Chapter 16 Economics - 11

When I think of my neighbors, the Concord farmers, who are at least as well off as the rest of the class, I find that most of them have been working twenty, thirty or forty years. , so that they may be the real masters of their farms, which are usually bequeathed to them with mortgages, and perhaps bought on loan,—we may as well give a third of their labor One, as the price of the house,--it's usually always the one they haven't paid off.It is true that the mortgage sometimes exceeded the original price of the farm, so that the farm itself became a great encumbrance, but in the end there was always an heir, as he himself said, because he was too close to the farm as an heir. .I spoke to the tax assessors, and I was amazed that they couldn't recite twelve free and innocent citizens who owned farms.If you want to know the real situation of these houses, you have to go to the bank and ask about the mortgage situation.So few, if any, were able to pay his farm debts by actual labor that every neighbor could point him out with the finger.I doubt there are three of them in this part of Concord.As for merchants, the vast majority of merchants, even about ninety-six out of a hundred, are sure to fail, and the same is true for farmers.With regard to merchants, however, one of them has rightly remarked that their failures are mostly not due to loss, but simply from inconvenience and failure to keep their promises; that is to say, from breaches of credit.This makes the problem much worse, and one cannot help thinking that the souls of the aforementioned three people may not be saved in the future, and may be bankrupted in worse circumstances than those who honestly failed. .Bankruptcies, defaults, are the springboards from which a large part of our civilization leaps and tumbles, while the savage stands on the inelastic plank of famine.Yet the annual Middlesex Cattle Show, held here, is always splendid, as if the farming were still in excellent condition.

Farmers often try to solve life problems in ways that are more complex than the problems themselves.In need of his shoelaces, he speculates in cattle herding.With skilful skill he had set a trap of thin springs, and, trying to catch ease and independence, he was about to move away when his own foot fell into the trap.Here is why he was poor; and for similar reasons we are all poor, though surrounded by luxuries, not so much as the savage, who has a thousand eases.Chapman sings: "This hypocritical human society— ——For the grandeur of the world Supreme joy is as thin as air. " When the farmer has his house, he is not the richer for it, but the poorer, because the house has him.As far as I can understand, Momus once said a very true remark against a house built by Minerva, saying that she "did not make it a movable There moved away”; and here it may be added that our houses are so unusable that they imprison us in them, rather than inhabiting them; and that it is often we who have the bad neighbors to avoid. The contemptible "self".I know that there are at least one or two in this city who have been hoping for almost their entire lives to sell their houses in the suburbs and move to the countryside, but they have never been able to do so. They can only regain their freedom when they die in the future. .

Even if the majority of people are finally able to own or lease the modern houses with all their improvements.But when civilization improved the houses, it did not also improve the people who lived in them.Civilization has created palaces, but it is not so easy to create nobles and kings.If the aspirations of the civilized man were no nobler than those of the savage, and if they devoted most of their time to the acquisition of crude necessities and comforts, why should he have better dwellings than the savage? Woolen cloth?