I have said that in the Middle Ages, comfort was nowhere, subsistence everywhere. When almost everyone in a population lived off the land, one came across great misery and coarse habits, but the most pressing human needs were satisfied. It is very rare for the land not to be able to provide the means of subsistence to those who water it with their sweat. The population was miserable but alive. Today, the population is happier, but one encounters everywhere a minority ready to die from want if public support were lacking.
Such a result is easy to comprehend. As his product, the farmer has food that is a basic necessity. The cost may be more or less advantageous, but it is almost assured; and if some accidental cause prevents a good harvest, the yield would at least provide a living to those who worked to produce it and permits them to look forward to better times.
The worker, on the contrary, speculates on artificial and secondary needs that many causes could restrain, and that important events could entirely suspend. However bad times are, man needs a certain amount of food without which he languishes and dies, and one is always ready to see him make extraordinary sacrifices to procure it; but unfortunate circumstances can cause a population to dispense with certain enjoyments, in which it would readily indulge in other times. But it is the taste for and use of these goods on which the worker depends to support himself. If they are lacking, he has no other resource. His own "harvest" is burnt; his "field" is plagued by sterility, and if such conditions continue, he sees nothing ahead but horrible misery and death.
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