Henry Thoreau has splendidly shown by his own experience how prolific are the rewards of labor, and in what ease, comfort, and luxury, the worker may live where his fellow does not prey upon him. Living as he did in the woods, almost isolated from his fellows, deprived of the advantages which contact with them and their products would bring him, and at the mercy of wild creatures who constantly destroyed his crops, he enjoyed a life such as not one in a thousand of the city laborers has any taste of, and was never troubled with the demon of Want. “For more than five years,” he wrote, “I maintained myself thus solely by the labor of my hands; and I found that by working about six weeks in a year I could meet all the expenses of living.” If this solitary individual could produce so much with so little labor living under conditions of relative freedom, how much more could these poor city wage-slaves produce by their united efforts, assisted by the wonderful industrial appliances of civilised life, were they also free to produce their own necessities without having to bear the yoke of legalized robbery?
But have we not a government to protect us? some will ask. Yes: and you have seen how it protects you from the aggressions of others, by making you subservient to the landlord and the usurer from whom you are unable to extricate yourselves. But, alas, that is not all. Government not only fails to protect you against the ravages of others, but it does not protect you against the ravages of itself. It taxes you at every turn; and dearly do you have to pay for its services—always paying more than its worth for what you need, or else paying for what you do not need. And the whole taxation is paid by the laborer, as we have already seen, out of his own products. No one else pays any taxes. If a merchant pays a tax, he charges it to his customer, who may be a laborer, or who, if he is not, will charge it to the laborer he employs. Government grants you “protection,” does it? Yes, it erects a custom-house barrier at your boundaries to protect the local capitalist, who employs you, from the competition of the capitalist afar off, as it would tend to reduce the price which the local capitalist charges for the goods you re-purchase of him. The tariff your Government collects is charged for the buyer, plus the usual profits, and labor again pays the whole bill. Perhaps you may boast of the glorious “free trade” which your Government bestows upon you. Poor deluded creatures! how do you expect to trade freely, when you own nothing to trade with, when the land on which you work belongs to others, when the tools and machinery you employ are theirs, your exchanges are hampered by a monopolized money system, you are bled by interest, and capitalistic monopolists form rings to defeat and rob you and eternally extort
