Economic Sophisms

Introduction

In political economy there is a great deal to learn and very little to do.

Bentham

In this little book I've tried to answer some of the arguments people raise against freeing trade.

I'm not picking a fight with the protectionists. I'm trying to get a principle into the heads of honest people who hesitate because they're unsure.

I'm not one of those who say that protection rests on interests. I believe it rests on errors, or, if you like, on half-truths. Far too many people fear freedom for that fear to be anything but sincere.

It's aiming high, I admit, but I'd like this little book to become a kind of handbook for the people who will have to decide between the two principles. Unless you've lived with the doctrine of free trade for a long time, the sophisms of protection keep coming back to you in one form or another. Clearing them out takes a long piece of analysis every time, and not everyone has time for that, legislators least of all. That's why I've tried to do the work for them in advance.

But are the benefits of freedom really so well hidden, someone will ask, that only professional economists can see them?

Yes, we admit it: our opponents in this debate have one great advantage over us. They can state a half-truth in a few words, while we, to show that it is only half true, need long, dry dissertations.

That's in the nature of things. Protection gathers the good it does into one spot and spreads the harm it does thinly across the whole population. The good can be seen with the eye; the harm can only be seen with the mind. With freedom it's exactly the reverse.

The same goes for nearly every economic question.

Say, "Here is a machine that has thrown thirty workers into the street."

Or, "Here is a spendthrift who keeps every trade in business."

Or, "The conquest of Algiers has doubled the trade of Marseille."

Or, "The budget supports a hundred thousand families."

Everyone will understand you. Each statement is clear, simple, and true as far as it goes. Now draw your principles from them:

Machines are a bad thing.

Luxury, conquest, and heavy taxes are good things.

And your theory will be all the more popular because you can back it with facts no one can deny.

We, on the other hand, can't stop at a cause and its immediate effect. We know that this effect becomes a cause in its turn. To judge a policy, then, we have to follow it through the whole chain of its results to the final effect. And, since the dreadful word has to come out, we are reduced to reasoning.

At once the cry goes up: you're theorists, metaphysicians, ideologues, utopians, men of principle. And every prejudice the public has turns against us.

What can we do? Appeal to the reader's patience and good faith, and throw so bright a light on our reasoning, if we can manage it, that the true and the false stand there naked, so that victory goes once and for all either to restriction or to freedom.

I have one essential point to make here.

A few extracts from this little book have appeared in the Journal des Économistes.

In a review, a very kind one otherwise, the Vicomte de Romanet has supposed that I want to abolish the customs (see the Moniteur industriel of May 15 and 18, 1845). Monsieur de Romanet is mistaken. What I want to abolish is the protective system. We don't refuse the government its taxes; what we'd like, if we can, is to talk the governed out of taxing one another. Napoleon said, "Customs duties must not be a tool for raising revenue, but a means of protecting industry." We argue the opposite: customs duties must not be a tool by which working people rob one another, but they can be as good a revenue machine as any other. So far are we, or, to commit no one but myself, so far am I from wanting to abolish the customs, that I see in them the future salvation of our finances. I believe they could bring the Treasury enormous revenues, and, to tell you everything I think, given how slowly sound economic ideas spread and how fast our budget grows, I'm counting more on the Treasury's needs than on the force of enlightened opinion to bring about the reform of trade.

"But then," people will say to me, "what's your conclusion?"

I don't need a conclusion. I'm fighting sophisms, that's all.

"But it isn't enough to tear down," they go on. "You have to build." I think that tearing down an error builds the opposite truth.

Having said that, I don't mind saying what I'd like. I'd like public opinion to come round to approving a customs law drawn up roughly as follows:

	Articles of basic necessity shall pay a duty ad valorem of 5%
	Articles of convenience, 10%
	Luxury articles, 15 or 20%

And even these distinctions come from a line of thinking entirely outside political economy proper, and I'm far from believing them as useful and as fair as people commonly suppose. But that's no longer my subject.

Chapter 1: Abundance and Scarcity

Which is better for people and for society, abundance or scarcity?

"What?" you'll cry. "Is that even a question? Has anyone ever claimed, could anyone possibly argue, that scarcity is the foundation of human well-being?"

Yes, it has been claimed. Yes, it has been argued. It is argued every day, and I'm not afraid to say that the theory of scarcity is by far the most popular theory there is. It fills conversations, newspapers, books, and speeches from the rostrum, and, strange as it may seem, political economy will have done its job, its whole practical mission, when it has made this very simple proposition common knowledge and beyond dispute: "People's wealth is the abundance of things."

Don't we hear every day, "The foreigner is going to flood us with his products"? Therefore people are afraid of abundance.

Didn't Monsieur de Saint-Cricq, the former minister of commerce, say, "Production is overabundant"? Therefore he was afraid of abundance.

Don't workers smash machines? Therefore they're frightened of too much production, of abundance.

Didn't Monsieur Bugeaud, the general turned deputy, say, "Let bread be dear, and the farmer will be rich!"? Now bread can only be dear because it is scarce; so Monsieur Bugeaud was recommending scarcity.

Didn't Monsieur d'Argout make an argument against the sugar beet out of its very fruitfulness? Didn't he say, "The beet has no future, and its cultivation can't expand, because a few hectares in each department would be enough to supply the whole consumption of France"? Therefore, in his eyes, good lies in barrenness and scarcity, and evil in fertility and abundance.

Don't La Presse, Le Commerce, and most of the daily papers run one or more articles every morning to show the Chambers and the government that it is sound policy to raise the price of everything by law, through the tariff? And don't the three powers of the state, the King and the two Chambers, obey this order from the press every day? Now tariffs only raise the prices of things because they reduce the quantity offered on the market! Therefore the newspapers, the Chambers, and the ministry are all putting the theory of scarcity into practice, and I was right to say that it is by far the most popular theory there is.

How did it come about that, in the eyes of workers, writers, and statesmen, abundance looked frightening and scarcity looked profitable? I propose to trace this illusion back to its source.

People notice that a man grows richer the more he gets for his work, that is, the higher the price he sells at. And he sells at a higher price the rarer, the scarcer, his kind of product is. From this they conclude that, for him at least, scarcity is enriching. Applying this reasoning to every worker in turn, they arrive at the theory of scarcity. From there they move to practice, and, to favor all workers, they artificially make everything dear and scarce, through prohibition, restriction, the suppression of machines, and other such means.

The same goes for abundance. People observe that when a product is abundant, it sells cheap, so the producer earns less. If every producer is in that situation, they're all poor; so it's abundance that ruins society. And since every conviction tries to turn itself into fact, in many countries you can see the laws of men fighting against the abundance of things.

Stated in general terms, this sophism might make little impression. But applied to one particular set of facts, to this or that industry, to a given class of workers, it is extremely plausible, and it's easy to see why. It is a syllogism that isn't false, but incomplete. Now whatever is true in a syllogism is always, necessarily, before the mind. But incompleteness is a negative quality, a missing piece of information, and it is quite possible, even quite easy, to leave it out of account.

Man produces in order to consume. He is both producer and consumer. The reasoning I've just laid out looks at him only from the first of these two points of view. From the second, it would have led to the opposite conclusion. For couldn't we just as well say:

The consumer is richer the more cheaply he buys everything; he buys things more cheaply the more abundant they are; therefore abundance enriches him. And this reasoning, extended to all consumers, would lead to the theory of abundance!

It's a half-understood idea of exchange that produces these illusions. If we consult our own interest, we can see plainly that it is double. As sellers, we have an interest in high prices, and therefore in scarcity; as buyers, in low prices, or, what comes to the same thing, in the abundance of things. We can't build an argument on either of these interests, then, until we've worked out which of the two coincides with the general and permanent interest of the human race.

If man were a solitary animal, if he worked only for himself and consumed the fruit of his own labor directly, in a word, if he didn't exchange, the theory of scarcity could never have come into the world. It's too obvious that abundance would be good for him, wherever it came from: whether it was the result of his own industry, of clever tools or powerful machines he had invented, or whether he owed it to the fertility of the soil, to the generosity of nature, or even to some mysterious invasion of goods that the tide had brought in from abroad and left on the beach. The solitary man would never dream of encouraging his own work, of guaranteeing it something to do, by smashing the tools that save it, cancelling out the fertility of the soil, or throwing back into the sea the goods the sea had brought him. He would easily see that work is a means and not an end, and that it would be absurd to reject the end for fear of harming the means. He would see that if he spends two hours a day providing for his needs, then anything at all (a machine, fertile land, a free gift, it doesn't matter) that saves him an hour of that work while leaving the result the same puts that hour at his disposal, to spend on making himself better off. In a word, he would see that saving labor is nothing other than progress.

But exchange blurs our view of so simple a truth. In society, with the division of occupations it brings, the production and the consumption of a thing no longer meet in the same person. Each of us is inclined to see his work no longer as a means but as an end. Exchange creates, for every object, two interests, the producer's and the consumer's, and these two interests are always immediately opposed.

It is essential to take them apart and study their nature.

Take any producer at all. What is his immediate interest? It consists of two things: first, that as few people as possible do the same work he does; second, that as many people as possible want the product of that work. Political economy puts it more briefly: supply should be very restricted and demand very extensive. Or in other words again: limited competition, unlimited markets.

What is the consumer's immediate interest? That the supply of the product in question should be extensive and the demand restricted.

Since these two interests contradict each other, one of them must coincide with the social or general interest, and the other must run against it.

But which one should legislation favor, as the expression of the public good, if it is to favor either?

To find out, we need only ask what would happen if people's secret wishes came true.

As producers, we have to admit, each of us makes antisocial wishes. Are we winegrowers? We wouldn't be too sorry if frost struck every vineyard in the world except ours: that's the theory of scarcity. Do we own ironworks? We wish there were no iron on the market except what we bring to it, however badly the public may need it, and precisely so that this need, keenly felt and poorly met, will make people pay us a high price: that's the theory of scarcity again. Are we farmers? We say with Monsieur Bugeaud: let bread be dear, that is, scarce, and farmers will do well: that's the theory of scarcity, always.

Are we doctors? We can't help seeing that a healthier country, the growth of moral virtues such as moderation and temperance, knowledge spread so widely that everyone could look after his own health, the discovery of simple remedies that are easy to use: every one of these would be a terrible blow to our profession. As doctors, our secret wishes are antisocial. I don't mean that doctors actually make such wishes. I like to believe they'd welcome a universal cure with joy; but in that feeling it isn't the doctor who shows himself, it's the man, the Christian, who by a noble act of self-denial puts himself in the consumer's place. But insofar as he practices a profession and draws from it his comfort, his standing, and even his family's living, his desires, or if you like his interests, can't help being antisocial.

Do we make cotton cloth? We want to sell it at the price that suits us best. We'd gladly agree to have every rival mill banned, and if we don't dare to say so in public, or to pursue it all the way with any hope of success, we still get there to some extent by roundabout means: for example, by shutting out foreign cloth, so as to reduce the quantity offered and thereby produce, by force and for our own profit, a scarcity of clothing.

We could go through every industry like this, and we would always find that producers, as such, have antisocial aims. "The merchant," says Montaigne, "does good business only out of the debauchery of youth; the farmer, out of the dearness of grain; the builder, out of the ruin of houses; the officers of the law, out of men's lawsuits and quarrels. Even the honor and the practice of the ministers of religion come from our death and our vices. No doctor takes pleasure in the health even of his friends, nor any soldier in the peace of his town; and so with the rest."

It follows that if every producer's secret wishes came true, the world would slide rapidly back into barbarism. Sail would outlaw steam, the oar would outlaw sail and soon have to hand over all transport to the cart, the cart to the mule, and the mule to the peddler with his pack. Wool would shut out cotton, cotton would shut out wool, and so on, until the scarcity of everything had wiped man himself off the face of the earth.

Suppose for a moment that the power to make laws and the police that enforce them were put at the disposal of Mimerel's committee, the manufacturers' lobby, and that each of its members could get it to adopt and enact one little law of his own. Would it be very hard to guess what kind of industrial code the public would find itself living under?

If we now turn to the consumer's immediate interest, we find that it is in perfect harmony with the general interest, with what the well-being of humanity demands. When the buyer goes to market, he wants to find it well stocked. That the seasons should favor every harvest; that more and more marvelous inventions should put more products and pleasures within his reach; that time and labor should be saved; that distances should vanish; that a spirit of peace and justice should make it possible to lighten taxes; that barriers of every kind should fall: in all of this the consumer's immediate interest runs exactly parallel to the public interest rightly understood. He can push his secret wishes to the point of fantasy, to the point of absurdity, without their ever ceasing to serve humanity. He can wish that food and clothing, shelter and warmth, education and morality, security and peace, strength and health might all be had without effort, without labor and without limit, like the dust of the road, the water of the stream, the air around us, and the light we bathe in, and the fulfillment of such wishes would never contradict the good of society.

Someone may say that if these wishes were granted, the producer's work would shrink more and more and finally stop for lack of anything to do. But why? Because, in that extreme case, every imaginable need and desire would be completely satisfied. Man, like the Almighty, would create everything by a single act of his will. Will someone kindly tell me, on that hypothesis, what there would be to regret about the loss of industrial production?

A moment ago I imagined a legislative assembly made up of workers, each of whom would turn his secret wish as a producer into law; and I said that the code produced by that assembly would be monopoly made into a system, the theory of scarcity put into practice.

In the same way, a Chamber in which everyone consulted only his immediate interest as a consumer would end up making freedom into a system: the abolition of every restrictive measure, the overthrow of every artificial barrier, in a word, the theory of abundance made real.

It follows:

That to consult only the immediate interest of production is to consult an antisocial interest;

That to take the immediate interest of consumption as one's only guide would be to take the general interest as one's guide.

Let me press this point once more, at the risk of repeating myself.

There is a radical antagonism between the seller and the buyer.

The seller wants the thing on the market to be scarce, in short supply, at a high price.

