Under a democratic constitution a nation cannot live happily if its
manners and customs are not simple, and if the conditions of life are not
virtually equal for one and all. Under other circumstances than these the
liberal professions prove all-devouring: there is a rush for public
functions; manual toil is regarded with contempt; luxury increases and
becomes necessary; and wealth and power are furiously appropriated by
assault in order that one may greedily taste the voluptuousness of
enjoyment. And in such a state of affairs, children, as Valerie put it,
were incumbrances, whereas one needed to be free, absolutely unburdened,
if one wished to climb over all one's competitors.
Mathieu also thought of that law of imitation which impels even the least
fortunate to impoverish themselves by striving to copy the happy ones of
the world. How great the distress which really lurks beneath that envied
luxury that is copied at such great cost! All sorts of useless needs are
created, and production is turned aside from the strictly necessary. One
can no longer express hardship by saying that people lack bread; what
they lack in the majority of cases is the superfluous, which they are
unable to renounce without imagining that they have gone to the dogs and
are in danger of starvation.
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