68o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



single remedy for inequality of wealth and its resultant luxury. What 

 is to be done, however, now that political economy has demonstrated, 

 from the evidence of facts, that alms engenders idleness, mendicity, 

 indolence, and debasement of character, and that it is fundamentally 

 wrong, because it levies an impost on those who work for the profit of 

 those who do not work ? 



The true solution of the question is to be found in encouraging the 

 greatest possible number of citizens to become holders of property. 

 Let it be in the power of each one to secure a parcel of land, a bond, 

 or an industrial obligation, a little capital in some form, so that prop- 

 erty may become democratized, and extreme inequality will be caused 

 to disappear ; then, if the progress of mechanical arts induces the mul- 

 tiplication and refinement of products, they will be within the reach of 

 all. Such conditions still prevail in countries where the agrarian cus- 

 toms and the proprietary forms of primitive times have not been de- 

 stroyed by the civil laws and feudal and royal usurpations. 



Voltaire says on this subject, in his " Dictionnaire Philosophique " : 

 " If we understand by luxury all that is over and above the necessary, 

 it is a natural consequence of the progress of the human species, and 

 by a consequent reasoning every enemy of luxury should believe, with 

 Rousseau, that man's real state of happiness and virtue is not that of 

 the savage, but of the orang-outang. We feel, however, that it would 

 be absurd to regard as evils such conveniences as all men enjoy ; so 

 we generally give the name of luxury only to the sui^erfluities which 

 are within the reach of but a small number of persons. In this sense, 

 luxury is a necessary concomitant of property, without which no 

 society can exist, and of a great inequality in fortunes, which is the 

 result, not of the right of property, but of bad laws. It is, therefore, 

 bad laws that generate luxury, and it is good laws that must destroy 

 it. Hence, moralists shoiald address their remonstrances to legislators, 

 not to individuals ; for it is in the order of possible events that a vir- 

 tuous and enlightened man should have the power of making reason- 

 able laws, but it is not in human nature that all the rich men of a 

 country should virtuously give up the enjoyment of buying pleasure 

 and vanity at the price of a small sum of money." 



One kind of luxury only, in my opinion, is justifiable : that, namely, 

 which admits the public to its enjoyments ; which invites the masses 

 to the pleasures of public gardens and fountains, which places the 

 beautiful within the reach of those who can not own statuary or pic- 

 tures, by establishing museums of art, and which founds libraries and 

 public expositions. Such collective luxury, if well directed, is profit- 

 able to all. It raises the level and fecundates the genius of industry. 

 The duty of the easy classes in every country is to favor those move- 

 ments which will tend to enable all of the people to become possessors 

 of property, and themselves to set the example of application to labor, 

 rural tastes, simplicity of life, and high moral and intellectual cul- 



