Lastly, one solution remains: it might be that, in consequence of the complete degradation of the human character, the peoples would put up with what they have; they would lose the love of independence, replaced by the love of money, at the same time that the kings lost the love of power, bartered for the love of the Civil List. Hence would result a compromise between monarchs and subjects charmed to crawl promiscuously in a bastard political order of things; they would display their infirmities to one another at their ease, as in the old leper-hospitals or in those mud-baths in which sick people soak nowadays to obtain relief: one would dabble in a common mire like a peaceful reptile. We misconstrue our times, however, when we desire, in the present condition of society, to replace the pleasures of our intellectual nature by the joys of our physical nature. The latter, we can understand, were able to occupy the life of the old aristocratic nations: masters of the world, they owned palaces, troops of slaves; they absorbed whole regions of Africa in their private possessions. But under what portico would you now air your paltry leisure? In what vast and decorated baths would you shut up the perfumes, the flowers, the flute-players, the courtezans of Ionia? One is not Heliogabalus[434] for the asking. Where will you find the wealth indispensable to those material delights? The soul is thrifty; but the body is extravagant. [Sidenote: Communism.] And now, a few words of a more serious character touching absolute equality. That equality would bring back not only the servitude of bodies, but the slavery of souls; it would be a question of nothing less than destroying the moral and physical inequality of the individual. Our will, administered under the general eye, would see our faculties falling into disuse. The infinite, for instance, is part of our nature: forbid our intellect, or even our passions to think of endless blessings, and you reduce man to the life of the snail, you transform him into a machine. For make no mistake: without the possibility of attaining all, without the idea of living eternally, you have nothingness everywhere; without individual property, none is free; whosoever has no property cannot be independent; he becomes a proletarian or a salaried servant, whether he live under the present condition of separate ownerships or in the midst of a common ownership. Common ownership would make society resemble one of those monasteries at whose door stewards used to stand distributing bread. Hereditary and inviolable property is our personal defense; property is nothing else than liberty. Absolute equality, which presupposes complete submission to that equality, would reproduce the harshest form of servitude; it would turn the human individual into a beast of burden subjected to the action which would constrain him and obliged to walk endlessly in the same path.