While some small groups of people had already learned the art of accumulating property, along with wealth, power, and nearly all intellectual and material pleasures that life could offer, the half-savage crowd are still ignorant of the secret of increasing comfort and extending freedom. At this point in the history of the human race, men had already abandoned the coarse and proud virtues that were born in the woods; they lost the advantages of barbarism without yet acquiring what civilization could offer. Attached to civilization of the soil as their sole resource, they did not know the art of defending the fruit of their labor. Placed between savage independence that they could no longer enjoy, and civil and political liberty that they could not yet understand, they were handed over without recourse to violence and fraud, and showed themselves to be ready to submit to all kinds of tyranny, provided that they were allowed to live, or at least to vegetate near their furrows.
In this way did estates agglomerate to fantastic sizes; that the government concentrated itself into a few hands. In this way did war, instead of imperiling the political state of the peoples, as it has done in our own time, menace the individual property of each citizen; that inequality reached its extreme limits and one saw the spirit of conquest spread, which was the father and mother of all long established aristocracies.
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