The buyer wants it abundant, in plentiful supply, at a low price.

The laws, which ought at least to be neutral, take the seller's side against the buyer, the producer's against the consumer, high prices against low,¹ scarcity against abundance.

They act, if not by intention then at least by logic, on this premise: A nation is rich when it lacks everything.

For they say: It's the producer we have to favor, by guaranteeing him a good market for his product. To do that, we have to raise its price; to raise its price, we have to restrict the supply; and restricting supply means creating scarcity.

Now look. Suppose that in the world as it is, where these laws are in full force, someone takes a complete inventory, not in value but in weights, measures, volumes, and quantities, of everything in France that can satisfy the needs and tastes of its inhabitants: wheat, meat, woolens, linens, fuel, colonial goods, and so on.

Suppose further that the next day every barrier against the entry of foreign products into France is torn down.

Finally, to judge the result of this reform, suppose a new inventory is taken three months later.

Isn't it true that there would be more wheat, cattle, woolens, linen, iron, coal, sugar, and so on, in France at the second inventory than at the first?

That is so true that our protective tariffs have no other purpose than to keep all these things from reaching us, to restrict their supply, to prevent them from falling in price, to prevent abundance.

Now I ask you: are the people better fed under our laws because there is less bread, meat, and sugar in the country? Are they better clothed because there is less thread, linen, and woolen cloth? Better warmed because there is less coal? Better helped in their work because there is less iron, copper, tools, and machinery?

"But," they say, "if the foreigner floods us with his products, he'll carry off our money."

Well, what of it? Man doesn't eat money, he doesn't dress in gold, he doesn't warm himself with silver. What does it matter whether there's more money or less in the country, if there's more bread in the cupboard, more meat on the hook, more linen in the closet, and more wood in the woodshed?

I will always put this dilemma to the restrictive laws:

Either you admit that you produce scarcity, or you don't.

If you admit it, you confess by that very fact that you are doing the people all the harm you can. If you don't, then you deny having restricted supply and raised prices, and so you deny having favored the producer.

You are either harmful or useless. You cannot be useful.

Chapter 2: Obstacle and Cause

Mistaking the obstacle for the cause, mistaking scarcity for abundance: it's the same sophism seen from another side, and it's worth studying from every side.

Man starts out with nothing.

Between his destitution and the satisfaction of his needs stand a multitude of obstacles, and the purpose of work is to overcome them. It's curious to look into how and why these very obstacles to his well-being have come to look to him like the cause of it.

I need to travel two hundred and fifty miles. But between where I start and where I'm going lie mountains, rivers, swamps, impenetrable forests, and highwaymen; in a word, obstacles. To overcome them I'll have to spend a great deal of effort, or, what comes to the same thing, others will have to spend a great deal of effort and charge me for it. Clearly I'd have been better off if those obstacles hadn't been there.

To get through life, through that long series of days between the cradle and the grave, a person has to take in a prodigious quantity of food, protect himself against the weather, and avoid or cure a host of ills. Hunger, thirst, sickness, heat, and cold are so many obstacles strewn along his road. Living alone, he would have to fight them all himself, by hunting, fishing, farming, spinning, weaving, and building, and clearly he'd be better off if these obstacles existed to a lesser degree, or not at all. In society he doesn't take on each of these obstacles personally; others do it for him, and in return he removes one of the obstacles that surround his fellow men.

It's also clear that, taking things as a whole, it would be better for mankind, for society, if obstacles were as weak and as few as possible.

But look closely at the details of social life, and at how exchange has shaped people's feelings, and you soon see how they came to confuse needs with wealth and the obstacle with the cause.

The division of occupations, which comes from our ability to trade, means that each person, instead of struggling on his own account with all the obstacles around him, fights only one; and he fights it not for himself but for the benefit of his fellows, who do him the same service in turn.

The result is that this person sees the immediate cause of his wealth in the obstacle he fights professionally on other people's behalf. The greater, the more serious, the more keenly felt that obstacle is, the more his fellows are willing to pay him for overcoming it, that is, to clear away for him the obstacles that stand in his way.

A doctor, for example, doesn't bake his own bread, make his own instruments, or weave and sew his own clothes. Others do that for him, and in return he fights the diseases that afflict his patients. The more numerous, severe, and frequent those diseases are, the more people are willing, even forced, to work for his benefit. From his point of view, disease, a general obstacle to human well-being, is a cause of individual well-being. Every producer reasons the same way about his own line. The shipowner makes his profits from the obstacle called distance; the farmer from the one called hunger; the cloth manufacturer from the one called cold; the schoolteacher lives on ignorance, the jeweler on vanity, the attorney on greed, the notary on possible bad faith, just as the doctor lives on people's illnesses. It is perfectly true, then, that every profession has an immediate interest in the continuation, even the extension, of the particular obstacle it works against.

Seeing this, along come the theorists, who build a system on these individual feelings and say: Need is wealth; work is wealth; the obstacle to well-being is well-being. To multiply obstacles is to give industry something to feed on.

Then come the statesmen. They have the power of the state at their command, and what could be more natural than to use it to develop and spread obstacles, since that means developing and spreading wealth? They say, for example: If we stop iron from coming in from places where it is plentiful, we'll create an obstacle at home to getting it. That obstacle, keenly felt, will make people pay to be rid of it. A certain number of our fellow citizens will devote themselves to fighting it, and the obstacle will make their fortune. The greater it is, in fact, the scarcer, more inaccessible, harder to transport, and farther from its consumers the ore, the more hands this industry will employ in all its branches. Let's shut out foreign iron, then; let's create the obstacle, so as to create the work that fights it.

The same reasoning will lead to banning machines.

Here, they'll say, are people who need somewhere to keep their wine. That's an obstacle; and here are other people who make it their business to remove it by making barrels. How lucky, then, that the obstacle exists, since it feeds a share of national labor and enriches a number of our fellow citizens. But now along comes an ingenious machine that fells the oak, squares it, splits it into a multitude of staves, fits them together, and turns them into wine casks. The obstacle is much reduced, and with it the coopers' fortunes. Let's preserve both by law. Let's ban the machine.

To get to the bottom of this sophism, you need only tell yourself that human labor is not an end but a means. It is never left with nothing to do. If it runs out of one obstacle, it attacks another, and humanity is rid of two obstacles by the same amount of work that used to destroy only one. If the coopers' work ever became useless, it would turn in some other direction. "But what would pay for it?" people ask. Exactly what pays for it now; for when a mass of labor is set free by the removal of an obstacle, a corresponding mass of payment is set free too. To say that human labor will end up with nothing to do, you would have to prove that humanity will stop running into obstacles. And then work would not just be impossible, it would be superfluous. We would have nothing left to do, because we would be all-powerful, and we'd only have to say fiat, let it be, for every need and every desire we had to be satisfied.

Chapter 3: Effort and Result

We have just seen that obstacles stand between our needs and their satisfaction. We manage to overcome them, or weaken them, by using our faculties. In the most general terms, you could say that industry is an effort followed by a result.

But what do we measure our well-being, our wealth, by? By the result of the effort, or by the effort itself? There is always a ratio between the effort spent and the result obtained. Does progress consist in a relative increase in the second term of that ratio, or in the first?

Both positions have been defended, and between them they divide opinion in political economy.

According to the first system, wealth is the result of labor. It grows as the ratio of result to effort grows. Absolute perfection, whose model is in God, lies in pushing the two terms infinitely far apart, like this: zero effort, infinite result.

The second holds that effort itself is what makes up wealth and measures it. To progress is to increase the ratio of effort to result. Its ideal could be pictured as the effort of Sisyphus, eternal and barren at once.²

Naturally, the first welcomes everything that tends to lessen the toil and increase the product: the powerful machines that add to man's strength; trade, which lets us make better use of the natural resources scattered in different amounts over the face of the globe; the intelligence that discovers, the experience that confirms, the competition that spurs us on, and so on.

Just as logically, the second longs for everything that increases the toil and lessens the product: privileges, monopolies, restrictions, prohibitions, the suppression of machines, barrenness, and so on.

It's worth noticing that the universal practice of mankind is always guided by the principle of the first doctrine. No one has ever seen, and no one ever will see, a worker of any kind, farmer, manufacturer, merchant, craftsman, soldier, writer, or scientist, who doesn't put all the strength of his mind into doing better, doing faster, doing more cheaply; in a word, into doing more with less.

The opposite doctrine is for the use of theorists, deputies, journalists, statesmen, ministers, in short the people whose role in this world is to conduct experiments on the body of society.

And even they, it should be noted, act like everyone else where they themselves are concerned, on the principle of getting the greatest possible amount of useful result out of their work.

You may think I'm exaggerating, and that there are no real Sisyphists.

If you mean that in practice nobody pushes the principle to its most extreme consequences, I'll gladly agree. That is always how it goes when you start from a false principle. It soon leads to results so absurd and so harmful that you're forced to stop. That's why practical industry never accepts Sisyphism: the punishment would follow the error too closely not to expose it. But in speculative industry, the kind theorists and statesmen practice, you can follow a false principle for a long time before you're warned of its falsity by complicated consequences that, besides, you never have to bear yourself. And when at last those consequences come to light, you act on the opposite principle, contradict yourself, and look for your justification in that modern axiom of incomparable absurdity: in political economy there are no absolute principles.

Let's see, then, whether the two opposite principles I've just set out don't each rule in turn, one in practical industry and the other in industrial legislation.

I've already quoted a remark of Monsieur Bugeaud's; but there are two men in Monsieur Bugeaud, the farmer and the legislator.

As a farmer, Monsieur Bugeaud strives with all his might toward a double goal: to save labor and to get cheap bread. When he prefers a good plow to a bad one; when he improves his manures; when, to loosen his soil, he lets the weather do the work of the harrow or the hoe wherever he can; when he calls to his aid every method whose power and perfection science and experience have shown him, he has, and can have, only one aim: to reduce the ratio of effort to result. Indeed, we have no other way of judging a farmer's skill or a method's merit than by measuring how much they have taken from the one and added to the other. And since every farmer in the world acts on this principle, we can say that all mankind strives, no doubt to its advantage, to get bread, or any other product, more cheaply, that is, to cut down the toil needed to have a given quantity of it at its disposal.

Once this undeniable tendency of mankind is established, it ought to be enough, it seems, to show the legislator the true principle and tell him in which direction he should assist industry (if assisting it is any part of his job at all); for it would be absurd to say that the laws of men should work in the opposite direction from the laws of Providence.

And yet we've heard Monsieur Bugeaud, the deputy, exclaim: "I understand nothing about this theory of cheapness; I'd rather see bread dearer and work more plentiful." And so the deputy for the Dordogne votes for measures that hamper trade, precisely because trade gets us indirectly what direct production can supply only at greater expense.

Now it's perfectly plain that the principle of Monsieur Bugeaud the deputy is diametrically opposed to that of Monsieur Bugeaud the farmer. If he were consistent, he would either vote against every restriction in the Chamber, or carry onto his farm the principle he proclaims from the rostrum. Then we would see him sow his wheat on his most barren field, since that way he would succeed in working hard to get little. We would see him ban the plow, since farming with his fingernails would fulfill both his wishes: dearer bread and more plentiful work.

Restriction has the avowed aim, and the acknowledged effect, of increasing labor.

It also has the avowed aim, and the acknowledged effect, of bringing about high prices, which is nothing but the scarcity of products. Pushed to its limits, then, it is pure Sisyphism, as we defined it: infinite labor, zero product.

Baron Charles Dupin, who is said to be the guiding light of the Chamber of Peers in economic science, accuses the railroads of harming the canal boats; and it is certainly in the nature of a better means to cut down the use of a comparatively cruder one. But railways can harm boats only by taking traffic from them; they can take it only by carrying it more cheaply; and they can carry it more cheaply only by reducing the ratio of the effort spent to the result obtained, since that is exactly what cheapness is. When Baron Dupin laments this suppression of labor for a given result, then, he is in the camp of Sisyphism. Logically, since he prefers the boat to the rail, he ought to prefer the wagon to the boat, the packsaddle to the wagon, and the porter's basket on a man's back to every known means of transport, because it requires the most labor for the least result.

"Labor makes up the wealth of a people," said Monsieur de Saint-Cricq, the minister of commerce who put so many shackles on commerce. Don't imagine this was shorthand for "The results of labor make up the wealth of a people." No, this economist really did mean that the intensity of labor is what measures wealth, and the proof is that, from one consequence to the next, from one restriction to the next, he led France, believing he was doing good, to spend twice the labor to supply itself with the same quantity of iron, for example. In England iron then cost 8 francs; in France it cost 16 francs. If a day's labor is worth 1 franc, clearly France could get a quintal of iron by trade with eight days taken from the whole of its national labor. Thanks to Monsieur de Saint-Cricq's restrictive measures, France needed sixteen days of labor to get a quintal of iron by producing it directly. Twice the toil for the same satisfaction, therefore twice the wealth; and therefore, again, wealth is measured not by the result but by the intensity of labor. There you have Sisyphism in all its purity!

And so that there can be no possible misunderstanding, the minister takes care to complete his thought further on. Just as he has called the intensity of labor wealth, we will now hear him call poverty the abundance of labor's results, the abundance of things fit to satisfy our needs. "Everywhere," he says, "machines have taken the place of human hands; everywhere production is overabundant; everywhere the balance between the power to produce and the means to consume has been broken." You see: according to Monsieur de Saint-Cricq, if France was in a critical situation, it was because she produced too much, because her labor was too intelligent, too fruitful. We were too well fed, too well clothed, too well supplied with everything; production was racing ahead of all our desires. This plague had to be stopped, and to stop it we had to be forced, by restrictions, to work more to produce less.

