to burn with a hot iron the root of the hydra's head,
but as soon as one head is crushed, two spring up.

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited
farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more
easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the
open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with
clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them
serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is
condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging
their graves as soon as they are born? They have got to live a man's
life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they
can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and
smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before
it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed,
and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and woodlot!
The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited
encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic
feet of flesh.

But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed
into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity,
they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which
moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is
a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not
before. It is said that Deucalion and Pyrrha created men by throwing
stones over their heads behind them:--

Inde genus durum sumus, experiensque laborum,
Et documenta damus qua simus origine nati.

Or, as Raleigh rhymes it in his sonorous way,--

"From thence our kind hard-hearted is, enduring pain and care,
Approving that our bodies of a stony nature are."

So much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle, throwing the
stones over their heads behind them, and not seeing where they fell.

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere
ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and
superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be
plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and
tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure
for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain t