erty, it follows,
should belong to him in whose hands it will be of most benefit, and the
instrument of the greatest happiness.

It is the love of distinction which attends wealth in corrupt societies
that explains the desire for luxury. We desire not the direct pleasure
to be derived from excessive possessions, but the consideration which is
attached to it. Our very clothes are an appeal to the goodwill of our
neighbours, and a refuge from their contempt. Society would be
transformed if the distinction were reversed, if admiration were no
longer rendered to the luxurious and avaricious and were accorded only
to talent and virtue. Let not the necessity of rewarding virtue be
suggested as a justification for the inequalities of fortune. Shall we
say, to a virtuous man: "If you show yourself deserving, you shall have
the essence of a hundred times more food than you can eat, and a hundred
times more clothes than you can wear. You shall have a patent for taking
away from others the means of a happy and respectable existence, and for
consuming them in riotous and unmeaning extravagance." Is this the
reward that ought to be offered to virtue, or that virtue should stoop
to take? Godwin is at his best on this theme of luxury: "Every man may
calculate in every glass of wine he drinks, and every ornament he
annexes to his person, how many individuals have been condemned to
slavery and sweat, incessant drudgery, unwholesome food, continual
hardships, deplorable ignorance and brutal insensibility, that he may be
supplied with these luxuries. It is a gross imposition that men are
accustomed to put upon themselves, when they talk of the property
bequeathed to them by their ancestors. The property is produced by the
daily labour of men who are now in existence. All that the ancestors
bequeathed to them was a mouldy patent which they show as a title to
extort from their neighbours what the labour of those neighbours has
produced."

It is a flagrant immorality that one man should have the power to
dispose of the produce of another man's toil, yet to maintain this power
is the main concern of police and legislation. Morality recognises two
degrees of property, (1) things which will produce the greatest benefit,
if attributed to me, in brief the necessities of life, my food, clothes,
furniture and apartment; (2) the empire which every man may claim over
the produce of his own industry, even over that part of it which ought
not to be u