"Life Without Principle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Thoreau Henry David)

digging where we never planted- and He would, perchance, reward us
with lumps of gold?

God gave the righteous man a certificate entitling him to food and
raiment, but the unrighteous man found a facsimile of the same in
God's coffers, and appropriated it, and obtained food and raiment like
the former. It is one of the most extensive systems of counterfeiting
that the world has seen. I did not know that mankind was suffering for
want of old. I have seen a little of it. I know that it is very
malleable, but not so malleable as wit. A grain of gold gild a great
surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom.

The gold-digger in the ravines of the mountains is as much a gambler
as his fellow in the saloons of San Francisco. What difference does it
make whether you shake dirt or shake dice? If you win, society is the
loser. The gold-digger is the enemy of the honest laborer, whatever
checks and compensations there may be. It is not enough to tell me
that you worked hard to get your gold. So does the Devil work hard.
The way of transgressors may be hard in many respects. The humblest
observer who goes to the mines sees and says that gold-digging is of
the character of a lottery; the gold thus obtained is not the same
same thing with the wages of honest toil. But, practically, he forgets
what he has seen, for he has seen only the fact, not the principle,
and goes into trade there, that is, buys a ticket in what commonly
proves another lottery, where the fact is not so obvious.

After reading Howitt's account of the Australian gold-diggings one
evening, I had in my mind's eye, all night, the numerous valleys, with
their streams, all cut up with foul pits, from ten to one hundred feet
deep, and half a dozen feet across, as close as they can be dug, and
partly filled with water- the locality to which men furiously rush
to probe for their fortunes- uncertain where they shall break
ground- not knowing but the gold is under their camp itself- sometimes
digging one hundred and sixty feet before they strike the vein, or
then missing it by a foot- turned into demons, and regardless of each
others' rights, in their thirst for riches- whole valleys, for
thirty miles, suddenly honeycombed by the pits of the miners, so
that even hundreds are drowned in them- standing in water, and covered
with mud and clay, they work night and day, dying of exposure and
disease. Having read this, and partly forgotten it, I was thinking,
accidentally, of my own unsatisfactory life, doing as others do; and
with that vision of the diggings still before me, I asked myself why I
might not be washing some gold daily, though it were only the finest
particles- why I might not sink a shaft down to the gold within me,
and work that mine. There is a Ballarat, a Bendigo for you- what
though it were a sulky-gully? At any rate, I might pursue some path,
however solitary and narrow and crooked, in which I could walk with
love and reverence. Wherever a man separates from the multitude, and
goes his own way in this mood, there indeed is a fork in the road,
though ordinary travellers may see only a gap in the paling. His