This much is certain, that very few people succeeded in living without work, on the labour of the subject masses. The small number of idlers who did so caused their slaves to construct for them sumptuous palaces, magnificent castles, and sombre fortresses. They loved to surround themselves with all the sensual enjoyments of life, and with all the monuments of art. They amused themselves by descanting on philosophy and cosmogony; and, above all, they cultivated assiduously the two sciences to which they owed their supremacy and their enjoyments,—the science of force, and the science of fraud.
Although below this aristocracy there existed countless multitudes engaged in creating for themselves the means of sustaining life, and for their oppressors the means of revelling in pleasures, yet as historians have never made the slightest allusion to those multitudes, we have come to forget their existence, and never taken them into account. Our regards are exclusively fixed on the aristocracy. To it we give the name of Old or Feudal Families; and we imagine that the men of those times maintained themselves without having recourse to commerce, to manufactures, to labour, to vulgar occupations. We admire their disinterestedness, their generosity, their taste for the arts, their spirituality, their disdain of servile employments, their [p457] elevation of mind and sentiment, and, in high-sounding language, we assert that at one epoch nations cared only for military glory, at another for the arts, at another for philosophy, at another for religion, at another for virtue. We sincerely lament our own condition, and give utterance to all sorts of sarcastic observations, to the effect that, in spite of these sublime models, we are unable to attain the same elevation, but are reduced to assign to labour and its vulgar merits a prominent place in the system of modern life.
Let us console ourselves with the reflection that it occupied a no less important place among the ancients. Only, the drudgery of labour, from which a limited number of people had succeeded in freeing themselves, fell with redoubled weight upon the enslaved masses, to the great detriment of justice, of liberty, of property, of wealth, of equality, and of progress. This is the first of those disturbing causes to which I propose to solicit the attention of the reader.
The means, then, to which men have recourse in order to obtain the means of subsistence cannot fail to exert a powerful influence on their condition, physical, moral, intellectual, economical, and political. Who can doubt that if we were in a situation to observe different tribes of men, one of which had devoted itself exclusively to the chase, another to fishing, a third to agriculture, a fourth to navigation, we should discover very considerable differences in their ideas, in their opinions, in their habits, their manners, their customs, their laws, and their religion? No doubt we should find human nature everywhere essentially the same; these various laws, customs, and religions would have many points in common; and such points we designate as the general laws of human society.
Be this as it may, there can be no doubt that in our great modern societies we find at work all, or nearly all, the various means of providing subsistence,—fisheries, agriculture, manufactures, commerce, arts, and sciences, although in different proportions in different countries. This is the reason why we do not discover among nations so situated such marked and striking differences as would be apparent if each devoted itself to one of these occupations exclusively.
But if the nature of the occupations in which a people is engaged exercises a powerful influence on its morality, its desires, and its tastes,—its morality in its turn exercises a great influence upon its occupations, at least upon the proportion which obtains between these occupations. But I shall not dwell on this observation, [p458] which I have presented in another part of this work,[102] but hasten to the principal subject of the present chapter.
A man (and the same thing may be said of a people) may procure the means of existence in two ways,—by creating them, or by stealing them.
Each of these two great sources of acquisition presents a variety of methods.
We may create the means of existence by the chase, by fishing, by agriculture, etc.
We may steal them by breach of trust, by violence, by force, fraud, war, etc.