91 Where I Lived, and What I Lived For
or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million
count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb
nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are
the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one
items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not
founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by
dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who
succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it
be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and
reduce other things in proportion. Our life is like a German
Confederacy, made up of petty states, with its boundary for-
ever fluctuating, so that even a German cannot tell you how
it is bounded at any moment. The nation itself, with all its
so called internal improvements, which, by the way, are all ex-
ternal and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown
establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its
own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want
of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million households
in the land; and the only cure for it as for them is in a rigid
economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life and
elevation of purpose. It lives too fast. Men think that it is es-
sential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and
talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, with-
out a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should
live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. If we do not
get out sleepers, and forge rails, and devote days and nights to
the work, but go to tinkering upon our lives to improve them,
who will build railroads? And if railroads are not built, how
shall we get to heaven in season? But if we stay at home and