I've also mentioned the opinion of another minister of commerce, Monsieur d'Argout. It deserves a moment's attention. Wanting to strike the sugar beet a terrible blow, he said: "No doubt the cultivation of the beet is useful, but this usefulness is limited. It does not allow of the gigantic growth people like to predict for it. To be convinced of this, you need only note that this cultivation will necessarily be confined within the limits of consumption. Double, triple if you like, the present consumption of France: you will still find that a very small portion of the land will be enough to meet the needs of that consumption." (A strange complaint, that one!) "Do you want proof? How many hectares were planted in beets in 1828? 3,130, which is 1/10,540th of the cultivable land. How many are there today, when home-grown sugar has taken over a third of consumption? 16,700 hectares, or 1/1,978th of the cultivable land, or 45 square meters per commune. Suppose home-grown sugar had already taken over all consumption: we would have only 48,000 hectares in beets, or 1/689th of the cultivable land."³

There are two things in this passage: the facts and the doctrine. The facts tend to show that it takes little land, capital, and labor to produce a great deal of sugar, and that every commune in France would be amply supplied with it by giving one hectare of its land over to beets. The doctrine consists in regarding this as a calamity, and in seeing in the very power and fruitfulness of the new industry the limit of its usefulness.

I'm not here to make myself the defender of the beet or the judge of the strange facts Monsieur d'Argout puts forward;⁴ but it's worth examining the doctrine of a statesman to whom France long entrusted the fate of her agriculture and her commerce.

I said at the start that there is a variable ratio between industrial effort and its result; that absolute imperfection consists in infinite effort with no result at all; absolute perfection in unlimited result with no effort at all; and perfectibility in the gradual reduction of effort compared with result.

But Monsieur d'Argout informs us that death lies where we thought we saw life, and that the importance of an industry is in direct proportion to its impotence. What can we expect from the beet, for example? Don't you see that 48,000 hectares of land, with capital and labor in proportion, will be enough to supply all of France with sugar? It is therefore an industry of limited usefulness; limited, of course, in the amount of labor it requires, which is the only way, according to the former minister, that an industry can be useful. Its usefulness would be more limited still if, thanks to fertile soil or rich beets, we could harvest from 24,000 hectares what we can now get only from 48,000. Oh, if it took twenty times, a hundred times as much land, capital, and labor to reach the same result, well and good! Then we could pin some hopes on the new industry, and it would deserve all the protection of the state, because it would offer a vast field for national labor. But to produce a lot with a little! That sets a bad example, and the law had better put a stop to it.

But what is true of sugar can't be false of bread. If, then, the usefulness of an industry is to be judged not by the satisfactions it can provide with a given amount of labor, but on the contrary by how much labor it requires to supply a given amount of satisfaction, what we ought obviously to wish for is that every hectare of land should yield little wheat, and every grain of wheat little nourishment; in other words, that our country should be barren. For then the mass of land, capital, and labor that would have to be set in motion to feed the population would be far greater by comparison; you could even say that the outlet opened to human labor would be in direct proportion to that barrenness. The wishes of Messieurs Bugeaud, Saint-Cricq, Dupin, and d'Argout would be fulfilled: bread would be dear, work plentiful, and France rich, rich as these gentlemen understand it.

What we ought to wish for, too, is that human intelligence should weaken and die out; for as long as it lives, it never stops trying to increase the ratio of end to means and of product to toil. That, indeed, is what intelligence consists of, and nothing else.

Sisyphism, then, is the doctrine of every man who has been put in charge of our industrial destinies. It wouldn't be fair to reproach them for it. This principle governs the ministries only because it reigns in the Chambers; it reigns in the Chambers only because the electorate sends it there; and the electorate is steeped in it only because public opinion is saturated with it.

I feel I should repeat here that I don't accuse men such as Messieurs Bugeaud, Dupin, Saint-Cricq, and d'Argout of being Sisyphists absolutely and in all circumstances. They certainly aren't in their private dealings; each of them certainly gets by trade whatever would cost him more to get by producing it directly. But I say that they are Sisyphists when they stop the country from doing the same.

Chapter 4: Equalizing the Conditions of Production

People say... but so that no one can accuse me of putting sophisms into the protectionists' mouths, I'll let one of their most vigorous champions speak for himself.

"It has been thought that protection in our country should simply represent the difference between the cost price of a commodity we produce and the cost price of the same commodity produced by our neighbors.... A protective duty calculated on this basis does nothing but ensure free competition...; free competition exists only when there is equality of conditions and burdens. In a horse race, they weigh the load each runner must carry, and they equalize the conditions; otherwise the horses are no longer competitors. In trade, if one of the sellers can deliver more cheaply, he ceases to be a competitor and becomes a monopolist.... Remove this protection representing the difference in cost price, and the foreigner invades your market at once, and the monopoly is his."⁵

"Everyone must want, for himself as for others, the country's production to be protected against foreign competition whenever that competition could supply the products at a lower price."⁶

This argument comes up again and again in the writings of the protectionist school. I propose to examine it carefully, which means I must ask for the reader's attention and even his patience. I'll deal first with the inequalities that come from nature, and then with those that come from differences in taxes.

Here, as everywhere, we find the theorists of protection standing at the producer's point of view, while we take up the cause of those unfortunate consumers they absolutely refuse to take into account. They compare the field of industry to the turf. But on the racecourse the race is both the means and the end. The public takes no interest in the contest apart from the contest itself. When you send your horses off with the sole aim of finding out which is the best runner, I can see why you'd equalize their loads. But if your aim were to get an important and urgent piece of news to the finishing post, could you, without contradicting yourself, put obstacles in the way of the horse that offered you the best speed? Yet that's exactly what you do in industry. You forget the result it's meant to achieve, which is well-being; you leave it out of the picture, you even sacrifice it, by a real case of begging the question.

But since we can't bring our opponents round to our point of view, let's take up theirs and examine the question from the side of production.

I shall try to establish:

1. That leveling the conditions of labor is an attack on the very principle of exchange;

2. That it isn't true that a country's labor is smothered by competition from more favored lands;

3. That even if it were true, protective duties don't equalize the conditions of production;

4. That freedom levels those conditions as much as they can be leveled;

5. And finally, that it is the least favored countries that gain most from trade.

I. Leveling the conditions of labor doesn't just hamper a few exchanges; it attacks exchange in its very principle, because exchange is founded precisely on this diversity, or, if you prefer, on these inequalities of fertility, aptitude, climate, and temperature that you want to erase. If Guyenne sends wine to Brittany and Brittany sends wheat to Guyenne, it's because the two provinces are placed in different conditions of production. Is there some other law for trade between nations? Once again: to invoke against trade the very inequalities of conditions that cause it and explain it is to attack its reason for existing. If the protectionists had logic and power enough on their side, they would reduce men, like snails, to absolute isolation. There isn't one of their sophisms, in fact, that doesn't end in destruction and nothingness when you put it to the test of rigorous deduction.

II. It isn't true, in fact, that inequality of conditions between two similar industries necessarily brings about the fall of the less favored one. On the racecourse, if one horse wins the prize, the other loses it; but when two horses are working to produce utilities, things that serve some human want, each produces in proportion to its strength, and the fact that the stronger renders more service doesn't mean that the weaker renders none at all. Wheat is grown in every department of France, though there are enormous differences of fertility among them; and if by chance there's one that grows none, it's because growing it isn't good, even for that department itself. In the same way, analogy tells us that under free trade, despite similar differences, wheat would be grown in every kingdom of Europe, and if one of them gave it up, it would be because, in its own interest, it had found a better use for its land, its capital, and its labor. And why doesn't the fertility of one department paralyze the farmer in the less favored department next door? Because economic phenomena have a suppleness, an elasticity, and, so to speak, leveling resources that seem to escape the protectionist school entirely. It accuses us of being systematic; but it is systematic to the highest degree itself, if the systematic spirit consists in building arguments on one fact rather than on all the facts. In the example above, it's the difference in the value of the land that offsets the difference in its fertility. Your field produces three times as much as mine. Yes; but it cost you ten times as much, and I can still compete with you. That's the whole mystery. And notice that superiority in some respects brings inferiority in others. It's precisely because your soil is more fertile that it's more expensive, so that the balance is established, or tends to be, not by accident but necessarily. And can anyone deny that freedom is the system that most favors this tendency?

I took a branch of agriculture as my example; I could just as well have taken a branch of manufacturing. There are tailors in Quimper, and that doesn't stop there being tailors in Paris, though the Paris tailors pay far more for their rent, their furniture, their workmen, and their food. But then they have a very different clientele, and that is enough not only to restore the balance but to tip it in their favor.

When people talk about equalizing the conditions of labor, then, they should at least look into whether freedom doesn't already do what they're asking arbitrary power to do.

This natural leveling of economic phenomena is so important to the question, and at the same time so well suited to make us admire the providential wisdom that presides over the egalitarian government of society, that I ask leave to dwell on it for a moment.

Gentlemen of the protectionist party, you say: Such and such a people has the advantage over us of cheap coal, iron, machinery, and capital; we can't compete with them.

That proposition will be examined from other angles. For now I'll confine myself to the question of whether, when a superiority and an inferiority meet, they don't carry within themselves, the inferiority a rising force and the superiority a falling one, that must bring them back to a fair balance.

Here are two countries, A and B. A has all sorts of advantages over B. You conclude that labor concentrates in A and that B is powerless to do anything at all. A, you say, sells far more than it buys; B buys far more than it sells. I could dispute this, but I'll stand on your ground.

On this hypothesis, labor is in great demand in A, and soon it grows dearer there.

Iron, coal, land, food, and capital are in great demand in A, and soon they grow dearer there.

Meanwhile labor, iron, coal, land, food, capital, everything in B is neglected, and soon everything there falls in price.

That's not all. With A always selling and B always buying, money passes from B to A. It is plentiful in A and scarce in B.

But plentiful money means that it takes a lot of it to buy anything else. In A, then, the real dearness that comes from very brisk demand is joined by a nominal dearness caused by the oversupply of precious metals.

Scarce money means that it takes little of it for each purchase. In B, then, a nominal cheapness combines with the real cheapness.

In these circumstances, industry will have every reason, reasons raised, if I may put it so, to the fourth power, to desert A and set up in B.

Or, to get back to the truth, let's say that industry won't have waited for that moment, that sudden moves are against its nature, and that from the start, under a free system, it will have divided and distributed itself gradually between A and B according to the laws of supply and demand, that is, according to the laws of justice and utility.

And when I say that if industry could ever concentrate in one spot, an irresistible force of decentralization would spring up within it by that very fact, I'm not putting forward an idle hypothesis.

Listen to what a manufacturer said to the Manchester Chamber of Commerce (I leave out the figures he used to support his case):

"We used to export cloth. Then that export gave way to the export of yarn, which is the raw material of cloth; then to the export of machinery, which is the instrument for producing yarn; later to the export of capital, with which we build our machinery; and finally to the export of our workers and our industrial genius, which are the source of our capital. One after another, all these elements of labor have gone off to work wherever they could do so to better advantage, where living is cheaper and life easier; and today you can see, in Prussia, Austria, Saxony, Switzerland, and Italy, immense factories founded with English capital, staffed by English workers, and run by English engineers."

You see, then, that nature, or rather Providence, more ingenious, wiser, and more farsighted than your narrow, rigid theory supposes, did not intend this concentration of labor, this monopoly of every advantage, which you treat as an absolute and irremediable fact. It has provided, by means as simple as they are infallible, for dispersion, diffusion, solidarity, and simultaneous progress; all things that your restrictive laws paralyze as far as they can, since their tendency, by isolating peoples, is to make the differences in their conditions far sharper, to prevent leveling, to block fusion, to cancel out the counterweights, and to pen each people up in its own superiority or inferiority.

III. Third, to say that a protective duty equalizes the conditions of production is to use a false expression as the vehicle for an error. It isn't true that an import duty equalizes the conditions of production. They remain after the duty what they were before it. What the duty equalizes, at most, is the conditions of sale. People may say I'm playing with words, but I throw the charge back at my opponents. It's for them to prove that production and sale mean the same thing; otherwise I have every right to reproach them, if not for playing with words, then at least for confusing them.

Let me illustrate my meaning with an example.

Suppose some Paris speculators take it into their heads to go into the orange business. They know that Portuguese oranges can sell in Paris for 10 centimes, while they themselves, because of the tubs and hothouses they'll need and the cold that will often thwart their growing, can't ask less than a franc if they're to make it pay. They demand a duty of 90 centimes on Portuguese oranges. With this duty, they say, the conditions of production will be equalized; and the Chamber, yielding to this reasoning as always, writes into the tariff a duty of 90 centimes on every foreign orange.

Well, I say that the conditions of production haven't changed in the least. The law hasn't taken anything away from the heat of the Lisbon sun, nor from the frequency or severity of the Paris frosts. Oranges will go on ripening naturally on the banks of the Tagus and artificially on the banks of the Seine; that is, it will take far more human labor in one country than in the other. What will be equalized is the conditions of sale: the Portuguese will have to sell us their oranges at 1 franc, 90 centimes of it to pay the tax. That tax will obviously be paid by the French consumer. And look how odd the result is. On every Portuguese orange consumed, the country will lose nothing, because the extra 90 centimes the consumer pays will go into the Treasury. There will be a transfer, but no loss. But on every French orange consumed, there will be a loss of 90 centimes or thereabouts, because the buyer will most certainly lose them, and the seller, just as certainly, won't gain them, since by the very terms of the hypothesis he will have got no more than his cost price out of them. I leave it to the protectionists to write down the conclusion.

IV. If I've insisted on this distinction between the conditions of production and the conditions of sale, a distinction the gentlemen of the prohibitionist party will no doubt find paradoxical, it's because it leads me to distress them with another paradox, a much stranger one, which is this: Do you want to equalize the conditions of production for real? Leave trade free.

"Oh, now," people will say, "this is going too far. This is abusing clever tricks." Well, if only out of curiosity, I ask the gentlemen of the protectionist party to follow my argument to the end. It won't take long. I return to my example.

