All creation is his property; but he finds in it as many hindrances as
helps. He must surmount these obstacles with the single strength that
God has given him; he cannot reckon on any other aid than chance and
opportunity. No one reaps, manufactures, fights, or thinks for him; he
is nothing to any one. He is a unit multiplied by the cipher of his own
single powers; while the civilized man is a unit multiplied by the whole
of society.

But, notwithstanding this, the other day, disgusted by the sight of some
vices in detail, I cursed the latter, and almost envied the life of the
savage.

One of the infirmities of our nature is always to mistake feeling for
evidence, and to judge of the season by a cloud or a ray of sunshine.

Was the misery, the sight of which made me regret a savage life, really
the effect of civilization? Must we accuse society of having created
these evils, or acknowledge, on the contrary, that it has alleviated
them? Could the women and children, who were receiving the coarse bread
from the soldier, hope in the desert for more help or pity? That dead
man, whose forsaken state I deplored, had he not found, by the cares of a
hospital, a coffin and the humble grave where he was about to rest?
Alone, and far from men, he would have died like the wild beast in his
den, and would now be serving as food for vultures! These benefits of
human society are shared, then, by the most destitute. Whoever eats the
bread that another has reaped and kneaded, is under an obligation to his
brother, and cannot say he owes him nothing in return. The poorest of us
has received from society much more than his own single strength would
have permitted him to wrest from nature.