these people what is indispensable, and place
them in such oppressive conditions, this life becomes more difficult
every year, and more filled with deprivations; but our life, the life of
the non-laboring classes, thanks to the co-operation of the arts and
sciences which are directed to this object, becomes more filled with
superfluities, more attractive and careful, with every year. I see,
that, in our day, the life of the workingman, and, in particular, the
life of old men, of women, and of children of the working population, is
perishing directly from their food, which is utterly inadequate to their
fatiguing labor; and that this life of theirs is not free from care as to
its very first requirements; and that, alongside of this, the life of the
non-laboring classes, to which I belong, is filled more and more, every
year, with superfluities and luxury, and becomes more and more free from
anxiety, and has finally reached such a point of freedom from care, in
the case of its fortunate members, of whom I am one, as was only dreamed
of in olden times in fairy-tales,--the state of the owner of the purse
with the inexhaustible ruble, that is, a condition in which a man is not
only utterly released from the law of labor, but in which he possesses
the possibility of enjoying, without toil, all the blessings of life, and
of transferring to his children, or to any one whom he may see fit, this
purse with the inexhaustible ruble.

I see that the products of the people's toil are more and more
transformed from the mass of the working classes to those who do not
work; that the pyramid of the social edifice seems to be reconstructed in
such fashion that the foundation stones are carried to the apex, and the
swiftness of this transfer is increasing in a sort of geometrical ratio.
I see that the result of this is something like that which would take
place in an ant-heap if the community of ants were to lose their sense of
the common law, if some ants were to begin to draw the products of labor
from the bottom to the top of the heap, and should constantly contract
the foundations and broaden the apex, and should thereby also force the
remaining ants to betake themselves from the bottom to the summit.

I see that the ideal of the Fortunatus' purse has made its way among the
people, in the place of the ideal of a toilsome life. Rich people,
myself among the number, get possession of the inexhaustible ruble by
various devices, and for