"to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles"; this purpose accomplished, he left the woods "for as good a reason as he went there." The further notion that the Walden experiment was designed to be "an entire independency of mankind," owes its origin not to Thoreau himself, but to the inventiveness of certain of his critics, who, being minded to prove him a fool, found it convenient to invest him gratuitously with the insignia of folly.
Thoreau's anarchist principles, which play so important a part in the "Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers," were a direct outcome of this natural individualism. When quite a young man, he had been brought into collision, as he tells us in his essay on "Civil Disobedience," with that power of which he always remained a sworn enemy—the State—his refusal to pay the church-rate, enforced by the Massachusetts Government on the members of the various religious congregations, being the cause of the disagreement.[1] He also, like his friend Alcott, declined to pay the annual poll-tax, for which continued act of contumacy he was arrested in the autumn of 1845 (his first year at Walden), and lodged for a night in the gaol at Concord, a novel experience of which he has himself given us a characteristic description. The immediate cause of this withdrawal of allegiance on the part of one who was in reality American to the backbone in his
- ↑ Thoreau had been brought up as a member of Dr. Ripley's Unitarian Church at Concord, but seceded in 1838, or soon afterwards. He was a pantheist in religious opinions, the only ritual which he attended being that of the "Sunday Walkers," or "Walden Pond Association," as it was jocosely styled by the villagers.
