We have the unfortunate and unreasonable habit of attributing to the ‹social state› the sufferings which we see around us. We are right so far, if our object be to compare society with itself in different degrees of advancement and improvement; but we are wrong if our object be to compare the social state, however imperfect, with a state of isolation. To authorize us to assert that society impairs the condition, I do not say of man in general, but of some men, and these the poorest and most wretched of the species, we must begin by proving that the worst provided of our fellow-creatures have to support in the social state a heavier load of privations and sufferings than the man whose lot has been cast in solitude. Now, examine the life of the humblest day-labourer. Pass in review, in all their details, the articles of his daily consumption. He is covered with some coarse clothing, he eats a little common bread, he sleeps under shelter, and on boards, at least, if he has no better couch. Now, let us ask if man in a state of isolation, deprived of the resources of Exchange, could by any possibility procure for himself that coarse clothing, that common bread, that rude bed, that humble shelter? Rousseau himself, the passionate enthusiast of the ‹state of nature›, avows the utter impossibility of it. Men dispensed with everything, he says; they went naked, they slept in the open air. Thus Rousseau, to exalt the state of nature, was led to make happiness consist in privation. And yet I affirm that this negative happiness is a chimera, and that man in a state of isolation would infallibly perish in a very few hours. Perhaps Rousseau would have gone to the length of saying that that would have been the perfection of his system; and he would have been consistent, for if privation be happiness, death is perfection. I trust the reader will not conclude from what precedes that we are insensible to the social sufferings of our fellow-men. Because these sufferings are less even in an imperfect state of society than in a state of isolation, it does not follow that we should not invoke, with all earnestness, that progress which constantly diminishes them. But if isolation is something worse than all that is bad in the social state, then I am justified in saying that it places our wants, even the most imperious, far above our faculties and our means of providing for wants. In what way does Exchange advantageously reverse all this, and place our faculties above our wants? And first this is proved by the very fact of civilisation. If our [p103] wants surpassed our faculties, we should be beings invincibly retrograde; if there were an equilibrium between them, we should be invincibly stationary. But we advance; which shows that at every stage of social life, as compared with the period that preceded it, a certain portion of our powers, relatively to a given amount of satisfactions, is left disposable. We shall endeavour to explain this marvellous phenomenon.