When the advantages of the possession and of the project are on
a par, there is no motive for a change. But in the present case,
perhaps, they are not upon a par, and the difference is in favor of
the possession. It does not appear to me that the expenses of those
whom you are going to expel do in fact take a course so directly and
so generally leading to vitiate and degrade and render miserable those
through whom they pass as the expenses of those favorites whom you are
intruding into their houses. Why should the expenditure of a great
landed property, which is a dispersion of the surplus product of the
soil, appear intolerable to you or to me when it takes its course
through the accumulation of vast libraries, which are the history of
the force and weakness of the human mind; through great collections of
ancient records, medals, and coins, which attest and explain laws
and customs; through paintings and statues that, by imitating
nature, seem to extend the limits of creation; through grand monuments
of the dead, which continue the regards and connections of life beyond
the grave; through collections of the specimens of nature which become
a representative assembly of all the classes and families of the world
that by disposition facilitate and, by exciting curiosity, open the
avenues to science? If by great permanent establishments all these
objects of expense are better secured from the inconstant sport of
personal caprice and personal extravagance, are they worse than if the
same tastes prevailed in scattered individuals? Does not the sweat
of the mason and carpenter, who toil in order to partake of the
sweat of the peasant, flow as pleasantly and as salubriously in the
construction and repair of the majestic edifices of religion as in the
painted booths and sordid sties of vice and luxury; as honorably and
as profitably in repairing those sacred works which grow hoary with
innumerable years as on the momentary receptacles of transient
voluptuousness; in opera houses, and brothels, and gaming houses,
and clubhouses, and obelisks in the Champ de Mars? Is the surplus
product of the olive and the vine worse employed in the frugal
sustenance of persons whom the fictions of a pious imagination raise
to dignity by construing in the service of God, than in pampering
the innumerable multitude of those who are degraded by being made
useless domestics, subservient to the pride of man? Are the
decorations of temples an expenditure less worthy a wise man than
ribbons, and laces, and national cockades, and petit maisons, and
petit soupers, and all the innumerable fopperies and follies in
which opulence sports away the burden of its superfluity?
We tolerate even these, not from love of them, but for fear of
worse.
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