Would you, having modified your opinion, seek to build a city in which every man shall possess a roof, a fire, clothes and sufficient to eat? When you have succeeded in endowing every citizen, the good and bad qualities of each will disturb your division and make it an unjust one: this one requires more to eat than that; that one is unable to work as much as this: the economical and industrious will become rich men, the spendthrifts, the idlers, the cripples will relapse into poverty; for you cannot give all men the same temperament: natural inequalities will reappear in spite of your efforts. And do not think that we should allow ourselves to be tied by the complicated legal precautions demanded by the organization of the family, patrimonial rights, wardships, recaptions by heirs and assigns, and so on, and so on. Marriage is notoriously an absurd oppression: we abolish all that. If the son kills the father, it is not the son, as is easily proved, who commits parricide but the father who, by living, sacrifices the son. Do not therefore let us go confusing our brains with the labyrinth of an edifice which we put down level with the ground; it is unnecessary to linger over those crazy trifles of our grandfathers. This notwithstanding, there are some among the modern sectarians who, half seeing the impossibility of their doctrines, mix with them, to obtain sufferance for them, words of morality and religion; they think that, pending better things, we might first be brought up to the ideal mediocrity of the Americans; they close their eyes and are good enough to forget that the Americans are landlords and ardent landlords, which alters the question somewhat. Others, still more obliging, who admit a sort of elegance of civilization, would be content to transform us into "Constitutional" Chinese, all but atheists, free and enlightened old men, sitting in yellow robes for centuries in our flowery seed-plots, spending our days in a state of comfort acquired to the multitude, having invented everything, discovered everything, vegetating peacefully in the midst of our accomplished progress and only going on board a railway-train, like a bale of merchandise, in order to travel from Canton to the Great Wall to chat about a marsh that wants draining or a canal that wants cutting with some other manufacturer of the Celestial Empire. In either supposition, American or Chinese, I shall be glad to have departed before so great a felicity happened to me.