Like many of his Harvard classmates of 1837, Henry Thoreau left Cambridge for a provincial world in which times were hard, jobs scarce, and prospects uncertain. Ultimately the Panic of 1837 would cause less practical suffering among middleclass New Englanders than was initially feared, but for the literary-minded of Thoreau's generation the apparent collapse of the economic order served to confirm an alienation from commercial America already widely felt and in some cases profound. By any objective measure Emerson vastly overdramatized the case in “The American Scholar” when he described “young men of the fairest promise” who “are hindered from action by the disgust which the principles on which business is managed inspire,” and who “turn drudges, or die of disgust, – some of them suicides” (CW I, 69).