at the expense of civilization, learning, and morality: on
the other hand, it is just as possible--and the error is one to which
the world is, on the whole, more liable--to direct labour to the objects
of life till too little is left for life, and thus to increase luxury or
learning at the expense of population. Right political economy holds its
aim poised justly between the two extremes, desiring neither to crowd
its dominions with a race of savages, nor to found courts and colleges
in the midst of a desert.

[Note 20: This point has sometimes been disputed; for instance,
opening Mill's 'Political Economy' the other day, I chanced on a passage
in which he says that a man who makes a coat, if the person who wears
the coat does nothing useful while he wears it, has done no more good to
society than the man who has only raised a pineapple. But this is a
fallacy induced by endeavour after too much subtlety. None of us have a
right to say that the life of a man is of no use to _him_, though it may
be of no use to _us_; and the man who made the coat, and thereby
prolonged another man's life, has done a gracious and useful work,
whatever may come of the life so prolonged. We may say to the wearer of
the coat, "You who are wearing coats, and doing nothing in them, are at
present wasting your own life and other people's;" but we have no right
to say that his existence, however wasted, is wasted _away_. It may be
just dragging itself on, in its thin golden line, with nothing dependent
upon it, to the point where it is to strengthen into good chain cable,
and have thousands of other lives dependent on it. Meantime, the simple
fact respecting the coat-maker is, that he has given so much life to the
creature, the results of which he cannot calculate; they may be--in all
probability will be--infinite results in some way. But the raiser of
pines, who has only given a pleasant taste in the mouth to some one, may
see with tolerable clearness to the end of the taste in the mouth, and
of all conceivable results therefrom.]

146. (3) The third kind of property is that which conduces to bodily
pleasures and conveniences, without directly tending to sustain life;
perhaps sometimes indirectly tending to destroy it. All dainty (as
distinguished from nourishing) food, and means of producing it; all
scents not needed for health; substances valued only for their
appearance and rarity (as gold and jewels); flowers of difficult
culture; animals