If we agree to suppose for a moment that the average daily earnings of a Frenchman are one franc, it follows beyond dispute that to produce an orange directly in France will take a day's labor or its equivalent, whereas to produce the equivalent value of a Portuguese orange will take only a tenth of that day. That means nothing more than this: the sun does in Lisbon what labor does in Paris. Now isn't it obvious that if I can produce an orange, or, what comes to the same thing, the means of buying one, with a tenth of a day's labor, then as far as this product is concerned I am in exactly the same position as the Portuguese producer himself, except for the transport, which I have to pay for? It is certain, then, that freedom equalizes the conditions of production, direct or indirect, as far as they can be equalized, since it leaves only one unavoidable difference, the cost of transport.

I'll add that freedom also equalizes the conditions of enjoyment, of satisfaction, of consumption, which nobody ever thinks about, and which is nonetheless the essential thing, since consumption is, in the end, the final goal of all our industrial efforts. Thanks to free trade, we would enjoy the Portuguese sun just as Portugal does; the people of Le Havre would have within their reach, just as much as the people of London and on the same terms, the advantages nature has given Newcastle in the way of minerals.

V. Gentlemen of the protectionist party, you find me in a paradoxical mood. Very well, I'll go further still. I say, and I believe it most sincerely, that if two countries are placed in unequal conditions of production, it is the one less favored by nature that has more to gain from free trade. To prove it, I'll have to stray a little from the form suited to this little book. I'll do it all the same, first because the whole question lies here, and second because it gives me the chance to set out an economic law of the highest importance, which, properly understood, seems to me destined to bring back to science all those sects of our day that seek in the land of fantasy the social harmony they haven't been able to find in nature. I mean the law of consumption, which most economists, I think, could fairly be reproached for having badly neglected.

Consumption is the end, the final cause, of all economic phenomena, and it is therefore in consumption that their last and definitive explanation is to be found.

Nothing favorable or unfavorable can stay permanently with the producer. The advantages nature and society shower on him, the drawbacks they strike him with, slide off him, so to speak, and tend imperceptibly to be absorbed and dissolved into the community, the community seen from the point of view of consumption. This is a law admirable in its cause and in its effects, and whoever managed to describe it properly would have the right, I think, to say: "I have not passed through this world without paying my debt to society."

Every circumstance that helps production is welcomed with joy by the producer, because its immediate effect is to enable him to render more services to the community and ask a greater payment for them. Every circumstance that hinders production is received with distress by the producer, because its immediate effect is to limit his services and therefore his payment. It was necessary for the immediate benefits and harms of good and bad circumstances to fall to the producer, so that he would be irresistibly driven to seek the one and avoid the other.

In the same way, when a worker manages to improve his trade, he reaps the immediate benefit of the improvement. That was necessary to spur him to intelligent work; and it was just, because it is just that an effort crowned with success should bring its own reward.

But I say that these good and bad effects, though permanent in themselves, aren't permanent as far as the producer is concerned. If they had been, a principle of ever-growing and therefore infinite inequality would have been introduced among men; and that is why these benefits and harms are soon absorbed into the general destiny of humanity.

How does this happen? I'll make it clear with a few examples.

Let's go back to the thirteenth century. The men who practice the art of copying receive, for the service they render, a payment governed by the general rate of profit. Among them is one who looks for, and finds, a way of quickly multiplying copies of the same text. He invents printing.⁷

At first, one man grows rich and many others grow poor. At first sight, marvelous as the discovery is, you might hesitate to decide whether it isn't more harmful than useful. It seems to introduce into the world, as I said, an element of unlimited inequality. Gutenberg makes profits with his invention and extends his invention with his profits, and so on without end, until he has ruined every copyist. As for the public, the consumer, it gains little, because Gutenberg takes care to lower the price of his books only just as much as he needs to undersell his rivals.

But the mind that put harmony into the movement of the heavenly bodies knew how to put it into the inner workings of society too. We are about to watch the economic advantages of the invention slip out of the individual's hands and become, forever, the common inheritance of the masses.

The process does in the end become known. Gutenberg is no longer the only printer; others imitate him. Their profits are considerable at first. They are rewarded for being the first to take the road of imitation, and that too was necessary, to draw them onto it and make them contribute to the great final result we are approaching. They earn a lot, but less than the inventor, because competition has just begun its work. The price of books keeps falling. The imitators' profits shrink the further we get from the day of the invention, that is, the less meritorious imitation becomes.... Soon the new industry reaches its normal state; in other words, printers' pay is no longer exceptional in any way, and, like the scribes' pay before it, it is governed only by the general rate of profit. Production as such, then, is back where it started. And yet the invention has been made all the same; the saving of time, of labor, of effort for a given result, for a given number of copies, has been achieved all the same. But how does it show itself? In cheap books. And to whose benefit? To the benefit of the consumer, of society, of humanity. The printers, who no longer have any exceptional merit, no longer receive any exceptional pay either. As men, as consumers, they share, no doubt, in the advantages the invention has conferred on the community. But that's all. As printers, as producers, they are back in the ordinary condition of every other producer in the country. Society pays them for their labor, not for the utility of the invention. That has become the common and free inheritance of all mankind.

I confess that the wisdom and beauty of these laws fill me with admiration and respect. I see Saint-Simonism in them: To each according to his ability, to each ability according to its works. I see communism in them, that is, the tendency of goods to become the common inheritance of mankind; but a Saint-Simonism, a communism ruled by infinite foresight, and not left to the frailty, the passions, and the whims of men.⁸

What I've said of printing can be said of every instrument of labor, from the nail and the hammer to the locomotive and the electric telegraph. Society enjoys them all through the abundance of what it consumes, and it enjoys them free of charge, because their effect is to lower the price of things; and the whole part of the price that has been wiped out, which represents precisely the inventor's contribution to production, obviously makes the product free to that extent. All that remains to be paid for is human labor, present labor, and it is paid for without regard to the result owed to the invention, at least once the invention has gone through the cycle I've just described, the cycle it is destined to go through. I call a workman to my house; he arrives with a saw, I pay him two francs for his day, and he makes me twenty-five planks. If the saw hadn't been invented, he might not have made one, and I'd have paid him for his day all the same. The utility produced by the saw is therefore, for me, a free gift of nature, or rather it is a portion of the inheritance I have received in common with all my brothers from the intelligence of our ancestors. I have two workmen in my field. One holds the handles of a plow, the other the handle of a spade. The results of their work are very different, but the day's wage is the same, because pay is proportioned not to the utility produced but to the effort, the labor, required.

I beg the reader's patience, and ask him to believe that I haven't lost sight of free trade. I ask him only to remember the conclusion I've reached: Pay is proportioned not to the utilities the producer brings to market, but to his labor.⁹

I took my examples from human inventions. Let's now talk about natural advantages.

Nature and man work together in every product. But the share of utility that nature puts into it is always free. Only the portion of utility owed to human labor is the subject of exchange, and therefore of payment. That payment no doubt varies a great deal according to the intensity of the labor, its skill, its speed, its timeliness, how badly it is needed, the momentary absence of rivals, and so on and so forth. But it is no less true, in principle, that the contribution of natural laws, which belong to everyone, counts for nothing in the price of the product.

We don't pay for the air we breathe, even though it is so useful to us that we couldn't live two minutes without it. We don't pay for it all the same, because nature supplies it without any human labor at all. If we want to separate out one of the gases it is made of, for an experiment, say, we have to go to some trouble ourselves, or, if we have someone else go to it, we have to give up to him an equivalent amount of trouble that we have put into some other product. Which shows that what is exchanged is pains, efforts, labors. It isn't really the oxygen I pay for, since it's everywhere at my disposal, but the work it took to extract it, work I've been spared and must therefore make good. Will someone say there are other things to pay for, expenses, materials, apparatus? But in those things too it is labor I'm paying for. The price of the coal used represents the work it took to dig it out and carry it.

We don't pay for sunlight, because nature lavishes it on us. But we pay for the light of gas, tallow, oil, and wax, because here there is human labor to be paid; and notice that pay is so truly proportioned to labor and not to utility that one of these kinds of lighting, though much brighter than another, may very well cost less. All it takes is for the same amount of human labor to produce more of it.

When the water carrier comes to supply my house, if I paid him according to the absolute utility of water, my whole fortune wouldn't be enough. But I pay him according to the trouble he's taken. If he asked more, others would take that trouble, and in the last resort, if need be, I'd take it myself. Water isn't really what we're bargaining over at all; it's the work done in connection with the water. This point of view is so important, and the conclusions I'm going to draw from it so illuminating for free trade between nations, that I feel I must clarify my thought with a few more examples.

The amount of nourishment contained in potatoes doesn't cost us very much, because a great deal of it can be had with little labor. We pay more for wheat, because to produce it nature demands a greater amount of human labor. Obviously, if nature did for wheat what it does for potatoes, their prices would tend to level out. The wheat grower can't permanently earn much more than the potato grower. The law of competition won't allow it.

If, by some happy miracle, the fertility of all arable land were to increase, it would be the consumer, not the farmer, who reaped the benefit, because it would turn into abundance, into cheapness. There would be less labor embodied in each hectoliter of wheat, and the farmer could exchange it only for a smaller amount of labor embodied in some other product. If, on the contrary, the fertility of the soil suddenly fell, nature's share in production would be smaller, labor's share larger, and the product dearer. I was right, then, to say that it is in consumption, in humanity, that all economic phenomena come to rest in the long run. As long as you haven't followed their effects that far, as long as you stop at the immediate effects, the ones that touch one man or one class of men as producers, you are not an economist; any more than a man is a doctor who, instead of following the effects of a potion through the whole body, judges it only by how it affects the palate or the throat.

The tropics are very favorably placed for producing sugar and coffee. That means nature does most of the work and leaves little for labor to do. But then who reaps the benefit of nature's generosity? Not those regions, because competition brings them to receive only the payment for their labor; it is humanity, because the result of that generosity is called cheapness, and cheapness belongs to everyone.

Here is a temperate zone where coal and iron ore lie on the surface of the ground; you only have to bend down to pick them up. At first the inhabitants will profit from this happy circumstance, I grant you. But soon competition takes a hand, and the price of coal and iron falls until nature's gift is freely acquired by all, and only human labor is paid, at the general rate of profit.

Nature's gifts, then, like improvements in the methods of production, are, or are constantly tending to become, under the law of competition, the common and free inheritance of consumers, of the masses, of humanity. Countries that lack these advantages therefore have everything to gain from trading with those that have them, because what is exchanged is labor for labor, leaving aside the natural utilities that labor contains; and it is obviously the most favored countries that have packed the most of these natural utilities into a given amount of labor. Their products, representing less labor, are paid less; in other words, they are cheaper; and if all of nature's generosity turns into cheapness, then obviously it is not the producing country but the consuming country that reaps the benefit.

Which shows the enormous absurdity of the consuming country if it rejects the product precisely because it is cheap. It's as if it said: "I want nothing that nature gives. You ask me for an effort equal to two to give me a product I can make only with toil equal to four. You can do it because in your country nature has done half the work. Well, I reject it, and I'll wait until your climate grows harsher and forces you to ask me for toil equal to four, so that I can deal with you on an equal footing."

A is a favored country; B is a country nature has treated badly. I say that trade is good for both, but especially for B, because exchange is not utility for utility but value for value. Now A puts more utility into the same value, since the utility of a product includes what nature has put into it as well as what labor has put into it, while its value corresponds only to what labor has put into it. B, then, makes a bargain entirely to its own advantage. Paying the producer in A simply for his labor, B receives into the bargain more natural utilities than it gives.

Let's state the general rule.

Exchange is the barter of values; since competition reduces value to representing labor, exchange is the barter of equal amounts of labor. Whatever nature has done for the products exchanged is given on both sides free and into the bargain; from which it follows strictly that trade with the countries most favored by nature is the most advantageous of all.

The theory whose outline I've tried to sketch in this chapter would need a great deal of development. I've looked at it only in its bearing on my subject, free trade. But perhaps the attentive reader will have spotted in it the fertile seed that, as it grows, must smother beneath it not only protection but Fourierism, Saint-Simonism, communism, and all those schools whose aim is to shut the law of competition out of the government of the world. Seen from the producer's point of view, competition no doubt often bruises our individual and immediate interests; but if you stand at the point of view of the general aim of all labor, of universal well-being, in a word, of consumption, you will find that competition plays the same part in the moral world that equilibrium plays in the material world. It is the foundation of true communism, of true socialism, of that equality of well-being and condition so much desired in our day; and if so many sincere writers, so many reformers in good faith, look for these things from arbitrary power, it is because they don't understand freedom.

Chapter 5: Our Products Are Weighed Down by Taxes

It's the same sophism. People demand that the foreign product be taxed, to cancel out the effects of the tax that weighs on the domestic one. Once again, then, it's a matter of equalizing the conditions of production. We need say only one thing: a tax is an artificial obstacle, and it has exactly the same result as a natural obstacle, which is to force the price up. If the price rises to the point where it costs more to make the product yourself than to get it from abroad by making something to pay for it, laissez faire. Private interest will know how to choose the lesser of two evils. I could, then, simply refer the reader back to the previous argument; but the sophism I have to fight here comes up so often in the complaints and petitions, I almost said the ultimatums, of the protectionist school that it deserves a discussion of its own.

If what's meant is one of those special taxes that fall on particular products, I readily agree that it's reasonable to apply it to the foreign product too. It would be absurd, for example, to exempt foreign salt from the salt tax; not that France would lose anything by it from the economic point of view. Quite the contrary. Whatever people say, principles don't change, and France would gain, as she will always gain by avoiding an obstacle, natural or artificial. But here the obstacle was put in place for the sake of revenue. That purpose has to be achieved; and if foreign salt sold in our market duty-free, the Treasury wouldn't collect its hundred millions and would have to ask for them from some other branch of taxation. It would obviously be inconsistent to create an obstacle for a purpose and then defeat the purpose. Better to have gone straight to that other tax in the first place and not taxed French salt at all. Those are the circumstances in which I accept a duty on the foreign product: a duty that is not protective, but fiscal.

