22

22. One man’s profit is another man’s loss

[Montaigne’s principal source in this short chapter is Seneca’s treatise De beneficiis.]

[A] Demades condemned a fellow Athenian whose trade was to sell funeral requisites on the grounds that he wanted too much profit from it and that this profit could only be made out of the deaths of a great many people.1

That judgement seems ill-founded since no profit is ever made except at somebody else’s loss: by his reckoning you would have to condemn earnings of every sort. The merchant can only thrive by tempting youth to extravagance; the husbandman, by the high price of grain; the architect, by the collapse of buildings; legal officials, by lawsuits and quarrels between men; the very honorariums and the fees of the clergy are drawn from our deaths and our vices. ‘No doctor derives any pleasure from the good health even of his friends’ (as was said by an ancient author of Greek comedies);2 ‘neither does the soldier from peace in his city’: and so on for all the others. And what is worse, if each of us were to sound our inner depths he would find that most of our desires are born and nurtured at other people’s expense.

When I reflected on this the thought came to me that Nature here was not belying her general polity, for natural philosophers hold that the birth, nurture and increase of each thing is at the expense and corruption of another.

Nam quodcunque suis mutatum finibus exit, Continuo hoc mors est illius, quod fuit ante.

[For when anything is changed and sallies forth from its confines, it is at once the death of something which previously existed.]3