youthful distinguishes all Thoreau's knock-down blows at
current opinion. Like the posers of a child, they leave the
orthodox in a kind of speechless agony. These know the thing
is nonsense. They are sure there must be an answer, yet
somehow cannot find it. So it is with his system of economy.
He cuts through the subject on so new a plane that the
accepted arguments apply no longer; he attacks it in a new
dialect where there are no catchwords ready made for the
defender; after you have been boxing for years on a polite,
gladiatorial convention, here is an assailant who does not
scruple to hit below the belt.

"The cost of a thing," says he, "is THE AMOUNT OF WHAT I WILL
CALL LIFE which is required to be exchanged for it,
immediately or in the long run." I have been accustomed to
put it to myself, perhaps more clearly, that the price we
have to pay for money is paid in liberty. Between these two
ways of it, at least, the reader will probably not fail to
find a third definition of his own; and it follows, on one or
other, that a man may pay too dearly for his livelihood, by
giving, in Thoreau's terms, his whole life for it, or, in
mine, bartering for it the whole of his available liberty,
and becoming a slave till death. There are two questions to
be considered - the quality of what we buy, and the price we
have to pay for it. Do you want a thousand a year, a two
thousand a year, or a ten thousand a year livelihood? and can
you afford the one you want? It is a matter of taste; it is
not in the least degree a question of duty, though commonly
supposed so. But there is no authority for that view
anywhere. It is nowhere in the Bible. It is true that we