Page:Labour - The Divine Command, 1890.djvu/30

26 how numerous they may be! But how much more surprising is it that, having in our hands a means so simple, so clear, so long known to all the world, we should neglect it, and seek to cure our woes by various false and subtle theories!

It is acting like one who, instead of putting a new bottom in a broken cask, tries to invent all sorts of artifices to make it hold water. And our efforts to cure our own woes are like these vain artifices.

Whence come, then, all the misfortunes of men, excepting those which result in assassinations, prisons, combats, and all the cruelties of which they become guilty because they cannot forbear to use violence?

All human misfortunes, direct violence excepted, result on the one hand from hunger and privation of all sorts, and from discouragement in labor, and on the other from riches, idleness, and the vices they engender. Ought we not to endeavor to destroy this inequality by which some are plunged into the evils of misery and want, and others into those which belong to the temptations of wealth? How can we do this but by taking part in the labor which satisfies our wants, and in abandoning wealth and idleness, which are the parents of vice and temptation; in other words, in obeying the law which commands men to labor each for his own bread, and to earn their living with their own hands? We are so overwhelmed with the multitude of