disgust; the infirmities estrange: all
that one can do is to have the virtue of being nurse, and of tolerating
what one has loved. It is burying a dead man.

_LUXURY_

People have declaimed against luxury for two thousand years, in verse
and in prose, and people have always delighted in it.

What has not been said of the early Romans when these brigands ravaged
and pillaged the harvests; when, to enlarge their poor village, they
destroyed the poor villages of the Volscians and the Samnites? They were
disinterested, virtuous men; they had not yet been able to steal either
gold, silver, or precious stones, because there were not any in the
little towns they plundered. Their woods and their marshes produced
neither pheasants nor partridges, and people praise their temperance.

When gradually they had pillaged everything, stolen everything from the
far end of the Adriatic Gulf to the Euphrates, and when they had enough
intelligence to enjoy the fruit of their plundering; when they
cultivated the arts, when they tasted of all pleasures, and when they
even made the vanquished taste of them, they ceased then, people say, to
be wise and honest men.

All these declamations reduce themselves to proving that a robber must
never either eat the dinner he has taken, or wear the coat he has
pilfered, or adorn himself with the ring he has filched. He should throw
all that, people say, in the river, so as to live like an honest man.
Say rather that he should not have stolen. Condemn brigands when they
pillage; but do not treat them as senseless when they enjoy. Honestly,
when a large number of English sailors enriched themselves at the taking
of Pondicherry and Havana, were they wrong to enjoy themselves later in
London, as the price of the trouble they had had in the depths of Asia
and America?

The declaimers want one to bury in the ground the wealth one has amassed
by the fortune of arms, by agriculture, by commerce and by industry.
They cite Lacedaemon; why do they not cite also the republic of San
Marino? What good did Sparto to Greece? Did she ever have Demosthenes,
Sophocles, Apelles, Phidias? The luxury of Athens produced great men in
every sphere; Sparta had a few captains, and in less number even than
other towns. But how fine it is that as small a republic as Lacedaemon
retains its poverty.[14]

One arrives at death as well by lacking everything as by enjoying what
can make life pleasant. The Canadian savage