But to claim that a nation, because it bears heavier taxes than its neighbor, must protect itself by tariffs against its rival's competition: there is the sophism, and that's where I mean to attack it.

I've said several times that I mean to deal only in theory, and to trace the protectionists' errors back to their sources as far as I can. If I were writing polemics, I'd say to them: Why do you aim your tariffs mainly at England and Belgium, the most heavily taxed countries in the world? Haven't I every right to see your argument as nothing but a pretext? But I'm not one of those who believe people are prohibitionists out of interest rather than conviction. The doctrine of protection is too popular not to be sincere. If the majority had faith in freedom, we would be free. No doubt it's private interest that loads our tariffs, but only after it has worked on people's convictions. "The will," says Pascal, "is one of the chief organs of belief." But belief is no less real for having its root in the will and in the secret promptings of self-interest.

Let's go back to the sophism drawn from taxation.

The state can make good or bad use of taxes. It makes good use of them when it renders the public services equal in value to what the public hands over to it. It makes bad use of them when it squanders that value and gives nothing in return.

In the first case, to say that taxes put the country that pays them in worse conditions of production than a country that is free of them is a sophism. We pay twenty million for the courts and the police, true; but we have the courts and the police, the security they give us, the time they save us; and it's very unlikely that production is easier or brisker among peoples, if there are any, where everyone takes the law into his own hands. We pay several hundred million for roads, bridges, harbors, and railroads, I grant you. But we have those railroads, harbors, and roads; and unless you claim we've made a bad bargain in building them, you can't say they put us below peoples who carry no public works budget, it's true, but who have no public works either. And this explains why, while accusing taxation of making us industrially inferior, we aim our tariffs precisely at the most heavily taxed nations. It's because taxes, well spent, have improved the conditions of production of those peoples instead of worsening them. Once again we arrive at the same conclusion: the protectionist sophisms don't merely stray from the truth; they are its opposite, its antipode.

As for unproductive taxes, abolish them if you can. But the strangest way anyone could imagine to cancel out their effects is surely to add private taxes to the public ones. Thanks very much for the compensation! The state has taxed us too much, you say. Well, all the more reason not to tax one another on top of it!

A protective duty is a tax aimed at the foreign product, but it falls back, let's never forget, on the domestic consumer. And the consumer is the taxpayer. Isn't it a comical thing to say to him: "Because your taxes are heavy, we'll raise the price of everything for you; because the state takes one part of your income, we'll hand another part over to monopoly"?

But let's look deeper into a sophism so widely credited among our legislators, though it's rather extraordinary that the very people who keep the unproductive taxes in place (that's our present hypothesis) are the ones who blame them for our supposed industrial inferiority, only to make up for it afterward with more taxes and more obstacles.

It seems obvious to me that protection could have taken the form of a direct tax levied by the state and paid out as compensating bounties to the privileged industries, without any change in its nature or its effects.

Let's suppose that foreign iron can sell in our market at 8 francs and no lower, and French iron at 12 francs and no lower.

On this hypothesis, the state has two ways of securing the national market for the producer.

The first is to put a duty of 5 francs on foreign iron. Clearly it will be shut out, since it could now sell only at 13 francs, that is, 8 francs cost price and 5 francs tax, and at that price it will be driven from the market by French iron, which we supposed to cost 12 francs. In this case the buyer, the consumer, will have paid the whole cost of the protection.

The state could also have laid a tax of 5 francs on the public and given it as a bounty to the ironmaster. The protective effect would have been the same. Foreign iron would have been shut out just the same, because our ironmaster would have sold at 7 francs, which, with the 5-franc bounty, would make his paying price of 12 francs. And faced with iron at 7 francs, the foreigner couldn't deliver his at 8.

I can see only one difference between these two systems. The principle is the same, the effect is the same; only in one case the protection is paid for by some, and in the other by all.

I frankly confess my preference for the second system. It seems to me fairer, cheaper, and more honest: fairer, because if society wants to hand out largesse to some of its members, everyone should contribute to it; cheaper, because it would save a great deal in collection costs and do away with many obstacles; and more honest, finally, because the public would see clearly what was going on and know what it was being made to do.

But if the protective system had taken that form, wouldn't it be rather laughable to hear people say: "We pay heavy taxes for the army, the navy, the courts, public works, the schools, the debt, and so on; it comes to more than a billion. That's why it would be a good thing for the state to take another billion from us to relieve those poor ironmasters, those poor shareholders of the Anzin coal mines, those unfortunate forest owners, those useful cod fishermen"?

Look closely and you'll be convinced that this is all the sophism I'm fighting comes down to. Do what you like, gentlemen: you can only give money to some by taking it from others. If you absolutely insist on draining the taxpayer dry, very well; but at least don't mock him, and don't come and tell him, "I'm taking from you to make up for what I've already taken."

There'd be no end to it if we tried to point out everything false in this sophism. I'll confine myself to three considerations.

You plead that France is crushed by taxes, and conclude from it that this or that industry must be protected. But we have to pay those taxes in spite of the protection. If an industry comes forward and says, "I take my share in paying the taxes; that raises my cost price, and I ask for a protective duty to raise my selling price too," what is it asking for, if not to shift its tax onto the rest of the community? Its aim is to get back the amount of its share of the taxes by raising the price of its products. Now since the total of the taxes must always come into the Treasury, and the public has to bear the higher price, the public pays its own tax and that industry's tax as well. "But," you say, "we'll protect everybody." First of all, that's impossible; and even if it were possible, where would the relief be? I'll pay for you and you'll pay for me; but the tax will still have to be paid.

You are being taken in by an illusion. You want to pay taxes so as to have an army, a navy, an established church, schools, judges, roads, and so on; and then you want to relieve one industry of its share of the taxes, then a second, then a third, always spreading the burden over the public. But you do nothing except create endless complications, with no result but the complications themselves. Prove to me that the rise in price caused by protection falls on the foreigner, and I might see something plausible in your argument. But if it's true that the French public paid the tax before the law, and after the law pays both the protection and the tax, then I honestly can't see what it gains.

But I go much further. I say that the heavier our taxes are, the faster we should open our ports and our frontiers to foreigners less burdened than we are. And why? To pass on to them a bigger share of our load. Isn't it an undisputed axiom of political economy that taxes, in the long run, fall on the consumer? The more our trade grows, then, the more taxes foreign consumers will repay us, taxes built into the products we sell them; while we would have less to repay them on that score, since, on our hypothesis, their products carry less tax than ours.

Finally, these heavy taxes you invoke to justify the prohibitive system: have you ever asked yourselves whether it isn't that very system that causes them? I'd very much like someone to tell me what use there would be for great standing armies and powerful navies if trade were free.... But that's a matter for the politicians, and let's not, by probing too far, mix up their business with our own.

Chapter 6: The Balance of Trade

Our opponents have adopted a tactic that is rather awkward for us. Do we set out our doctrine? They accept it as respectfully as can be. Do we attack their principle? They give it up with the best grace in the world. They ask only one thing: that our doctrine, which they hold to be true, be confined to books, and that their principle, which they admit is faulty, govern the practice of affairs. Leave them in charge of the tariff, and they won't dispute your claim to theory.

"Of course," Monsieur Gauthier de Rumilly said the other day in the Chamber, "none of us wants to revive the old theories of the balance of trade." Very good; but, Monsieur Gauthier, it isn't enough to give error a passing slap in the face. You also have to refrain, immediately afterward and for two hours on end, from reasoning as if that error were the truth.

Give me Monsieur Lestiboudois. There's a consistent reasoner, a logical arguer. There's nothing in his conclusions that isn't in his premises; he asks nothing of practice that he doesn't justify with a theory. His principle may be false; that's the question. But at least he has a principle. He believes, and proclaims aloud, that if France gives ten to receive fifteen, she loses five, and it's only natural that he should make laws accordingly.

"What matters," he says, "is that the figure for imports keeps on rising and exceeds the figure for exports; that is, every year France buys more foreign products and sells fewer national ones. The figures prove it. What do we see? In 1842 we see imports exceed exports by 200 million. These facts seem to me to prove in the clearest way that national labor is not sufficiently protected, that we are leaving it to foreign labor to supply us, that our rivals' competition oppresses our industry. The present law seems to me to confirm the fact that it is not true, as the economists have declared, that when one buys, one necessarily sells a corresponding quantity of goods. Obviously one can buy, not with one's usual products, not with one's income, not with the fruits of steady labor, but with one's capital, with the accumulated, saved-up products that serve for reproduction; that is, one can spend and squander the profits of earlier savings, one can grow poorer, one can march toward ruin, one can consume the national capital entirely. That is precisely what we are doing. Every year we give 200 million to the foreigner."

Well, here's a man you can talk to. There's no hypocrisy in that language. The balance of trade is owned up to frankly. France imports 200 million more than she exports. Therefore France loses 200 million a year. And the remedy? Stop the imports. The conclusion can't be faulted.

It's Monsieur Lestiboudois we'll take on, then, because how can you fight Monsieur Gauthier? If you tell him the balance of trade is an error, he'll answer, "That's what I said in my opening." If you shout at him, "But the balance of trade is true!" he'll tell you, "That's what I put in my conclusion."

The economists will no doubt blame me for arguing with Monsieur Lestiboudois. To fight the balance of trade, they'll tell me, is to tilt at a windmill.

But be careful: the balance of trade is not as old, nor as sick, nor as dead as Monsieur Gauthier would have us believe, since the whole Chamber, Monsieur Gauthier included, has signed on to Monsieur Lestiboudois's theory with its votes.

All the same, so as not to tire the reader, I won't go deeply into that theory. I'll simply put it to the test of the facts.

Our principles are forever being accused of being good only in theory. But tell me, gentlemen: do you believe merchants' ledgers are good in practice? It seems to me that if anything in the world has practical authority when it comes to establishing losses and profits, it's commercial bookkeeping. Surely all the merchants on earth haven't conspired for centuries to keep their books in such a way that profits show up as losses and losses as profits. Honestly, I'd sooner believe that Monsieur Lestiboudois is a bad economist.

Now a merchant friend of mine made two ventures with very different results, and I was curious to compare the accounts of the counting house with those of the customs, as interpreted by Monsieur Lestiboudois with the sanction of our six hundred legislators.

Monsieur T. sent a ship from Le Havre to the United States, loaded with French goods, mainly the kind called articles de Paris, fancy goods, to the amount of 200,000 francs. That was the figure declared at the customs. On arrival in New Orleans, it turned out that the cargo had run up 10 percent in expenses and paid 30 percent in duties, which brought it to 280,000 francs. It was sold at a 20 percent profit, or 40,000 francs, and fetched 320,000 francs in all, which the consignee turned into cotton. This cotton in its turn had to bear 10 percent in expenses for freight, insurance, commission, and so on, so that when it came into Le Havre the new cargo stood at 352,000 francs, and that was the figure recorded in the customs returns. Finally, Monsieur T. made another 20 percent profit on this return cargo, or 70,400 francs; in other words, the cotton sold for 422,400 francs.

If Monsieur Lestiboudois insists, I'll send him an extract from Monsieur T.'s books. He will see there, on the credit side of the profit and loss account, that is, as profits, two entries, one of 40,000 francs and the other of 70,400 francs, and Monsieur T. is quite sure that on this point his bookkeeping isn't deceiving him.

And yet what do the figures the customs collected on this venture tell Monsieur Lestiboudois? They tell him that France exported 200,000 francs and imported 352,000 francs, from which the honorable deputy concludes "that she has spent and squandered the profits of her earlier savings, that she has grown poorer, that she has marched toward ruin, that she has given 152,000 francs of her capital to the foreigner."

Some time later, Monsieur T. sent off another ship, also loaded with 200,000 francs' worth of the products of our national labor. But the unlucky vessel sank on her way out of the harbor, and there was nothing left for Monsieur T. to do but enter in his books two little items, worded as follows:

Sundry goods, debtor to X, 200,000 francs, for purchase of various articles shipped on the vessel N.

Profit and loss, debtor to sundry goods, 200,000 francs, for final and total loss of the cargo.

Meanwhile the customs entered 200,000 francs on its table of exports; and since it will never have anything to set against it on the table of imports, it follows that Monsieur Lestiboudois and the Chamber will see in this shipwreck a clear, net profit of 200,000 francs for France.

There's a further conclusion to be drawn from this: according to the theory of the balance of trade, France has a very simple way of doubling her capital at any moment. All she has to do is put it through the customs and then throw it into the sea. In that case, exports will equal the whole of her capital, imports will be nil, even impossible, and we will gain everything the ocean has swallowed.

"That's a joke," the protectionists will say. "We can't possibly be saying anything so absurd." But you do say it, and, what's more, you carry it out, you impose it in practice on your fellow citizens, at least as far as it lies in your power.

The truth is that the balance of trade should be taken the other way round, and the national profit from foreign trade calculated by the excess of imports over exports. That excess, less expenses, is the real profit. But this theory, the true one, leads straight to free trade. I hand this theory over to you, gentlemen, like all the others that have been the subject of the preceding chapters. Exaggerate it as much as you like; it has nothing to fear from the test. Suppose, if it amuses you, that the foreigner floods us with every kind of useful goods without asking anything of us; that our imports are infinite and our exports nil. I defy you to prove to me that we will be any the poorer for it.

Chapter 7: The Candlemakers' Petition

A petition from the manufacturers of candles, tapers, lamps, candlesticks, street lamps, snuffers, and extinguishers, and from the producers of tallow, oil, resin, alcohol, and generally of everything to do with lighting.

To the Honorable Members of the Chamber of Deputies.

"Gentlemen,

"You are on the right track. You reject abstract theories; abundance and cheapness mean little to you. Your chief concern is the fate of the producer. You want to free him from foreign competition; in a word, you want to reserve the national market for national labor.

