"On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" - читать интересную книгу автора (Thoreau Henry David)

slavery in America. For it matters not how small the
beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done
forever. But we love better to talk about it: that we say
is our mission. Reform keeps many scores of newspapers in
its service, but not one man. If my esteemed neighbor, the
State's ambassador, who will devote his days to the
settlement of the question of human rights in the Council
Chamber, instead of being threatened with the prisons of
Carolina, were to sit down the prisoner of Massachusetts,
that State which is so anxious to foist the sin of slavery
upon her sister--though at present she can discover only an
act of inhospitality to be the ground of a quarrel with
her--the Legislature would not wholly waive the subject of
the following winter.

Under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true
place for a just man is also a prison. The proper place
today, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for
her freer and less despondent spirits, is in her prisons, to
be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as
they have already put themselves out by their principles.
It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican
prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs
of his race should find them; on that separate but more free
and honorable ground, where the State places those who are
not with her, but against her--the only house in a slave
State in which a free man can abide with honor. If any
think that their influence would be lost there, and their
voices no longer afflict the ear of the State, that they
would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know
by how much truth is stronger than error, nor how much more
eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has
experienced a little in his own person. Cast your whole
vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.
A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority;
it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when
it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep
all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the
State will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men
were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be
a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them,
and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent
blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable
revolution, if any such is possible. If the tax-gatherer,
or any other public officer, asks me, as one has done, "But
what shall I do?" my answer is, "If you really wish to do
anything, resign your office." When the subject has refused
allegiance, and the officer has resigned from office, then
the revolution is accomplished. But even suppose blood shed
when the conscience is wounded? Through this wound a man's