Labour, like family, property, and everything else in this world, is subject to natural and general laws; among which are, diversity and inequality of the kinds and the results of labour, and of the stations of those by whom it is performed. Intellectual labour is superior to manual. Descartes, who enlightened France, and Colbert, who laid the foundations of her prosperity, performed a labour superior to that of the workman who prints the works of Descartes, or who helps to produce the manufactures fostered by Colbert; and among these very workmen, those who are intelligent, moral, and industrious, justly attain to a situation superior to that which the same description of labour can secure to the dull, the lazy, or the licentious. The variety of tasks and vocations allotted to man is infinite. Labour is everywhere--in the house of a father of a family, who educates his children and superintends his affairs; in the cabinet of a statesman who takes part in the government of his country; in that of the magistrate who administers its laws; of the philosopher who instructs, and of the poet who charms it; in the fields, on the ocean, on the highways, in the manufactories and the workshops; and in every situation, in every variety of labour, in every class of labourers, diversity and inequality arise and subsist; inequality of intellectual power, of moral merit, of social importance, of material wealth. These are the natural, primitive, universal laws of labour, originating in the nature and condition of man, or, to speak more properly, ordained by the wisdom of God. It is against these laws that the war of which we are witnesses is waged; it is this hierarchy of labour, founded on the decrees of God and the free actions of man, which it is the object of this war to abolish; and to substitute--what?--the degradation and the ruin of labour, by the reduction of all labour and all labourers to the same level! Examine the meaning which is usually affixed to the word _labour_ in the language of these enemies of social order. They do not distinctly say that material and manual work are the only real work; indeed they occasionally affect great respect for purely intellectual labour: but they omit to mention the various sorts of higher labour which are performed on every stage of the social scale; their whole attention is absorbed by material labour, which they constantly represent as the kind of labour whose importance throws every other into the shade. In short, they talk in a manner to excite and keep alive in the minds of the men employed in physical labour, the opinion that theirs only has a claim to the name and the rights of labour. Even when speaking not of labour, but of labourers, they hold the same levelling and depreciating language;--ascribing the rights of labour to workmen, as such, independently of all degrees of personal merit. Thus the coarsest and most ordinary labour is assumed as