s and the calls of their
position; others vegetate obscurely in a sort of lazy discomfort. In the
other vocations, those in which the labor is principally physical and
manual, there also it is according to nature that there should be
different and unequal positions; some, by brains and good conduct, make
capital, and get a footing upon the ways of competence and progress;
others, being dull, or idle, or disorderly, remain in the straitened and
precarious condition of existence depending solely on wages. Throughout
the whole extent of the social structure, in the ranks of labor as well
as of property, differences and inequalities of position are produced or
kept up and co-exist with oneness of laws and similarity of rights.
Examine any human associations, in any place and at any time, and
whatever diversity there may be in point of their origin, organization,
government, extent, and duration, there will be found in all three types
of social position always fundamentally the same, though they may appear
under different and differently distributed forms; 1st, men living on
income from their properties, real or personal, land or capital, without
seeking to increase them by their own personal and assiduous labor; 2d,
men devoted to working up and increasing, by their own personal and
assiduous labor, the real or personal properties, land or capital they
possess; 3d, men living by their daily labor, without land or capital to
give them an income. And these differences, these inequalities in the
social position of men, are not matters of accident or violence, or
peculiar to such and such a time, or such and such a country; they are
matters of universal application, produced spontaneously in every human
society by virtue of the primitive and general laws of human nature, in
the midst of events and under the influence of social systems utterly
different.

These matters exist now and in France as they did of old and elsewhere.
Whether you do or do not use the name of classes, the new French social
fabric contains, and will not cease to contain, social positions widely
different and unequal. What constitutes its blessing and its glory is,
that privilege and fixity no longer cling to this difference of
positions; that there are no more special rights and advantages legally
assigned to some and inacessible to others; that all roads are free and
open to all to rise to everything; that personal merit and toil have an
infinitely gr