The farming of the unhappy by the happy

The farming of the unhappy by the happy is the narrator’s name for a system in which those who enjoy security or power make the suffering of others serve their pleasure. Introduced as the possible title of a book about human cruelty, the phrase turns exploitation into an image of cultivation: the unhappy are treated not as equals but as people to be managed and used by the happy.

The Phrase and Its Frame

The narrator presents the expression as more than a passing metaphor. After asking what the preliminary pages are sketching, the text calls them a chapter from “the most terrible of books” and proposes The farming of the unhappy by the happy as that book’s title. The image gives the subject a broad, systemic scale: suffering is not merely witnessed but made useful to those who do not suffer it.

Pleasure and Public Spectacle

The surrounding discussion connects this exploitation to the demand for amusement. The populace, like kings, must laugh; the mountebank belongs in the streets and the jester at court. The distinction between Clown and Fool changes the setting and status of the performer, but both answer an appetite for entertainment. The narrator then observes that people’s efforts to procure pleasure can merit philosophical attention, placing amusement beside the more troubling question of who bears its cost.

The Child as Its Sharpest Example

The next passage makes the metaphor concrete through the figure of a child destined to be a plaything for men. The narrator says that such a child existed and still exists, and describes child-trading as a particular trade in what it calls the Seventeenth century of English aristocratic and royal politics. Its description of the period holds refinement and brutality together: delicate ferocity, a tiger with a simper. The reference to histories that conceal the wound while divulging Vincent de Paul’s remedy sharpens the charge: charitable relief may be recorded even when the suffering that made it necessary is obscured. In this context, the expression names an order that converts vulnerability into someone else’s pleasure and leaves its victims’ exploitation easier to hide than to remedy.