But how fine it is that as small a republic as Lacedaemon
retains its poverty.[14]
One arrives at death as well by lacking everything as by enjoying what
can make life pleasant. The Canadian savage 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.
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