In a simile, Thoreau envisions a mode of government that would treat each citizen “as a neighbor” rather than as tools to be used and discarded:
I please myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose, if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.
Throughout the essay, Thoreau characterizes the relationship between a government and its citizens as unnatural and exploitative. Citizens, he suggests, slowly become part of the machinery of the state as they surrender more of their decision-making power to politicians. In contrast, he repeatedly references the behavior of neighbors towards each other, which follows from common sense principles and values. Why, he asks the reader, do they accept conduct from the state that they would never tolerate from their neighbors? In this passage, Thoreau imagines a state which follows from neighborly principles, according respect to its citizens. Thoreau’s simile, then, underscores what he considers to be the very un-neighborly behavior of the government.
Writing of his one-night stay in a local jail after refusing to pay his taxes in protest of the government of the United States, Thoreau uses a simile that, ironically, compares imprisonment in jail to distant travel:
It was like travelling into a far country, such as I had never expected to behold, to lie there for one night. It seemed to me that I never had heard the town-clock strike before, nor the evening sounds of the village; for we slept with the windows open, which were inside the grating. It was to see my native village in the light of the middle ages, and our Concord was turned into a Rhine stream, and visions of knights and castles passed before me [...] It was a closer view of my native town. I was fairly inside of it. I never had seen its institutions before.
Imprisonment, he writes, is “like travelling into a far country,” one which he “had never expected to behold.” There is a pointed irony in Thoreau’s simile: imprisonment might be characterized specifically as a restriction on free movement, but here he imagines his brief stay in jail as a voyage across the world, one which introduces him to many novel sights and experiences. Though he was imprisoned in the town of Concord, Massachusetts, where he lived, he feels as though he experienced his town for the first time, noting, for example, the “town-clock strike” and the “evening sounds of the village” which he could hear through the open windows of the jail. He even compares his home town to a historically remote location such as medieval Germany, with “knights and castles.” Thoreau’s surprising simile suggests that jails and prisons are actually central to the social and political reality of the United States, and that those who have never spent a night in jail do not fully understand how their nation functions.
