But the question which Political Economy proposes is this: Is wealth for mankind a moral good or a moral evil? Does the progressive development of wealth imply, in a moral point of view, improvement or decadence?
The reader anticipates my answer, and will understand that I must say a few words on the subject of individual morality, in order to get quit of the contradiction, or rather of the impossibility, [p195] which would be implied in asserting that what is individual immorality is general morality.
Without having recourse to statistics, or the records of our prisons, we must handle a problem which may be enunciated in these terms:—
Is man degraded by exercising more power over nature—by constraining nature to serve him—by obtaining additional leisure—by freeing himself from the more imperious and pressing wants of his organization—by being enabled to rouse from sleep and inactivity his intellectual and moral faculties,—faculties which assuredly have not been given him to remain in eternal lethargy?
Is man degraded by being removed from a state the most inorganic, so to speak, and raised to a state of the highest spiritualism which it is possible for him to reach?
To enunciate the problem in this form is to resolve it.
I willingly grant, that when wealth is acquired by means which are immoral, it has an immoral influence, as among the Romans.
I also allow that when it is developed in a very unequal manner, creating a great gulf between classes, it has an immoral influence, and gives rise to revolutionary passions.
But does the same thing hold when wealth is the fruit of honest industry and free transactions, and is uniformly distributed over all classes? That would be a doctrine which it is impossible to maintain.
Socialist works, nevertheless, are crammed with declamations against the rich.