"We have come to offer you a wonderful opportunity to apply your... how shall we put it? Your theory? No, nothing is more misleading than theory. Your doctrine? Your system? Your principle? But you don't like doctrines, you have a horror of systems, and as for principles, you declare that there are none in social economy. We'll say your practice, then: your practice without theory and without principle.

"We are suffering from the intolerable competition of a foreign rival who, it seems, enjoys conditions so far superior to ours for the production of light that he floods our national market with it at a fabulously reduced price. The moment he appears, our sales stop, every consumer goes over to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are countless is struck all at once with the most complete stagnation. This rival, who is none other than the sun, wages so bitter a war on us that we suspect he has been set on us by perfidious Albion (always good politics these days!), especially since he shows that proud island a consideration he denies to us.

"We ask that you be pleased to pass a law ordering the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull's-eyes, and blinds; in a word, of all openings, holes, chinks, and cracks through which the light of the sun is accustomed to enter houses, to the detriment of the fine industries with which we flatter ourselves we have endowed the country, a country that cannot, without ingratitude, abandon us today to so unequal a struggle.

"Please, Honorable Deputies, don't take our request for a satire, and at least don't reject it without hearing the reasons we have to offer in its support.

"First of all, if you shut off all access to natural light as far as possible, if you thereby create a need for artificial light, what industry in France will not, little by little, be encouraged?

"If more tallow is consumed, more cattle and sheep will be needed, and we'll see a multiplication of sown pastures, meat, wool, hides, and above all manure, that foundation of all agricultural wealth.

"If more oil is consumed, we'll see the spread of poppy, olive, and rapeseed growing. These rich, soil-hungry plants will come along just in time to make use of the fertility that cattle raising will have given our land.

"Our heaths will be covered with resinous pines. Swarms of bees will gather on our mountains fragrant treasures that today evaporate uselessly, like the flowers they come from. There isn't a single branch of agriculture, then, that won't see great growth.

"The same goes for shipping. Thousands of vessels will go whaling, and in no time we'll have a navy able to uphold the honor of France and to satisfy the patriotic sensibilities of the undersigned petitioners, candle merchants, and so on.

"And what shall we say of Paris fancy goods? Picture the gilding, the bronzes, the crystal in candlesticks, lamps, chandeliers, and candelabra, gleaming in spacious showrooms beside which the shops of today are mere stalls.

"Even the poor resin tapper on top of his sand dune and the gloomy miner deep in his black tunnel will see their wages and their comfort rise.

"Think it over, gentlemen, and you will be convinced that there is perhaps not one Frenchman, from the wealthy shareholder of the Anzin mines to the humblest seller of matches, whose lot will not be improved by the success of our petition.

"We foresee your objections, gentlemen; but you won't raise a single one against us that you haven't picked up from the dog-eared books of the free traders. We dare to challenge you to say one word against us that doesn't instantly turn against you yourselves and against the principle that guides your whole policy.

"Will you tell us that though we may gain by this protection, France won't, because the consumer will bear the cost?

"We will answer:

"You no longer have the right to invoke the interests of the consumer. Whenever he has come up against the producer, you have sacrificed him every time. You did it to encourage labor, to increase the field of employment. For the same reason you ought to do it again.

"You have answered that objection yourselves. When people told you, 'The consumer has an interest in the free entry of iron, coal, sesame, wheat, and textiles,' you said, 'Yes, but the producer has an interest in keeping them out.' Very well: if consumers have an interest in admitting natural light, producers have one in banning it.

"'But,' you also said, 'the producer and the consumer are one and the same. If the manufacturer gains by protection, he will make the farmer gain. If agriculture prospers, it will open markets for manufactures.' Very well: if you grant us a monopoly of lighting during the day, first of all we'll buy great quantities of tallow, charcoal, oil, resin, wax, alcohol, silver, iron, bronze, and crystal to supply our industry; and then we and our many suppliers, having grown rich, will consume a great deal and spread prosperity through every branch of national labor.

"Will you say that the light of the sun is a free gift, and that to reject free gifts would be to reject wealth itself on the pretext of encouraging the means of getting it?

"But be careful: you are striking at the very heart of your own policy. Be careful: until now you have always rejected the foreign product because it comes close to being a free gift, and all the more the closer it comes. To meet the demands of the other monopolists you had only half a reason; to grant our request you have a whole reason; and to turn us down on the very grounds that we have better grounds than the others would be to write the equation + × + = −; in other words, to pile absurdity on absurdity.

"Labor and nature work together in varying proportions, depending on the country and the climate, to create a product. Nature's share is always free; it is labor's share that gives the product its value and gets paid for.

"If an orange from Lisbon sells at half the price of an orange from Paris, it's because natural heat, and therefore free heat, does for the one what the other owes to artificial heat, and therefore costly heat.

"When an orange reaches us from Portugal, then, we can say it is given to us half free and half paid for; in other words, at half price compared with the Paris orange.

"Now it is precisely this half-freeness (forgive the word) that you argue from to keep it out. You say: How could national labor stand up to the competition of foreign labor, when ours has everything to do and theirs only half the work, the sun taking care of the rest? But if half-freeness makes you reject competition, how would complete freeness lead you to accept it? Either you are no logicians, or, rejecting half-freeness as harmful to our national labor, you must reject complete freeness a fortiori, and with twice the zeal.

"Once again: when a product, coal, iron, wheat, or cloth, comes to us from abroad, and we can get it with less labor than if we made it ourselves, the difference is a free gift bestowed on us. That gift is larger or smaller as the difference is larger or smaller. It is a quarter, a half, three quarters of the product's value, if the foreigner asks of us only three quarters, a half, a quarter of the payment. It is as complete as it can be when the giver, as the sun does with light, asks us for nothing. The question, and we put it formally, is whether you want for France the benefit of free consumption or the supposed advantages of costly production. Choose, but be logical; for as long as you keep out foreign coal, iron, wheat, and cloth, as you do, in proportion as their price comes close to zero, how inconsistent would it be to let in the light of the sun, whose price is zero all day long!"

Chapter 8: Differential Duties

A poor farmer in the Gironde had tended a vine with loving care. After much toil and labor he at last had the joy of filling a cask with wine, and he forgot that every drop of that precious nectar had cost his brow a drop of sweat. "I'll sell it," he told his wife, "and with the money I'll buy thread for you to make our daughter's trousseau." The honest countryman goes to town and meets a Belgian and an Englishman. The Belgian says to him, "Give me your cask of wine, and I'll give you fifteen bundles of thread in exchange." The Englishman says, "Give me your wine, and I'll give you twenty bundles of thread, because we English spin more cheaply than the Belgians." But a customs officer who happened to be standing there says, "My good man, trade with the Belgian if you like, but it's my job to stop you trading with the Englishman." "What?" says the countryman. "You want me to settle for fifteen bundles of thread from Brussels when I can have twenty from Manchester?" "Certainly. Don't you see that France would lose if you got twenty bundles instead of fifteen?" "I have trouble understanding it," says the winegrower. "And I have trouble explaining it," the customs officer replies; "but it's a sure thing, because all the deputies, ministers, and newspapermen agree on this point: the more a people receives in exchange for a given quantity of its products, the poorer it gets." He had to close the deal with the Belgian. The countryman's daughter got only three quarters of her trousseau, and these good people are still wondering how anyone can be ruined by receiving four instead of three, and why you're richer with three dozen napkins than with four dozen.

Chapter 9: An Immense Discovery!!!

At a time when every mind is busy looking for savings on the means of transport;

At a time when, to achieve these savings, we are leveling roads, canalizing rivers, improving steamboats, and linking Paris to every one of our frontiers with a star of iron rails, with atmospheric, hydraulic, pneumatic, electric, and other systems of traction;

At a time, finally, when I must believe that everyone is seeking, eagerly and sincerely, the solution to this problem:

"To bring the price of things at the place where they are consumed as close as possible to their price at the place where they are produced";

I would consider myself guilty toward my country, toward my century, and toward myself if I kept secret any longer the marvelous discovery I have just made.

For proverbial as the illusions of inventors may be, I am completely certain that I have found an infallible means of making the products of the whole world reach France, and vice versa, at a considerable reduction in price.

Infallible! And that's only one of the advantages of my astonishing invention.

It requires no plans, no estimates, no preliminary surveys, no engineers, no mechanics, no contractors, no capital, no shareholders, no government aid!

It carries no danger of shipwreck, explosion, collision, fire, or derailment!

It can be put into practice overnight!

Finally, and this will no doubt recommend it to the public, it won't add a centime to the budget; quite the contrary. It won't enlarge the ranks of officialdom or the demands of the bureaucracy; quite the contrary. It won't cost anyone his liberty; quite the contrary.

It wasn't chance that put me in possession of my discovery; it was observation. I must tell you here how I was led to it.

I had this question to solve:

"Why does a thing made in Brussels, for example, cost more once it has reached Paris?"

I soon saw that it comes from the fact that between Paris and Brussels there are obstacles of several kinds. First there is distance: you can't cover it without effort and loss of time, and you either have to put up with that yourself or pay someone else to put up with it. Then come rivers, marshes, rough ground, mud: so many difficulties to overcome. We manage it by building causeways and bridges, cutting roads, and reducing their resistance with paving stones, iron rails, and so on. But all that costs money, and the goods carried must bear their share of the expense. There are robbers on the roads too, which calls for gendarmes, police, and so on.

Now among these obstacles there is one that we ourselves have thrown up between Brussels and Paris, at great expense. It consists of men lying in wait along the frontier, armed to the teeth, whose job is to put difficulties in the way of carrying goods from one country to the other. They are called customs officers. They act in exactly the same direction as the mud and the ruts. They delay, they hinder, they add to that difference we noted between the price of production and the price of consumption, the difference our problem is to reduce as far as possible.

And there's the problem solved. Lower the tariff.

You will have built the Northern Railway without its costing you a thing. Far from it: you'll save large salaries, and from the very first day you'll start by putting capital into your pocket.

Really, I wonder how so much oddity could have got into our brains as to make us pay many millions to destroy the natural obstacles standing between France and other countries, and at the same time pay many more millions to put artificial obstacles in their place that have exactly the same effects; so that, the obstacle created and the obstacle destroyed canceling each other out, things go on as before, and the residue of the whole operation is a double expense.

A Belgian product is worth 20 francs in Brussels and, delivered to Paris, 30, because of the cost of transport. The same product made in Paris is worth 40 francs. What do we do?

First we put a duty of at least 10 francs on the Belgian product, to raise its cost in Paris to 40 francs, and we pay a great many guards to make sure it doesn't escape the duty; so that on the way it is loaded with 10 francs for transport and 10 francs for tax.

That done, we reason like this: transport from Brussels to Paris, at 10 francs, is very expensive. Let's spend two or three hundred million on railways and we'll cut it in half. Obviously all we'll have achieved is that the Belgian product will sell in Paris for 35 francs, namely:

	20 francs  its price in Brussels
	10 francs  duty
	5 francs  freight, reduced by the railroad
	35 francs  total, or cost price in Paris

Well, wouldn't we have got the same result by lowering the tariff to 5 francs? Then we'd have:

	20 francs  price in Brussels
	5 francs  reduced duty
	10 francs  freight by ordinary roads
	35 francs  total, or cost price in Paris

And that method would have saved us the 200 million the railroad costs, plus the cost of customs guards, since that cost must fall as the encouragement to smuggling falls.

"But," people say, "the duty is necessary to protect Paris industry." So be it; but then don't destroy its effect with your railroad.

For if you insist that the Belgian product should cost 40 francs in Paris, like the Paris one, you'll have to raise the duty to 15 francs, to get:

	20 francs  price in Brussels
	15 francs  protective duty
	5 francs  freight by railroad
	40 francs  total at equalized prices

Then I ask what use, from this point of view, the railroad is.

Frankly, isn't there something humiliating for the nineteenth century in preparing for future ages the spectacle of such childishness, practiced with a perfectly straight face? Being taken in by others is unpleasant enough; but to use the whole vast machinery of representative government to take ourselves in, to take ourselves in twice over, and in a matter of simple arithmetic: that is well calculated to take the pride of the age of enlightenment down a peg or two.

Chapter 10: Reciprocity

We have just seen that everything that makes carriage costly along the way acts in the same direction as protection; or, if you prefer, that protection acts in the same direction as everything that makes carriage costly.

It's true to say, then, that a tariff is a swamp, a rut, a gap in the road, a steep hill; in a word, an obstacle whose effect comes down to widening the difference between the price of consumption and the price of production. It's equally undeniable that a swamp or a quagmire is a genuine protective tariff.

There are people (not many, it's true, but there are some) who are beginning to understand that obstacles are no less obstacles for being artificial, and that our well-being has more to gain from freedom than from protection, for exactly the same reason that a canal serves it better than "a sandy road, uphill and hard going."

"But," they say, "this freedom must be reciprocal. If we lowered our barriers to Spain without Spain lowering hers to us, we'd obviously be the dupes. Let's make trade treaties on the basis of fair reciprocity: let's make concessions to get concessions, let's make the sacrifice of buying to obtain the advantage of selling."

The people who reason like this, I'm sorry to tell them, are working from the principle of protection, whether they know it or not; they're only a little more inconsistent than the out-and-out prohibitionists.

I'll show it with the following fable.

Stulta and Puera.

There were once two towns, never mind where, called Stulta and Puera. At great expense they built a road connecting them. When it was finished, Stulta said to herself: "Now Puera is flooding me with her products; something must be done." So she created and paid a corps of Obstructors, so called because their job was to put obstacles in the way of the wagons arriving from Puera. Soon afterward Puera had a corps of Obstructors too.

After some centuries, enlightenment having made great progress, Puera's wits rose high enough for her to discover that these reciprocal obstacles might be nothing but reciprocally harmful. She sent a diplomat to Stulta, who, official phrasing aside, spoke to this effect: "We built a road, and now we clutter it up. That's absurd. Better to have left things as they were. We wouldn't have had to pay for the road first and then for the clutter. In the name of Puera, I've come to propose, not that we give up all at once putting obstacles in each other's way (that would be acting on a principle, and we despise principles as much as you do), but that we reduce these obstacles a little, taking care to weigh our respective sacrifices fairly." So spoke the diplomat. Stulta asked for time to think it over. She consulted her manufacturers and her farmers in turn. Finally, after a few years, she announced that the negotiations had broken off.

