There is no real wealth but the labour of man.  Were the mountains of gold and the valleys of silver, the world would not be one grain of corn the richer; no one comfort would be added to the human race.  In consequence of our consideration for the precious metals, one man is enabled to heap to himself luxuries at the expense of the necessaries of his neighbour; a system admirably fitted to produce all the varieties of disease and crime, which never fail to characterize the two extremes of opulence and penury.  A speculator takes pride to himself as the promoter of his country’s prosperity, who employs a number of hands in the manufacture of articles avowedly destitute of use, or subservient only to the unhallowed cravings of luxury and ostentation.  The nobleman, who employs the peasants of his neighbourhood in building his palaces, until ‘jam pauca aratro jugera regiae moles relinquunt,’ flatters himself that he has gained the title of a patriot by yielding to the impulses of vanity.  The show and pomp of courts adduce the same apology for its continuance; and many a fete has been given, many a woman has eclipsed her beauty by her dress, to benefit the labouring poor and to encourage trade.  Who does not see that this is a remedy which aggravates whilst it palliates the countless diseases of society?  The poor are set to labour,—­for what?  Not the food for which they famish:  not the blankets for want of which their babes are frozen by the cold of their miserable hovels:  not those comforts of civilization without which civilized man is far more miserable than the meanest savage; oppressed as he is by all its insidious evils, within the daily and taunting prospect of its innumerable benefits assiduously exhibited before him:—­no; for the pride of power, for the miserable isolation of pride, for the false pleasures of the hundredth part of society.  No greater evidence is afforded of the wide extended and radical mistakes of civilized man than this fact:  those arts which are essential to his very being are held in the greatest contempt; employments are lucrative in an inverse ratio to their usefulness (See Rousseau, “De l’Inegalite parmi les Hommes”, note 7.):  the jeweller, the toyman, the actor gains fame and wealth by the exercise of his useless and ridiculous art; whilst the cultivator of the earth, he without whom society must cease to subsist, struggles through contempt and penury, and perishes by that famine which but for his unceasing exertions would annihilate the rest of mankind.

I will not insult common sense by insisting on the doctrine of the natural equality of man.  The question is not concerning its desirableness, but its practicability:  so far as it is practicable, it is desirable.  That state of human society which approaches nearer to an equal partition of its benefits and evils should, caeteris paribus, be preferred:  but so long as we conceive that a wanton expenditure of human labour, not for the necessities, not even for the luxuries of the mass of society, but for the egotism and ostentation of a few of its members, is defensible on the ground of public justice, so long we neglect to approximate to the redemption of the human race.