Farm produce sold $23.44 Earned by day labor 13.34 ------ $36.78 leaving $25.21-3/4, which was about the cash in hand with which he started. The expense of the second year did not, of course, include the heaviest of the first-year items--the cost of the house. I learned from my two years' experience that it would cost incredibly little trouble to obtain one's necessary food, even in this latitude.... In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain oneself on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial. It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do. So much for the external account of the Walden years. The last words of the quotation give a cue to the criticism with which he accompanies the bare statement. This is contained chiefly in chapters I, "Economy" (the longest, amounting to one fourth of the book); II, "Where I lived and What I lived for"; V, "Solitude"; VIII, "The Village"; and XVIII, "Conclusion." He contended that life had been made complex and burdensome because of the mistaken notion that property was much to be desired. This idea had led men to buy land and build houses, go into trade, construct railways and ships, and to set up government and rival governments, in order to protect the things men owned and those they were buying and selling. Being who he was, he asserted boldly and sometimes savagely a large number of charges against organized society and the men who submitted to it. "The laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity." "The civilized man's pursuits are not worthier than the savage's." "The college student obtains an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself." "Thank God, I can sit and I can stand without the aid of a furniture warehouse." "Men say a stitch in time saves nine, so they take a thousand stitches to-day to save nine to-morrow." "Society is commonly too cheap." "Wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate, odd-fellow society." At this point he challenges comparison again with Crèvecoeur (see p. 60). To the hearty immigrant of the eighteenth century the common right to own the soil and to enjoy the fruits of labor seemed almost millennial in view of the Old World conditions which denied these privileges to the masses. To the New England townsman the ownership of property was oppressive in view of the aboriginal right to traverse field and forest without any obligation to maintain an establishment or "improve" an acreage. In Crèvecoeur's France, where for centuries the people had lived on sufferance, tenure of the land seemed an inestimable privilege.