At this news the inhabitants of Puera held a council. An old man (it was always suspected that Stulta had secretly bought him) stood up and said: "The obstacles created by Stulta hurt our sales; that's a misfortune. The ones we created ourselves hurt our purchases; that's another misfortune. We can do nothing about the first, but the second is up to us. Let's at least free ourselves from one, since we can't get rid of both. Let's abolish our Obstructors without requiring Stulta to do the same. Some day, no doubt, she'll learn to do her sums better."

A second councilor, a practical man of facts, free of principles and nourished on the ancient experience of his forefathers, replied: "Don't listen to this dreamer, this theorist, this innovator, this utopian, this economist, this Stultophile. We'd be lost if the hindrances on the road weren't properly equalized, balanced, and weighed between Stulta and Puera. It would be harder to go than to come, harder to export than to import. We'd be in the same position of inferiority with respect to Stulta that Le Havre, Nantes, Bordeaux, Lisbon, London, Hamburg, and New Orleans are in with respect to the towns at the sources of the Seine, the Loire, the Garonne, the Tagus, the Thames, the Elbe, and the Mississippi; because it's harder to go up a river than down it." (A voice: "The towns at the mouths have prospered more than the towns at the sources.") "That's impossible." (The same voice: "But it's so.") "Well, then they've prospered against the rules." So conclusive an argument shook the assembly. The speaker finished winning it over by talking of national independence, national honor, national dignity, national labor, floods of products, tribute, and murderous competition. In short, he carried the vote to keep the obstacles; and, if you're curious, I can take you to a certain country where you'll see with your own eyes road menders and Obstructors working in the most perfect harmony in the world, by decree of the same legislative assembly and at the expense of the same taxpayers, the first to clear the road and the second to clutter it.

Chapter 11: Absolute Prices

Do you want to judge between freedom and protection? Do you want to gauge the reach of an economic phenomenon? Look at its effects on the abundance or scarcity of things, not on the rise or fall of prices. Beware of absolute prices: they'll lead you into a labyrinth with no way out.

Monsieur Mathieu de Dombasle, having established that protection makes things dearer, adds:

"The extra price increases the cost of living, and consequently the price of labor, and everyone gets back in the extra price of his products the extra price of his expenses. Thus, if everyone pays as a consumer, everyone also receives as a producer."

Clearly you could turn the argument around and say:

"If everyone receives as a producer, everyone pays as a consumer."

And what does that prove? Nothing, except that protection shifts wealth around uselessly and unjustly. Plunder does as much.

Even to grant that this vast apparatus comes down to mere compensations, you have to accept Monsieur de Dombasle's consequently, and make sure that the price of labor rises with the price of protected products. That's a question of fact, which I refer to Monsieur Moreau de Jonnès, our chief of statistics; let him kindly find out whether wages have climbed like the shares of the Anzin mines. For my part, I don't think so, because I believe that the price of labor, like every other price, is governed by the ratio of supply to demand. Now I can quite see that restriction reduces the supply of coal and so raises its price; but I don't see as clearly that it increases the demand for labor so as to improve wages. I see it all the less because the amount of labor demanded depends on the capital available. Protection may well shift capital about, push it from one industry into another, but it cannot increase it by a penny.

But this question, of the highest interest, will be examined elsewhere. I come back to absolute prices, and I say there's no absurdity that can't be made to look plausible by reasoning like Monsieur de Dombasle's.

Imagine an isolated nation, with a given quantity of money, that amuses itself by burning half of everything it produces every year. I undertake to prove, with Monsieur de Dombasle's theory, that it will be none the poorer for it.

For as a result of the fire, everything will double in price, and inventories taken before and after the disaster will show exactly the same nominal value. But then who has lost? If John buys his cloth dearer, he also sells his wheat dearer; and if Peter loses on buying wheat, he makes it up on selling his cloth. "Everyone gets back in the extra price of his products (I'll say) the extra amount of his expenses; and if everyone pays as a consumer, everyone also receives as a producer."

All this is gibberish, not science. The truth, reduced to its simplest expression, is this: whether people destroy cloth and wheat by fire or by use, the effect is the same as far as prices go, but not as far as wealth goes, because wealth, or well-being, consists precisely in the use of things.

In the same way, restriction, while reducing the abundance of things, may raise their price so that everyone is, if you like, just as rich in money terms. But to enter in an inventory three hectoliters of wheat at 20 francs, or four hectoliters at 15 francs, because the result is 60 francs either way: does that come to the same thing from the point of view of satisfying our needs?

And it is to this point of view, consumption, that I will never stop bringing the protectionists back, because that is where all our efforts end and where every problem is solved. I will always say to them: Isn't it true that restriction, by preventing trade, limiting the division of labor, and forcing labor to struggle against the difficulties of location and climate, in the end reduces the quantity produced by a given amount of effort? And what does it matter that the smaller quantity produced under protection has the same nominal value as the larger quantity produced under freedom? Man doesn't live on nominal values but on real products, and the more of those products he has, whatever their price, the richer he is.

When I wrote the above, I never expected to meet an anti-economist good enough at logic to admit explicitly that the wealth of nations depends on the value of things regardless of their abundance. But here is what I find in Monsieur de Saint-Chamans's book (page 210):

"If 15 million worth of goods sold to foreigners are taken out of the ordinary product, estimated at 50 million, the remaining 35 million worth of goods, no longer able to meet the ordinary demand, will rise in price and reach a value of 50 million. Then the country's income will represent 15 million more in value.... There will thus be an increase in wealth of 15 million for the country, precisely the amount of money imported."

Now that's a good one! If a nation has produced 50 million worth of crops and goods in the year, it need only sell a quarter of them abroad to be a quarter richer! Then if it sold half, it would increase its fortune by half; and if it traded its last tuft of wool and its last grain of wheat for coin, it would bring its income up to a hundred million! A strange way to get rich, producing infinite dearness through absolute scarcity!

Anyway, do you want to judge between the two doctrines? Put them to the test of exaggeration.

According to Monsieur de Saint-Chamans's doctrine, the French would be just as rich, that is, just as well supplied with everything, with a thousandth of their annual product, because it would be worth a thousand times as much.

According to ours, the French would be infinitely rich if their annual product were infinitely abundant, and therefore worth nothing at all.

Chapter 12: Does Protection Raise Wages?

An atheist was ranting against religion, against priests, against God. "If you keep this up," said one of his listeners, not very orthodox himself, "you'll convert me."

In the same way, when we hear our beardless scribblers, novelists, reformers, and newspaper serialists, perfumed with amber and musk, stuffed with ices and champagne, their wallets lined with shares in Ganneron's bank, the Northern Railway, and Mackenzie's lines, or getting their tirades against the selfishness and individualism of the age paid for in gold; when we hear them, I say, declaim against the harshness of our institutions and moan about wage labor and the proletariat; when we see them raise tender eyes to heaven at the sight of the poverty of the working classes, a poverty they have never visited except to paint profitable pictures of it, we're tempted to tell them: If you keep this up, you'll make me indifferent to the fate of the workers.

Oh, affectation, affectation! That is the nauseating disease of our age! Workers, let a serious man, a sincere philanthropist, set out a picture of your distress, let his book make an impression, and at once the mob of reformers throws its grappling hook onto this prize. They turn it over and over, they exploit it, exaggerate it, squeeze it to the point of disgust, to the point of ridicule. For your only remedy they toss you the big words, organization, association; they flatter you and fawn on you, and soon it will be with the workers as it is with the slaves: serious men will be ashamed to take up their cause in public, for how can anyone get a few sensible ideas heard amid all this insipid declamation?

But far be it from us to fall into a cowardly indifference that the affectation provoking it would never justify!

Workers, your situation is a strange one! You are being robbed, as I will prove in a moment.... But no, I take that word back. Let's banish from our language every violent expression, and one that may even be false, in the sense that plunder, wrapped in the sophisms that veil it, is carried on, we must believe, against the will of the plunderer and with the consent of the plundered. But all the same, you are being deprived of the fair reward for your work, and nobody bothers to see that you get justice. Oh, if all it took to console you were noisy appeals to philanthropy, to powerless charity, to degrading alms; if the big words organization, communism, phalanstery were enough, nobody spares you those. But justice, plain justice, nobody thinks of giving you. And yet wouldn't it be just that when, after a long day's toil, you have drawn your meager wages, you should be able to exchange them for the greatest amount of satisfaction you can get, by free agreement, from anyone at all on the face of the earth?¹⁰

Some day, perhaps, I'll talk to you about association and organization too, and then we'll see what you have to expect from these fantasies that are leading you astray on a false quest.

Meanwhile, let's see whether you're not being done an injustice when the law assigns you the people from whom you're allowed to buy the things you need, bread, meat, linen, cloth, and, so to speak, the artificial price you must pay for them.

Is it true that protection, which, as everyone admits, makes you pay dearly for everything and harms you that way, raises your wages in proportion?

What do wages depend on?

One of your own put it forcefully: When two workers run after one boss, wages fall; they rise when two bosses run after one worker.

Allow me, for brevity, to use this more scientific and perhaps less clear phrase: "Wages depend on the ratio of the supply of labor to the demand for it."

Now what does the supply of hands depend on?

On how many there are in the market; and on this first element protection can do nothing.

What does the demand for hands depend on?

On the national capital available. But does the law that says, "Such and such a product will no longer be let in from abroad; it will be made at home," increase that capital? Not in the least. It pulls capital out of one channel and pushes it into another, but it doesn't increase it by a penny. It doesn't increase the demand for hands, then.

People point with pride to some factory or other. But was it founded, and is it kept going, with capital that fell from the moon? No; that capital had to be drawn off from agriculture, or shipping, or winegrowing. And that is why, if since the reign of protective tariffs there are more workers in the galleries of our mines and the suburbs of our factory towns, there are fewer sailors in our ports and fewer plowmen and winegrowers in our fields and on our hillsides.

I could hold forth on this theme for a long time. I'd rather try to make my meaning clear with an example.

A countryman had a farm of twenty arpents, some seventeen acres, which he worked with a capital of 10,000 francs. He divided his land into four parts and set up the following rotation: first maize; second wheat; third clover; fourth rye. He and his family needed only a very modest share of the grain, meat, and dairy produce the farm turned out, and he sold the surplus to buy oil, flax, wine, and so on. The whole of his capital was paid out each year in wages, salaries, and settled accounts to the working people of the neighborhood. It came back to him through his sales, and even grew from year to year; and our countryman, knowing perfectly well that capital produces nothing unless it is put to work, let the working class benefit from these yearly surpluses, which he spent on fences, clearing land, and improvements to his farm tools and buildings. He even deposited some savings with the banker in the nearest town, but the banker didn't leave them idle in his safe; he lent them to shipowners and to contractors doing useful work, so that they always ended up turned into wages.

Then the countryman died, and as soon as the son was master of the inheritance, he said to himself: "I have to admit my father was a dupe all his life. He bought oil, and so paid tribute to Provence, when our land can, at a pinch, keep a few olive trees alive. He bought wine, flax, and oranges, and paid tribute to Brittany, the Médoc, and the Hyères islands, when the vine, hemp, and the orange tree can, after a fashion, yield something here. He paid tribute to the miller and the weaver, when our servants can perfectly well weave our flax and crush our wheat between two stones. He was ruining himself, and on top of that he was letting outsiders earn the wages he could so easily have spread around him."

Strong in this reasoning, our scatterbrain changed the farm's rotation. He divided it into twenty fields. On one he grew olives, on another mulberries, on the third flax, on the fourth vines, on the fifth wheat, and so on and so forth. In this way he managed to supply his family with everything and make himself independent. He no longer took anything out of the general circulation; it's true he no longer put anything into it either. Was he any richer? No; for the land wasn't suited to the vine, the climate was against the olive, and in the end the family was less well supplied with all these things than in the days when the father got them by trade.

As for the workers, there was no more work for them than before. There were five times as many fields to cultivate, sure enough, but they were five times smaller. Oil was being made, but less wheat; flax was no longer bought, but rye was no longer sold. Besides, the farmer couldn't spend more on wages than his capital; and his capital, far from growing with the new division of the land, kept shrinking. A large part of it was sunk in buildings and in countless implements, indispensable to anyone who means to do everything himself. In the end, the supply of hands stayed the same, but the means of paying them dwindled, and wages were bound to fall.

There you have a picture of what happens in a nation that isolates itself with the prohibitive system. It multiplies the number of its industries, I know; but it lessens their importance. It gives itself, so to speak, a more complicated industrial rotation, but not a more fruitful one; on the contrary, since the same capital and the same labor come up against more natural difficulties in it. Its fixed capital swallows a larger share of its circulating capital, that is, a larger share of the fund set aside for wages. However much what's left branches out, its total doesn't grow. It's like the water of a pond that someone thinks he has made more plentiful because, divided among a host of little reservoirs, it touches the ground at more points and shows more surface to the sun; and he fails to notice that this is exactly why it soaks away, evaporates, and is lost.

Given capital and labor create a smaller mass of products the more obstacles they meet. There's no doubt that since international barriers force this capital and this labor, in every country, to overcome more difficulties of climate and temperature, the general result is fewer products created, or, what comes to the same thing, fewer satisfactions gained for humanity. Now if there is a general reduction in satisfactions, how could your share, workers, be increased? Have the rich, the people who make the laws, really arranged things so that they not only bear their proportional share of the total reduction, but see their already reduced portion reduced further by everything that is added, so they say, to yours? Is that possible? Is it believable? Oh, that's a suspicious generosity, and you'd be wise to refuse it.

