and the small property.  Though the great proprietors may be less numerous and less rich, and the middling and the small proprietors more numerous and more powerful than they were of yore, this does not prevent the difference from being real and great enough to create, in the civil body, social positions widely different and unequal.  In the professions which are called liberal, and which live by brains and knowledge, amongst barristers, doctors, scholars, and literates of all kinds, some rise to the first rank, attract to themselves practice and success, and win fame, wealth, and influence; others make enough, by hard work, for the necessities of their families and the calls of their position; others vegetate obscurely in a sort of lazy discomfort.  In the other vocations, those in which the labor is principally physical and manual, there also it is according to nature that there should be different and unequal positions; some, by brains and good conduct, make capital, and get a footing upon the ways of competence and progress; others, being dull, or idle, or disorderly, remain in the straitened and precarious condition of existence depending solely on wages.  Throughout the whole extent of the social structure, in the ranks of labor as well as of property, differences and inequalities of position are produced or kept up and co-exist with oneness of laws and similarity of rights.  Examine any human associations, in any place and at any time, and whatever diversity there may be in point of their origin, organization, government, extent, and duration, there will be found in all three types of social position always fundamentally the same, though they may appear under different and differently distributed forms; 1st, men living on income from their properties, real or personal, land or capital, without seeking to increase them by their own personal and assiduous labor; 2d, men devoted to working up and increasing, by their own personal and assiduous labor, the real or personal properties, land or capital they possess; 3d, men living by their daily labor, without land or capital to give them an income.  And these differences, these inequalities in the social position of men, are not matters of accident or violence, or peculiar to such and such a time, or such and such a country; they are matters of universal application, produced spontaneously in every human society by virtue of the primitive and general laws of human nature, in the midst of events and under the influence of social systems utterly different.

These matters exist now and in France as they did of old and elsewhere.  Whether you do or do not use the name of classes, the new French social fabric contains, and will not cease to contain, social positions widely different and unequal.  What constitutes its blessing and its glory is, that privilege and fixity no longer cling to this difference of positions; that there are no more special rights and advantages legally assigned to some and inacessible to others;