The soldier must carry a shovel nowadays, but he will require a hoe, too, and a pruning hook, and a ploughshare, before he will be self-supporting. With such a kit war could support war forever, which is the Rathenau plan of war, with everything German left out, consequently everything of war left out. The soldier cannot feed himself. The crew of a battleship cannot be expected to catch their own cod and flounders. They must leave that to the trawlers, those human boats, with human crews who fish for a living. Men of the navy must die for a living. The captain of a United States destroyer, writing to his wife, says, “I think that the only real anxiety is lest we may not get into the big game at all. I do not think that any of us are bloodthirsty or desirous of glory or advancement, but we have to justify our existence.”
So does every human being; yet an existence that can be justified only by fighting and dying is too unproductive, too far from self-supporting, to warrant the sure calling and election of many of us. No Grand-Banker ever wrote so to his wife, though he might be returning with all his salt unwet; no college professor ever wrote so—not if he could get into his garden—in spite of his pupils, his college president, the trustees, and Mr. Carnegie’s Efficiency Board. Teaching may not justify a professor’s existence, though it ought to justify his salary; so, every time I start for the University, I put a dozen or two of eggs into my book-bag, that I may have a right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city.
I am not independent of society. I do not wish to be independent. I wish to be debtor to all and have all debtors to me. But we buy too much and sell too much of life, and raise too little. We pay for all we get. Sometimes we get all we pay for, but not often; and if we never did, still life has so thoroughly adopted the business standard, that we had rather keep on paying than trying to grow our way.
Business is a way of living by proxy; money is society’s proxy for every sort of implement and tool. To produce something, however—some actual wealth, a pennyweight of gold-dust, a pound of honey, a dozen eggs, a book, a boy, a bunch of beets; some real wealth out of the soil, out of my loins, out of my brains, out of my muscles and the sap of the maple, the rains and sunshine and the soil, out of the rich veins of the earth or the swarming waters of the sea—this is to be; and to be myself, and not a proxy, is to lose my life and save it, and to justify my existence.
I have to buy a multitude of things—transportation, coal, dentistry, news, flour, and clothes. I have paid in money for them. I have also paid in real wealth, having given, to balance my charge on society, an equivalent in raw cabbage, pure honey, fresh eggs, and the like, from my own created store. I am doubtless in debt to society, but I have tried to give wealth for wealth, not the symbol of it merely; and last year, as I balanced my books, I think the world was in debt to me by several bunches of beets. I do not boast of the beets, though they take me out of the debtor’s prison where most of us live. I can face the world, however, with those beets; I have gone over the top, have done my bit, with beets.
The oldest duty on the human conscience is the duty to dig. I am a college teacher, and that is an honorable, if futile, profession. The Scriptures say: “He gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers”; but, before there were any such multifarious and highly specialized needs, it was said unto our first father: “Replenish the earth and subdue it”—a universal human need, a call to duty, from which no Draft Board of civilization can rightly exempt us.
Wealth is not created, not even increased, in trade. When was one pennyweight of gold on ’change by any magic metallurgy of trade made two pennyweight? The magic of the second pennyweight is the metallurgy of the pick and shovel and cradle rocking the shining sands of the Yukon. Real wealth is only circulated in trade. It comes from primal sources—from the gold-fields, the cotton-fields, the corn-fields, the fir-clad sides of Katahdin, the wide gray waters of the Grand Banks, the high valleys of the sheeped Sierras, and from back yards, like mine, that bring forth thirty- and sixty- and an hundred-fold.
And this is as profoundly true of life and literature as it is of cotton and lumber and gold.
Give me a garden and the wages of hoeing my row. And if not a garden, then a little house of hens, a coop of pigeons, a colony of bees—even in the city I should keep bees, if I had to keep them in the attic or on the roof. Not every one can have a garden, but every one can either plant a tree, or raise one pig, or keep a cow or goat, or feed a few hens, or raise a flock of pigeons, or do something that will bring him personally into contact with real things, and make it possible for him to help pay his way with real wealth, and in part, at least, to justify his existence, and his book.