us from ordering
his life in a spirit of simplicity. To know that this spirit does not
rule in our society we need but watch the lives of men of all classes.
Ask different people, of very unlike surroundings, this question: What
do you need to live? You will see how they respond. Nothing is more
instructive. For some aboriginals of the Parisian asphalt, there is no
life possible outside a region bounded by certain boulevards. There one
finds the respirable air, the illuminating light, normal heat, classic
cookery, and, in moderation, so many other things without which it would
not be worth the while to promenade this round ball.

On the various rungs of the bourgeois ladder people reply to the
question, what is necessary to live? by figures varying with the degree
of their ambition or education: and by education is oftenest understood
the outward customs of life, the style of house, dress, table--an
education precisely skin-deep. Upward from a certain income, fee, or
salary, life becomes possible: below that it is impossible. We have seen
men commit suicide because their means had fallen under a certain
minimum. They preferred to disappear rather than retrench. Observe that
this minimum, the cause of their despair, would have been sufficient for
others of less exacting needs, and enviable to men whose tastes are
modest.

On lofty mountains vegetation changes with the altitude. There is the
region of ordinary flora, that of the forests, that of pastures, that of
bare rocks and glaciers. Above a certain zone wheat is no longer found,
but the vine still prospers. The oak ceases in the low regions, the pine
flourishes at considerable heights. Human life, with its needs, reminds
one of these phenomena of vegetation.

At a certain altitude of fortune the financier thrives, the club-man,
the society woman, all those in short for whom the strictly necessary
includes a certain number of domestics and equipages, as well as several
town and country houses. Further on flourishes the rich upper middle
class, with its own standards and life. In other regions we find men of
ample, moderate, or small means, and very unlike exigencies. Then come
the people--artisans, day-laborers, peasants, in short, the masses, who
live dense and serried like the thick, sturdy growths on the summits of
the mountains, where the larger vegetation can no longer find
nourishment. In all these different regions of society men live, and no
matter in whic