Such discordances are never encountered in the natural order of society. It is impossible to suppose that all men should aspire to competence, that the natural way to attain it should be by the exercise of the strictest virtue, and that they should reach it [p079] nevertheless only to be caught in the snares of vice. Such declamations are calculated only to light up and keep alive the hatred of classes. If true, they place human nature in a dilemma between poverty and immorality. If untrue, they make falsehood the minister of disorder, and set to loggerheads classes who should mutually love and assist each other. Factitious inequality—inequality generated by law, by disturbing the natural order of development of the different classes of society—is, for all, a prolific source of irritation, jealousy, and crime. This is the reason why it is necessary to satisfy ourselves whether this natural order leads to the progressive amelioration and progressive equalization of all classes; and we should be arrested in this inquiry by what lawyers term a ‹fin de non-recevoir›, a peremptory exception, if this double material progress implied necessarily a double moral degradation. Upon the subject of human wants I have to make an important observation,—and one which, in Political Economy, may even be regarded as fundamental,—it is, that wants are not a fixed immutable quantity. They are not in their nature stationary, but progressive. We remark this characteristic even in our strictly physical wants; but it becomes more apparent as we rise to those desires and intellectual tastes which distinguish man from the inferior animals. It would seem that if there be anything in which men should resemble each other, it is in the want of food, for, unless in exceptional cases, men’s stomachs are very much alike. And yet aliments which are ‹recherchés› at one period become vulgar at another, and the regimen which suits a Lazzarone would subject a Dutchman to torture. Thus the want which is the most immediate, the grossest of all, and consequently the most uniform of all, still varies according to age, sex, temperament, climate, custom. The same may be said of all our other wants. Scarcely has a man found shelter than he desires to be lodged, scarcely is he clothed than he wishes to be decorated, scarcely has he satisfied his bodily cravings than study, science, art, open to his desires an unlimited field. It is a phenomenon well worthy of remark, how quickly, by continuous satisfaction, what was at first only a vague desire becomes a taste, and what was only a taste is transformed into a want, and even a want of the most imperious kind.