opinions as to the special applications of this general statement, but this is not the place to enter into details, and they are only too evident to everybody.] Who can answer for your fate?  What man has made, man may destroy.  Nature’s characters alone are ineffaceable, and nature makes neither the prince, the rich man, nor the nobleman.  This satrap whom you have educated for greatness, what will become of him in his degradation?  This farmer of the taxes who can only live on gold, what will he do in poverty?  This haughty fool who cannot use his own hands, who prides himself on what is not really his, what will he do when he is stripped of all?  In that day, happy will he be who can give up the rank which is no longer his, and be still a man in Fate’s despite.  Let men praise as they will that conquered monarch who like a madman would be buried beneath the fragments of his throne; I behold him with scorn; to me he is merely a crown, and when that is gone he is nothing.  But he who loses his crown and lives without it, is more than a king; from the rank of a king, which may be held by a coward, a villain, or madman, he rises to the rank of a man, a position few can fill.  Thus he triumphs over Fortune, he dares to look her in the face; he depends on himself alone, and when he has nothing left to show but himself he is not a nonentity, he is somebody.  Better a thousandfold the king of Corinth a schoolmaster at Syracuse, than a wretched Tarquin, unable to be anything but a king, or the heir of the ruler of three kingdoms, the sport of all who would scorn his poverty, wandering from court to court in search of help, and finding nothing but insults, for want of knowing any trade but one which he can no longer practise.

The man and the citizen, whoever he may be, has no property to invest in society but himself, all his other goods belong to society in spite of himself, and when a man is rich, either he does not enjoy his wealth, or the public enjoys it too; in the first case he robs others as well as himself; in the second he gives them nothing.  Thus his debt to society is still unpaid, while he only pays with his property.  “But my father was serving society while he was acquiring his wealth.”  Just so; he paid his own debt, not yours.  You owe more to others than if you had been born with nothing, since you were born under favourable conditions.  It is not fair that what one man has done for society should pay another’s debt, for since every man owes all that he is, he can only pay his own debt, and no father can transmit to his son any right to be of no use to mankind.  “But,” you say, “this is just what he does when he leaves me his wealth, the reward of his labour.”  The man who eats in idleness what he has not himself earned, is a thief, and in my eyes, the man who lives on an income paid him by the state for doing nothing, differs little from a highwayman who lives on those who travel his way.  Outside the pale of society, the solitary, owing nothing to any man, may live as he pleases, but in society either he lives at the cost of others, or he owes them in labour the cost of his keep; there is no exception to this rule.  Man in society is bound to work; rich or poor, weak or strong, every idler is a thief.