had now seceded, and was a polity unto
himself; or, as he explains it with admirable sense, "In fact, I
quietly declare war with the State after my fashion, though I will still
make what use and get what advantage of her I can, as is usual in such
cases." He was put in prison; but that was a part of his design. "Under
a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man
is also a prison. I know this well, that if one thousand, if one
hundred, if ten men whom I could name--ay, if _one_ HONEST man, in this
State of Massachusetts, _ceasing to hold slaves_, were actually to
withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county gaol
therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. For it
matters not how small the beginning may seem to be; what is once well
done is done for ever." Such was his theory of civil disobedience.

And the upshot? A friend paid the tax for him; continued year by year to
pay it in the sequel; and Thoreau was free to walk the woods unmolested.
It was a _fiasco_, but to me it does not seem laughable; even those who
joined in the laughter at the moment would be insensibly affected by
this quaint instance of a good man's horror for injustice. We may
compute the worth of that one night's imprisonment as outweighing half a
hundred voters at some subsequent election; and if Thoreau had possessed
as great a power of persuasion as (let us say) Falstaff, if he had
counted a party however small, if his example had been followed by a
hundred or by thirty of his fellows, I cannot but believe it would have
greatly precipitated the era of freedom and justice. We feel the
misdeeds of our country with so little fervour, for we are not witnesses
to the suffering they cause; but when we see them wake an active horror
in our fellow-man, when we see a neighbour prefer to lie in prison
rather than be so much as passively implicated in their perpetration,
even the dullest of us will begin to realise them with a quicker pulse.

Not far from twenty years later, when Captain John Brown was taken at
Harper's Ferry, Thoreau was the first to come forward in his defence.
The committees wrote to him unanimously that his action was premature.
"I did not send to you for advice," said he, "but to announce that I was
to speak." I have used the word "defence"; in truth he did not seek to
defend him, even declared it would be better for the good cause that he
should die; but he praised his action