[1849, original title: Resistance to Civil Government]
I have paid no poll
tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night;
and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick,
the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the
light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution
which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. I
wondered that it should have concluded at length that this was the best use it
could put me to, and had never thought to avail itself of my services in some
way. I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there
was a still more difficult one to climb or break through before they could get
to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls
seemed a great waste of stone and mortar. I felt as if I alone of all my
townsmen had paid my tax…
Thus the state never
intentionally confronts a man's sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body,
his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior
physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own
fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What force has a multitude? They only
can force me who obey a higher law than I. They force me to become like
themselves. I do not hear of men being forced to live this way or that by masses
of men. What sort of life were that to live? When I meet a government which says
to me, "Your money or your life," why should I be in haste to give it
my money? It may be in a great strait, and not know what to do: I cannot help
that. It must help itself; do as I do. It is not worth the while to snivel about
it. I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society.
I am not the son of the engineer. I perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut
fall side by side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but
both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can,
till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. If a plant cannot live
according to nature, it dies; and so a man.