The Service

Henry David Thoreau
Core works and topics Civil Disobedience Herald of Freedom The Last Days of John Brown Life Without Principle Paradise (to be) Regained A Plea for Captain John Brown Reform and the Reformers Remarks After the Hanging of John Brown The Service Sir Walter Raleigh Slavery in Massachusetts Thomas Carlyle and His Works Walden A Walk to Wachusett A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers Wendell Phillips Before the Concord Lyceum The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau Thoreau Society
Related topics Abolitionism Anarchism Anarchism in the United States Civil disobedience Concord, Massachusetts Conscientious objection Direct action Ecology Environmentalism History of tax resistance Individualist anarchism John Brown Lyceum movement Nonviolent resistance Ralph Waldo Emerson Simple living Tax resistance Tax resisters Transcendentalism The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail Walden Pond
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The Service is an essay written in 1840 by Henry David Thoreau. He submitted it to The Dial for publication, but they declined to print it. It was not published until after Thoreau's death.^[1]

The essay uses war and military discipline as metaphors that, as Thoreau would have it, can instruct us in how to order and conduct our lives.