In the professions called liberal, or those which depend on the cultivation and employment of the intellect; among lawyers, physicians, men of science, and literary men of every sort, some few rise to the highest rank, attract business, and gain success, reputation, wealth, and influence. Others earn laboriously what is barely sufficient for the wants of their families, and the decencies of their station. Many more vegetate in obscure and unemployed indigence.
And here one fact deserves notice. From the time when all professions have been accessible to all, from the time when labour has been free, subject only to the same laws for all, the number of men who have raised themselves to the first ranks in the liberal professions has not sensibly increased. It does not appear that there are now more great lawyers or physicians, more men of science or letters of the first order, than there were formerly. It is the men of the second order, and the obscure and idle multitude, that are multiplied. It is as if Providence did not permit human laws to have any influence over the intellectual rank of its creatures, or the extent and magnificence of its gifts.
In the other trades or professions, in which labour is chiefly material and manual, there are also different and unequal situations. Some, by intelligence and good conduct, accumulate a capital and enter upon the path of competence and advancement; others, either incapable or improvident, lazy or dissolute, remain in the narrow and precarious condition of men dependent upon the daily casualties of wages.
Thus throughout the whole extent of civil society,—whether among those who depend on labour, or those possessed of property,—diversity and inequality of situation arise and coexist with unity of laws and equality of rights.
How, indeed, can it be otherwise? If we examine every form of human society throughout all ages and countries—whatever be the variety of their organization, government, extent, or duration, or of the kind and degree of civilization to which they have attained—we shall find three types of social position always fundamentally the same, though under very different forms and very differently distributed.
1. Men living on the income of their property, whether in land or capital, without seeking to increase it by their own labour;
2. Men occupied in increasing by their own labour the property, whether in land or capital, which they possess;
3. Men living by their labour without land or capital.
These diversities and inequalities in the social condition of men are not accidental, or peculiar to any particular time or country. They are universal facts, which naturally arise in every human society, amidst circumstances, and under laws, the most widely different.
And the more accurately we study them, the more clearly we shall perceive that there exists an intimate connexion and a profound harmony between these facts and the nature of man, which we know, on the one hand, and the mysteries of his destiny, of which we can only obtain a dim and distant glance, on the other.