diploma, he had the privilege of declining it; and having gone to
college, it was his right to affirm the emptiness of the classics. Only
the man with a goodly bank-balance can wear rags with impunity.

* * * * *

John Thoreau made his lead-pencils and peddled them out, and we hear of
his saying, "Pencils, I fear, are going out of fashion--people are
buying nothing but these miserable new-fangled steel pens." When called
upon to surrender, Paul Jones replied, "We haven't yet begun to fight."
The truth was, the people had not really begun to use pencils. Pencils
weren't going out of fashion, but John Thoreau was. The poor man moved
here and there, evicted by rapacious landlords and taken in by his
relatives, who didn't care whether he was a stranger or not. If he owed
them ten dollars, they took fifty dollars' worth of pencils and called
it square.

Then they undersold John one-half, and he said times were scarce.

This, it need not be explained, was in Massachusetts.

A hundred years ago, these men who whittled useful things out of wood
during the long winter days were everywhere in New England. The sons of
these men invented machines to make the same things, and thus were
started the New England manufactories. It was brains against hands,
cleverness against skill, initiative against plodding industry. And the
man who can tell of the sorrow and suffering of all those industrious
sparrows that were caught and wound around flying shuttles, or stamped
beneath the swift presses of invention, hadn't yet been born. God
doesn't seem to care for sparrows--three-fourths of all that are hatched
die in the nest or fall fluttering to the ground and perish, Grant
Allen says.

Comparatively few persons can adjust themselves happily to new
conditions: the rest are pushed and broken and bent--and die.

When Dixon and Faber invented machines that could be fed automatically,
and turn out more pencils in a day than John Thoreau could in a year,
John was out of the game.

John had brought up his children to work, and Henry became an expert
pencil-maker. Henry, we say, should have found employment with Faber and
Company, as foreman, or else evaded their patents and made a
pencil-machine of his own. Instead, however, he settled down and made
pencils just like his father used to make, and in the same way. He
peddled out a few to his friends, but