From the uncongenial limitations of a college town it was a satisfaction to escape to sea. Here Burroughs’s versatility stood him in good stead. “Having no doctor engaged, I undertook to act in that capacity; and after obtaining the assistance, advice, and direction of an old practitioner, together with marks set on each parcel of medicine, I thought myself tolerably well qualified to perform the office of a physician on board the ship.”
From his seafaring life Burroughs returned with his reputation under a cloud. There were ugly rumors afloat which were readily believed by a censorious world. For once he confesses that his philosophy failed him. “I returned to my father’s house sunken and discouraged; the world appeared a gloomy chaos; the sun arose to cast a sickly glimmer on surrounding objects; the flowers of the field insulted my feelings with their gayety and splendor; the frolicsome lamb, the playful kitten, and the antic colt were beheld with those painful emotions which are beyond description. Shall all nature, shall the brute creation break out into irregular transports, by the overflowing of pleasing sensations, whilst I am shut out from even the dim rays of hope?”
Certainly not. To a mind constituted as was his there was an absurdity in the very suggestion. The brute creation should not have any monopoly of comfortable sensations, so he cheered up immediately and spent the next year loafing around his father’s house.
He had been on the coast of Africa and had taken part in some strange scenes, but his moral sense had not been blunted to such an extent that he could not grieve over some infractions of the moral law which he observed in peaceful Hanover. He regretted that he had been led inadvertently by a young man named Huntington to join a party which robbed a farmer’s beehive.
“For some unaccountable reason or other, youth are carried away with false notions of right and wrong. I know, for instance, that Huntington possessed those principles of integrity that no consideration would have induced him to deprive another of any species of property, except fruit, bees, pigs, and poultry. And why it is considered by youth that depriving another of these articles is less criminal than stealing any other kind of property, I cannot tell.”
Burroughs himself was inclined to take a harsher view of these transgressions than he did of some others; for example, of counterfeiting, in which he was afterwards for a time engaged during one of his brief pastorates.
The argument by which his scruples in this particular were overcome are worth repeating. The law was indeed violated in its letter, but might not a justification be found by one who interpreted it in a large spirit of charity?
“Money is of itself of consequence only as we annex to it a nominal value as the representation of property. Therefore we find the only thing necessary to make a matter valuable is to induce the world to deem it so; and let that esteem be raised by any means whatever, yet the value is the same, and no one becomes injured by receiving it at the valuation.”
The principle of fiat money having been established, the only question that remained was whether the circumstances of the times were such as to justify him in issuing the fiat. The answer was in the affirmative. “That an undue scarcity of cash now prevails is a truth too obvious for me to attempt to prove. Hence whoever contributes to increase the quantity of cash does not only himself but likewise the community an essential benefit.”
It was in his attempt to benefit the community in this way that he first experienced the ingratitude of republics, being landed in the Northampton jail.