One Person's Gain, Another's Loss — The Essays of Montaigne

Demades the Athenian condemned a man of his city whose trade was to sell the necessaries for funeral ceremonies. The pretence was that the seller demanded unreasonable profit, and that such profit could not accrue to him except by the death of a great number of people. Montaigne calls that judgment ill grounded. No profit whatever can possibly be made but at the expense of another. By the same rule Demades should condemn all gain of what kind soever.

He then names the trades that live off someone else's damage. 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. Even the honour and office of divines are derived from our death and vices. An ancient Greek comic writer says a physician takes no pleasure in the health even of his friends, nor a soldier in the peace of his country, and so of the rest.

Worse still, Montaigne turns the case inward. 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 that consideration it comes into his head that nature does not swerve from her general polity. Physicians hold that the birth, nourishment, and increase of every thing is the dissolution and corruption of another. Lucretius supplies the close: whatever from its own confines passes changed is at once the death of that which before it was. The funeral seller remains in the dock. The same rule now covers the rest of the room.