Walden

design of doing me good, I should run for my life, as from that dry
and parching wind of the African deserts called the simoom, which
fills the mouth and nose and ears and eyes with dust till you are
suffocated, for fear that I should get some of his good done to me
-- some of its virus mingled with my blood.  No -- in this case I
would rather suffer evil the natural way.  A man is not a good man
to me because he will feed me if I should be starving, or warm me if
I should be freezing, or pull me out of a ditch if I should ever
fall into one.  I can find you a Newfoundland dog that will do as
much.  Philanthropy is not love for one's fellow-man in the broadest
sense.  Howard was no doubt an exceedingly kind and worthy man in
his way, and has his reward; but, comparatively speaking, what are a
hundred Howards to us, if their philanthropy do not help us in our
best estate, when we are most worthy to be helped?  I never heard of
a philanthropic meeting in which it was sincerely proposed to do any
good to me, or the like of me.
    The Jesuits were quite balked by those Indians who, being burned
at the stake, suggested new modes of torture to their tormentors.
Being superior to physical suffering, it sometimes chanced that they
were superior to any consolation which the missionaries could offer;
and the law to do as you would be done by fell with less
persuasiveness on the ears of those who, for their part, did not
care how they were done by, who loved their enemies after a new
fashion, and came very near freely forgiving them all they did.
    Be sure that you give the poor the aid they most need, though it
be your example which leaves them far behind.  If you give money,
spend yourself with it, and do not merely abandon it to them.  We
make curious mistakes sometimes.  Often the poor man is not so cold
and hungry as he is dirty and ragged and gross.  It is partly his
taste, and not merely his misfortune.  If you give him money, he
will perhaps buy more rags with it.  I was wont to pity the clumsy
Irish laborers who cut ice on the pond, in such mean and ragged
clothes, while I shivered in my more tidy and somewhat more
fashionable garments, till, one bitter cold day, one who had slipped
into the water came to my house to warm him, and I saw him strip off
three pairs of pants and two pairs of stockings ere he got down to
the skin, though they were dirty and ragged enough, it is true, and
that he could afford to refuse the extra garments which I offered
him, he had so many intra ones.  This ducking was the very thing he
needed.  Then I began to pity myself, and I saw that it would be a
greater charity to bestow on me a flannel shirt than a whole
slop-shop on him.  There are a thousand hacking at the branches of
evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who
bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing
the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives
in vain to relieve.  It is the pious slave-breeder devoting the
proceeds of every tenth slave to buy a Sunday's liberty for the
rest.  Some show their kindness to the poor by employing them in
their kitchens.  Would they not be kinder if they employed
themselves there?  You boast of spending a tenth part of your income
in charity; maybe you should spend the nine tenths so, and done with
it.  Society recovers only a tenth part of the property then.  Is
this owing to the generosity of him in whose possession it is found,
or to the remissness of the officers of justice?
    Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently
appreciated by mankind.  Nay, it is greatly overrated; and it is our
selfishness which overrates it.  A robust poor man, one sunny day
here in Concord, praised a fellow-townsman to me, because, as he
said, he was kind to the poor; meaning himself.  The kind uncles and
aunts of the race are more esteemed than its true spiritual fathers
and mothers.  I once heard a reverend lecturer on England, a man of
learning and intelligence, after enumerating her scientific,
literary, and political worthies, Shakespeare, Bacon, Cromwell,
Milton, Newton, and others, speak next of her Christian heroes,
whom, as if his profession required it of him, he elevated to a
place far above all the rest, as the greatest of the great.  They
were Penn, Howard, and Mrs. Fry.  Every one must feel the falsehood
and cant of this.  The last were not England's best men and women;
only, perhaps, her best philanthropists.
    I would not subtract anything from the praise that is due to
philanthropy, but merely demand justice for all who by their lives
and works are a blessing to mankind.  I do not value chiefly a man's
uprightness and benevolence, which are, as it were, his stem and
leaves.  Those plants of whose greenness withered we make herb tea
for the sick serve but a humble use, and are most employed by
quacks.  I want the flower and fruit of a man; that some fragrance
be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness flavor our
intercourse.  His goodness must not be a partial and transitory act,
but a constant superfluity, which costs him nothing and of which he
is unconscious.  This is a charity that hides a multitude of sins.
The philanthropist too often surrounds mankind with the remembrance
of his own castoff griefs as an atmosphere, and calls it sympathy.
We should impart our courage, and not our despair, our health and
ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread
by contagion.  From what southern plains comes up the voice of
wailing?  Under what latitudes reside the heathen to whom we would
send light?  Who is that intemperate and brutal man whom we would
redeem?  If anything ail a man, so that he does not perform his
functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even -- for that is the
seat of sympathy -- he forthwith sets about reforming -- the world.
Being a microcosm himself, he discovers -- and it is a true
discovery, and he is the man to make it -- that the world has been
eating green apples; to his eyes, in fact, the globe itself is a
great green apple, which there is danger awful to think of that the
children of men will nibble before it is ripe; and straightway his
drastic philanthropy seeks out the Esquimau and the Patagonian, and
embraces the populous Indian and Chinese villages; and thus, by a
few years of philanthropic activity, the powers in the meanwhile
using him for their own ends, no doubt, he cures himself of his
dyspepsia, the globe acquires a faint blush on one or both of its