subsists, and comes to old
age like the English citizen who has an income of fifty thousand
guineas. But who will ever compare the land of the Iroquois to England?

Let the republic of Ragusa and the canton of Zug make sumptuary laws,
they are right, the poor man must not spend beyond his powers; but I
have read somewhere:

"Learn that luxury enriches a great state, even if it ruins a
small."[15]

If by luxury you understand excess, everyone knows that excess in any
form is pernicious, in abstinence as in gluttony, in economy as in
generosity. I do not know how it has happened that in my village where
the land is ungrateful, the taxes heavy, the prohibition against
exporting the corn one has sown intolerable, there is nevertheless
barely a cultivator who has not a good cloth coat, and who is not well
shod and well fed. If this cultivator toiled in his fields in his fine
coat, with white linen, his hair curled and powdered, there, certainly,
would be the greatest luxury, and the most impertinent; but that a
bourgeois of Paris or London should appear at the theatre clad like a
peasant, there would be the most vulgar and ridiculous niggardliness.

When scissors, which are certainly not of the remotest antiquity, were
invented, what did people not say against the first men who pared their
nails, and who cut part of the hair which fell on their noses? They were
treated, without a doubt, as fops and prodigals, who bought an
instrument of vanity at a high price, in order to spoil the Creator's
handiwork. What an enormous sin to cut short the horn which God made to
grow at the end of our fingers! It was an outrage against the Deity! It
was much worse when shirts and socks were invented. One knows with what
fury the aged counsellors who had never worn them cried out against the
young magistrates who were addicted to this disastrous luxury.[16]

FOOTNOTES:

[14] Lacedaemon avoided luxury only by preserving the community or
equality of property; but she did not preserve either the one or the
other save by having the land cultivated by an enslaved people. The
existence of the equality or community of property supposes the
existence of an enslaved people. The Spartans had virtue, just like
highwaymen, inquisitors and all classes of men whom habit has
familiarized with a species of crime, to the point of committing them
without remorse.

[15] The sumptuary laws are by their nature a violation of the right of
property. If i