The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Montaigne
• Preface
• The Author to the Reader
• Essays of Montaigne
• By Different Methods Men Arrive At the Same End.
• Of Sorrow
• Our Affections Carry Themselves Beyond Us
• How the Soul Expends Its Passions Upon False Objects, When the True Are Missed.
• Whether the Governor of a Place Besieged Ought to Go Out to Parley
• The Hour of Parley Dangerous.
• That the Intention Is Judge of Our Actions.
• Of Idleness
• Of Liars.
• Of Quick Or Slow Speech
• Of Prognostications
• Of Constancy
• Ceremony of the Interview of Kings.
• Men Are Punished For Being Obstinate In the Defence of a Fort Without Reason.
• Of the Punishment of Cowardice
• A Trait of Some Ambassadors.
• Of Fear
• That We Are Not to Judge of Our Hour Till After Death.
• That to Philosophise Is to Learn to Die.
• Of the Force of Imagination
• The Profit of One Man Is the Loss of Another.
• Of Custom, and of Not Changing a Received Law

THE PROFIT OF ONE MAN IS THE LOSS OF ANOTHER.

DEMADES the Athenian condemned one of his city, whose trade it was to sell the necessaries for funeral ceremonies, upon pretence that he demanded unreasonable profit, and that that profit could not accrue to him, but by the death of a great number of people. A judgment that appears to be ill grounded, forasmuch as no profit whatever can possibly be made but at the expense of another, and that by the same rule he should condemn all gain of what kind soever. The merchant only thrives by the debauchery of youth, the husbandman by the dearness of grain, the architect by the ruin of buildings, lawyers and officers of justice by the suits and contentions of men: nay, even the honor and office of divines are derived from our death and vices. A physician takes no pleasure in the health even of his friends, says the ancient Greek comic writer, nor a soldier in the peace of his country, and so of the rest. And, which is yet worse, let every one but dive into his own bosom, and he will find his private wishes spring and his secret hopes grow up at another’s expense. Upon which consideration it comes into my head, that nature does not in this swerve from her general polity; for physicians hold, that the birth, nourishment and increase of every thing is the dissolution and corruption of another:—