On the whole, though men had lost some of their original endurance, and their natural pity had already undergone a certain deterioration, this period of the development of the human faculties, occupying a just medium between the indolence of the primitive state and the petulant activity of our modern self-love, must have been at once the happiest and the most durable epoch.  The more we reflect, the more evident we find it that this state was the least subject to revolutions and the best for man.  “So long as men were content with their rustic hovels, so long as they confined themselves to stitching their garments of skin with spines or fish bones, to decking their bodies with feathers and shells and painting them in different colours, to perfecting and beautifying their bows and arrows—­in a word, so long as they only applied themselves to works that one person could do, and to arts that needed no more than a single hand, then they lived free, healthy, good, and happy, so far as was compatible with their natural constitution, and continued to enjoy among themselves the sweetness of independent intercourse.  But from the moment that one man had need of the help of another, as soon as they perceived it to be useful for one person to have provisions for two, then equality disappeared, property was introduced, labour became necessary, and the vast forests changed into smiling fields, which had to be watered by the sweat of men, and in which they ever saw bondage and misery springing up and growing ripe with the harvests."[187]

The working of metals and agriculture have been the two great agents in this revolution.  For the poet it is gold and silver, but for the philosopher it is iron and corn, that have civilised men and undone the human race.  It is easy to see how the latter of the two arts was suggested to men by watching the reproducing processes of vegetation.  It is less easy to be sure how they discovered metal, saw its uses, and invented means of smelting it, for nature had taken extreme precautions to hide the fatal secret.  It was probably the operation of some volcano which first suggested the idea of fusing ore.  From the fact of land being cultivated its division followed, and therefore the institution of property in its full shape.  From property arose civil society.  “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, could think of saying, This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.  How many crimes, wars, murders, miseries, and horrors would not have been spared to the human race by one who, plucking up the stakes, or filling in the trench, should have called out to his fellows:  Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you forget that the earth belongs to no one, and that its fruits are for all."[188]