The idea is not to establish an imaginary wealth in a state and to ensure that everyone owns the same amount of goods, and that the peasant and the worker can (406) spend as much as the great nobleman, and that everything is covered and filled with gold and silver, for that would upset the differences in stations and ranks and would be proposing a public opulence that would make everyone poor and miserable. The peasant would no longer want to serve his master if he were as rich as him, and if everyone were the same, everyone would have to be his own servant, cook, and gardener. And finally, we would fall back into the same poverty with which we came into the world: instead everyone can be rich without leaving his station. I only claim that in a state we should prevent as much as possible anyone from dying of hunger or repletion, (407) some from dying idle and others from succumbing under the strain of work. Everyone’s interests should be so strongly linked together that they do not have cause to distrust their mutual assistance in case of need; on the contrary, they are led away from this normal desire to own an excessive quantity of goods. Here are the true necessities, true conveniences, and true superfluities that the prince will be able to procure for everyone by following these simple and natural principles, without disturbing the necessary differences in stations and ranks. Everyone will find his necessities, his conveniences, and his superfluities insofar as he wishes to follow the law of nature itself: (408) that one should only get rich by contributing proportionally to the needs of others.
The prince will be the one who establishes this proportion, who makes it necessary for everyone to do things this way, who removes all the obstacles that prevent and stop those who are willing; he will be the one who leads and who governs his states as time passes like a clock that only needs to be wound to continue its movement. It is true that in spite of the best arrangements that the prince can make to enrich all his subjects in the sense that I mean, there may always be some who are farther away from it than others, but it is also true that when (409) things have reached a certain point of perfection, the remedies are sure to make a few who are left behind about as happy as the rest. Old people, for example, cripples, and all those who are naturally incapable of working for the public good could very easily be relieved by the others and in ways that I will show later. At least the goal of a prince who wants to govern his states must be to move towards a general wealth for everyone, which stimulates and increases the natural desire to multiply as much as possible because there is no other way to enrich a state than by an increase in the number (410) of its people.
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