We are all more or less dependent on the physical and social conditions which surround us. It is quite certain that birth, for example, is a circumstance wholly independent of the will of man. Some are born in the most favorable, some in the least favorable social conditions--some rich, some poor; facts which depend neither on their constitution nor on their will. There are, moreover, still other outward circumstances. One may be born in a rich, a civilized, an enlightened, a progressive country, or in a poor, barbarous, benighted country. One may live in a place where there is every means of education, of making a living, of improving one's self, where there may be a thousand favorable openings for a man, and again, on the contrary, in a place far away from all civilization, without opportunities for work, without enlightenment, without means of communication with other men. All such circumstances are independent of the will of the individual man, and can only be corrected in time and through the progress of civilization, which gradually equalizes all countries. There are yet, besides all this, what is generally called the happy and unhappy chances of life. Everybody knows that human events do not always run as one would wish them, that things turn out more or less fortunately, as circumstances, and not men, order them. One may, for instance, get sick, when he has most need of health; a wife loses her husband, the support of her family, when she has most need of him; one may engage in an enterprise apparently founded on the best conditions of success: this enterprise fails on account of unexpected events, and without its being any one's fault. In commerce, for instance, we see every day the most unfortunate consequences of outward circumstances, against which one is utterly helpless, because, in commerce especially, there is a large share to be left to chance, to the unknown, which no one can calculate beforehand. Now, all such unexpected events, as they are realized, overthrow all our plans, and are cause that some attain to wealth, and others fall into poverty. Farmers particularly know but too well how dependent they are on outward circumstances. Cold, heat, rain, are for them elements of fortune or misery, and they are elements over which they have no control whatsoever. Now these elements, working blindly, as it would seem, are the chief cause of the great diversity of human conditions. Some, it is said, are lucky; others are not; some meet with favorable circumstances, others with contrary and fatal circumstances. Everything seems to co-operate toward crushing some, whilst everything again favors the success of others. These causes are innumerable, and could be multiplied _ad infinitum_; they explain the infinite variety of human conditions, how there are none exactly similar, and how there are consequently no two men exactly alike.