ChapterTwoBookOne75

There is no good of any kind that is worth as much as the life of one man, and nothing can be called good except by the use that others make of it. This impression, having won over everyone’s mind, must return an infinite good to the state and erase a large part of what passions and rages could inspire in some against their natural feelings to preserve one another; it must help with multiplying the number of contributors[^1] to its wealth. This truth, rooted in the minds of the youth, will make them more humane than men usually are, and they will be more inclined to submit to what (295) the prince wishes to establish for the public good. They will know by this that it is fruitless for them to seek other causes for their poverty and indigence than that of not wanting to follow the natural order to get rich through the help and mutual friendship of others: no good is worth this one and without it our natural poverty would continue our whole life.

This maxim must be mainly shown to and inspired in the children of the great and the rich to cure them of and to protect them from the insipid and ridiculous presumptions with which they are usually educated and brought up. Having been born into complete affluence, they feel and know their natural poverty less than others; (296) they become bombastic, arrogant, inhuman, unbearable, and consequently, costly to society rather than useful members. They do not know that they are poorer than those who do not have any goods and that the latter do not need as large a number of contributors[^2] as they do to support the value of their wealth and to provide them with an infinite number of things, which the poor easily do without. They falsely imagine that they are rich by the sole possession of a certain quantity of goods to which they attribute a sovereign virtue that can get them out of all difficulties while they scorn and mistreat the poor whom they do not think they need. It is very important for the (297) good of the state to disabuse them and to make them feel that this thought is very absurd and very ridiculous and that their so-called wealth has no other virtue than that given to it by the will, the power, and the number of those who use it.