'Why impossible? You may convert a hundred head of oxen into a service of gold plate. Liveries, laces, equipage, gilding, garnishing, and ten thousand other modes or fashionable wants, which if not gratified render those that have them miserable, would eat up all that ten thousand acres, if you had them, could yield. Are you an Epicure? You may so stew, distill, and titillate your palate with essences that a hecatomb shall be swallowed at every meal. The means of devouring are innumerable, and justified by general usage.' 'General usage may be an apology, but not a justification. Happiness is the end of man: but it cannot be single. On the contrary, the more beings are happy the greater is the individual happiness of each: for each is a being of sympathies, and affections; which are increased by being called into action. It is the miserable mechanism of society which, by giving legal possession of what is called property to the holders, puts it absolutely and unconditionally in their disposal.' 'Why the miserable mechanism? Are you a friend to the Agrarian system?' 'By no means. I was incorrect: The mechanism is defective enough, but I rather meant to have said the miserable moral system of society; which allows every man to exercise his own caprice, and thinks him guilty of no crime though he is in the daily habit of wasting that which might render numbers happy, who are in absolute want.' 'This is an evil of which the world has for ages been complaining: but for which I see no remedy.' 'You mean no remedy which laws or governments, by the inflicting of pains and penalties, can afford: at which, to do them justice, they have been much too often aiming; but have as continually failed.' 'And you imagine, sir, you are possessed of a more effectual prescription? 'I dare not prescribe: it would be an arrogant assumption of wisdom. But I may advise a regimen which has numerous probabilities in its favour. Yet what I must advise has been so many thousand times advised before that it seems impertinence to repeat it; if not mockery. To tell the rich that they seek enjoyment where it is not to be found, that the parade by which they torment themselves to gain distinction renders them supremely ridiculous, that their follies, while they are oppressive and hateful to the poor, are the topics of contempt and scandal even in their own circles, and that the repetition of them inevitably proves that they bring weariness, disgust, ruin, pain, and every human misery, is mere common-place declamation. 'But there is one truth of which they have not been sufficiently reminded. They are not, as they have too long been taught to suppose themselves, placed beyond the censure of the multitude. It is found that the multitude can think, and have discovered that the use the wealthy too often make of what they call their own is unjust, tyrannical, and destructive.