Since the inexorable necessities of material life are an obstacle to moral and intellectual culture, it follows that we ought to find more virtue among wealthy than among poor nations and classes. [p078] Good Heaven! what have I just said, and with what clamour shall I be assailed! But the truth is, it is a perfect mania of our times to attribute all disinterestedness, all self-sacrifice, all which constitutes the greatness and moral beauty of man, to the poorer classes, and this mania has of late been still more developed by a revolution, which, bringing these classes to the surface of society, has not failed to surround them with a crowd of flatterers. I don’t deny that wealth, opulence, especially where it is very unequally spread, tends to develop certain special vices. But is it possible to admit as a general proposition that virtue is the privilege of poverty, and vice the unhappy and unfailing companion of ease? This would be to affirm that moral and intellectual improvement, which is only compatible with a certain amount of leisure and comfort, is detrimental to intelligence and morality. I appeal to the candour of the suffering classes themselves. To what horrible ‹dissonances› would such a paradox conduct us! We must then conclude, that human nature has the frightful alternative presented to it, either to remain eternally wretched, or advance gradually on the road to vice and immorality. Then all the forces which conduct us to wealth—such as activity, economy, skill, honesty—are the seeds of vice; while those which tie us to poverty—improvidence, idleness, dissipation, carelessness—are the precious germs of virtue. Could we conceive in the moral world a dissonance more discouraging? Or, were it really so, who would dare to address or counsel the people? You complain of your sufferings (we must say to them), and you are impatient to see an end of these sufferings. You groan at finding yourselves under the yoke of the most imperious material wants, and you sigh for the hour of your deliverance, for you desire leisure to make your voice heard in the political world and to protect your interests. You know not what you desire, or how fatal success would prove to you. Ease, competence, riches, develop only vice. Guard, then, religiously your poverty and your virtue. The flatterers of the people, then, fall into a manifest contradiction when they point to the region of opulence as an impure sink of egotism and vice, and, at the same time, urge them on—and frequently in their eagerness by the most illegitimate means—to a region which they deem so unfortunate.