Chapter 13: Theory and Practice

We supporters of free trade are accused of being theorists, of not taking enough account of practice.

"What a terrible presumption against Monsieur Say," says Monsieur Ferrier,¹¹ "is this long line of distinguished administrators, this imposing league of writers who have all seen things differently from him; and Monsieur Say does not hide it from himself! Let us hear him: 'It has been said, in support of old errors, that there must be some foundation for ideas so generally adopted by every nation. Ought we not to distrust observations and reasonings that overturn what has been held constant until now, what has been held certain by so many persons made respectable by their learning and their intentions? This argument, I confess, is fit to make a deep impression, and might cast doubt on the most incontestable points, if we had not seen, one after another, the falsest opinions, now generally recognized as such, accepted and professed by everyone for a long succession of centuries. It is not so very long since every nation, from the crudest to the most enlightened, and every man, from the porter to the most learned philosopher, accepted four elements. No one would have thought of disputing this doctrine, which is nonetheless false; so much so that today there is no naturalist's assistant who would not disgrace himself if he regarded earth, water, and fire as elements.'"

On which Monsieur Ferrier makes this remark:

"If Monsieur Say thinks he has answered in this way the very strong objection he set himself, he is strangely mistaken. That men otherwise very enlightened should have been wrong for several centuries on some point of natural history is understandable and proves nothing. Were water, air, earth, and fire, elements or not, any less useful to man?... Errors of that kind have no consequences; they cause no upheavals, they spread no unease in men's minds, above all they injure no interest, which is why they could last thousands of years without harm. The physical world goes on as if they did not exist. But can it be so with errors that strike at the moral world? Can one conceive that a system of administration that was absolutely false, and therefore harmful, could be followed for several centuries and among several peoples with the general assent of all educated men? Will anyone explain how such a system could go along with the ever-growing prosperity of nations? Monsieur Say admits that the argument he is fighting is fit to make a deep impression. Yes indeed, and the impression remains, for Monsieur Say has increased it rather than destroyed it."

Now let's hear Monsieur de Saint-Chamans:

"It was hardly before the middle of the last century, of that eighteenth century when every subject and every principle without exception was handed over to the discussion of writers, that these purveyors of speculative ideas, applied to everything without being applicable to anything, began to write on political economy. Before that there existed a system of political economy that was unwritten but practiced by governments. Colbert, they say, was its inventor, and it was the rule of every state in Europe. What is most remarkable is that it still is, in spite of the anathemas and the contempt, in spite of the discoveries of the modern school. This system, which our writers have named the mercantile system, consisted in... thwarting, by prohibitions or import duties, the foreign products that might ruin our manufactures by their competition.... This system has been declared inept, absurd, and fit to impoverish any country by the economic writers of every school;¹² it has been banished from every book, reduced to taking refuge in the practice of every nation; and one cannot conceive why, where the wealth of nations is concerned, governments have not relied on the learned authors rather than on the long experience of a system, and so on.... Above all, one cannot conceive why the French government... persists, in political economy, in resisting the progress of enlightenment and keeping in its practice those old errors that all our economists of the pen have pointed out.... But enough about this mercantile system, which has nothing but the facts on its side and is upheld by no writer!"¹³

Hearing that kind of language, wouldn't you think that the economists, in claiming for each person the free disposal of his own property, had dreamed up out of their own heads, like the Fourierists, a new, fantastic, outlandish social order, a sort of phalanstery without precedent in the annals of the human race? It seems to me that if anything in all this has been invented, if anything is artificial, it isn't freedom but protection; it isn't the right to trade, but the customs house, the customs house set to work artificially overturning the natural order of rewards.

But the point isn't to compare the two systems and judge between them; the question for the moment is which of the two rests on experience.

Well then, gentlemen of the monopolies, you claim that the facts are on your side, and that all we have on ours is theories.

You even flatter yourselves that this long series of public acts, this long experience of Europe that you invoke, struck Monsieur Say as imposing; and I admit that he didn't refute you with his usual shrewdness. For my part, I don't concede the ground of facts to you, because all you have on your side is exceptional and coerced facts, and against them we can set the universal facts, the free and voluntary acts of all mankind.

What do we say, and what do you say?

We say:

"It is better to buy from someone else what would cost more to make yourself."

And you say:

"It is better to make things yourself, even though it costs less to buy them from someone else."

Now, gentlemen, leaving aside theory, proof, reasoning, all those things that seem to turn your stomach: which of these two statements has the sanction of universal practice?

Go and visit the fields, the workshops, the factories, the stores; look above you, below you, and around you; examine what goes on in your own household; observe your own actions at every moment; and tell me what principle guides these plowmen, these workers, these employers, these merchants. Tell me what your own personal practice is.

Does the farmer make his own clothes? Does the tailor grow the grain he eats? Doesn't your housekeeper stop baking bread at home as soon as she finds it cheaper to buy it from the baker? Do you put down your pen and pick up a brush so as not to pay tribute to the bootblack? Doesn't the whole economy of society rest on the separation of occupations, on the division of labor, in a word, on exchange? And is exchange anything other than the calculation that makes every one of us stop producing directly whenever getting a thing indirectly saves us time and trouble?

You are not the men of practice, then, since you couldn't point to a single person on the face of the globe who acts on your principle.

"But," you'll say, "we never meant to make our principle the rule of relations between individuals. We quite understand that that would break the social bond and force men to live like snails, each in his shell. We only claim that it governs, in fact, the relations that have grown up between the different groupings of the human family."

Well, that statement is wrong too. The family, the commune, the canton, the department, the province are so many groupings, and every one of them, without exception, rejects your principle in practice and has never even thought of it. They all get by trade whatever it would cost them more to get by production. Nations would do the same, if you didn't prevent it by force.

It's we, then, who are the men of practice and experience. To fight the ban you have placed, by way of exception, on certain international exchanges, we rely on the practice and experience of every individual and every grouping of individuals whose acts are voluntary and can therefore be called as witnesses. But you begin by compelling, by preventing, and then you seize on forced or forbidden acts and cry, "Look, practice proves us right!"

You rail against our theory, and even against theory in general. But when you lay down a principle opposed to ours, did you by any chance imagine you weren't doing theory? No, no, strike that from your notes. You do theory just as we do, but there is this difference between yours and ours:

Our theory consists only in observing universal facts, universal feelings, universal calculations and methods, and at most in classifying them and setting them in order so as to understand them better.

It is so far from being opposed to practice that it is nothing but practice explained. We watch people act, moved by the instinct of self-preservation and progress, and what they do freely and voluntarily is exactly what we call political economy, the economy of society. We never stop repeating: Every man is in practice an excellent economist, producing or trading according to whether it pays better to trade or to produce. Each of us rises through experience to science; or rather, science is nothing but that same experience, scrupulously observed and methodically set out.

But you do theory in the bad sense of the word. You imagine, you invent methods sanctioned by the practice of no man living under the vault of heaven, and then you call in compulsion and prohibition to help you. You have to resort to force, since, wanting people to produce what it is more to their advantage to buy, you want them to give up an advantage; you demand that they behave according to a doctrine that contradicts itself in its very terms.

And this doctrine, which you admit would be absurd in relations between individuals, I defy you to extend, even in speculation, to dealings between families, communes, departments, or provinces. By your own admission, it applies only to relations between nations.

And that is why you are reduced to repeating every day:

"Principles are not absolute. What is right for the individual, the family, the commune, the province, is wrong for the nation. What is good in detail (namely, buying rather than producing when buying pays better than producing) is bad in the mass; the political economy of individuals is not that of nations," and other drivel ejusdem farinae, of the same flour.

And all this for what? Look closely. To prove to us that we consumers are your property! That we belong to you body and soul! That you have an exclusive right over our stomachs and our limbs! That it's for you to feed us and clothe us at your price, however incompetent, rapacious, or badly placed you may be!

No, you are not the men of practice; you are men of abstraction... and extortion.

Chapter 14: A Conflict of Principles

There is one thing that baffles me, and it is this.

Sincere writers, studying the economy of society solely from the producers' point of view, have arrived at this double formula:

"Governments must dispose of the consumers subject to their laws for the benefit of national labor;

"They must bring distant consumers under their laws, so as to dispose of them for the benefit of national labor."

The first of these formulas is called Protection; the second, Outlets.

Both rest on the premise called the Balance of Trade:

"A people grows poorer when it imports, and richer when it exports."

For if every purchase abroad is tribute paid, a loss, then it's only natural to restrict imports, even prohibit them.

And if every sale abroad is tribute received, a profit, then it's only natural to create outlets for yourself, even by force.

The protective system and the colonial system, then, are just two sides of the same theory. To stop our fellow citizens from buying from foreigners and to force foreigners to buy from our fellow citizens are just two consequences of one and the same principle.

Now it's impossible not to see that, according to this doctrine, if it is true, general utility rests on monopoly, which is plunder at home, and on conquest, which is plunder abroad.

I step into one of the chalets that cling to the slopes of our Pyrenees.

The father of the family has received only a meager wage for his work. The icy wind sets his half-naked children shivering; the hearth is cold and the table bare. There is wool and wood and maize on the other side of the mountain, but these goods are forbidden to the poor laborer's family, because the other side of the mountains isn't France anymore. Foreign pine will not cheer the chalet's hearth; the shepherd's children will never know the taste of Basque cornbread, and the wool of Navarre will not warm their numbed limbs. That is what general utility requires: very well! But let's admit that here it is in contradiction with justice.

To dispose of consumers by law, to reserve them for national labor, is to encroach on their liberty, to forbid them an action, exchange, that has nothing immoral about it in itself; in a word, it is to do them injustice.

And yet this is necessary, we're told, or public prosperity will suffer a fatal blow.

The writers of the protectionist school thus arrive at this sad conclusion: that there is a radical incompatibility between Justice and Utility.

On the other hand, if every people has an interest in selling and not buying, then violent action and reaction are the natural state of their relations, for each will try to force its products on all, and all will strive to keep out the products of each.

A sale, after all, implies a purchase; and since, according to this doctrine, selling is gaining and buying is losing, every international transaction implies the improvement of one people and the deterioration of another.

But on the one hand, men are inevitably driven toward what profits them; on the other, they instinctively resist what harms them. From which we must conclude that every people carries within itself a natural force of expansion and an equally natural force of resistance, both of them harmful to all the others; or, in other words, that antagonism and war are the natural state of human society.

The theory I am discussing, then, comes down to these two axioms:

Utility is incompatible with Justice at home.

Utility is incompatible with Peace abroad.

Well, what astonishes me, what baffles me, is that a writer or a statesman who has sincerely embraced an economic doctrine whose principle clashes so violently with other undeniable principles can enjoy a moment's calm and peace of mind.

For my part, it seems to me that if I had entered the science by that door, if I didn't see clearly that Liberty, Utility, Justice, and Peace are not only compatible but closely bound together, and so to speak identical, I would try to forget everything I had learned. I would say to myself:

"How could God have willed that men should reach prosperity only through injustice and war? How could He have willed that they should give up war and injustice only by giving up their well-being?

"Isn't the science that has led me to the horrible blasphemy this dilemma implies deceiving me with false lights? And shall I dare take it upon myself to make it the basis of the legislation of a great people? And when a long line of illustrious scholars have drawn more comforting results from this same science, to which they devoted their whole lives; when they affirm that in it liberty and utility are reconciled with justice and peace, and that all these great principles run on infinite parallels, without ever colliding, for all eternity: don't they have on their side the presumption that comes from everything we know of the goodness and wisdom of God, shown in the sublime harmony of the material creation? Am I to believe lightly, against such a presumption and against so many imposing authorities, that this same God took pleasure in putting antagonism and dissonance into the laws of the moral world? No, no. Before I hold it for certain that all social principles collide, clash, cancel one another out, and stand in an anarchic, eternal, irremediable conflict; before I impose on my fellow citizens the impious system my reasoning has led me to, I mean to go back over the whole chain of it, and make sure there isn't some point along the road where I went astray."

And if, after a sincere examination, begun twenty times over, I always arrived at this dreadful conclusion, that we must choose between the Right and the Good, I would turn my back on the science in discouragement and sink into willful ignorance; above all, I would refuse any part in the affairs of my country, leaving to men of a different temper the burden and the responsibility of so painful a choice.

Chapter 15: Reciprocity Again

Monsieur de Saint-Cricq used to say: "Are we sure the foreigner will buy as much from us as he sells to us?"

Monsieur de Dombasle: "What reason have we to believe that English producers will come to us, rather than to any other nation on the globe, for the products they may need, and for products worth as much as their exports to France?"

How I admire the way men who call themselves practical above all else reason without any reference to practice!

In practice, is there one exchange in a hundred, in a thousand, in ten thousand perhaps, that is a direct barter of product for product? Since money came into the world, has any farmer ever said to himself, "I'll buy shoes, hats, advice, and lessons only from the shoemaker, the hatter, the lawyer, and the teacher who will buy wheat from me for exactly the same value"? And why should nations saddle themselves with such a constraint?

How do things actually work?

Suppose a people with no foreign relations at all. A man has grown wheat. He puts it into the national circulation at the highest price he can get, and he receives in exchange... what? Coins; that is, warrants, vouchers divisible without limit, with which he will be free to draw out of the national circulation in his turn, whenever he sees fit and up to the amount due, the things he needs or wants. In the end, when the operation is over, he will have drawn from the common stock exactly the equivalent of what he put into it, and, in value, his consumption will exactly equal his production.

If this nation's trade with the outside world is free, it is no longer into the national circulation but into the general circulation that each person pours his products and from which he draws what he consumes. He doesn't have to worry whether what he hands over to this general circulation is bought by a fellow countryman or a foreigner; whether the vouchers he receives come from a Frenchman or an Englishman; whether the things he later exchanges these vouchers for, as he needs them, were made on this side of the Rhine or the Pyrenees or on the other. Either way, for each individual there is an exact balance between what he pours into the great common reservoir and what he draws from it; and if that is true of each individual, it is true of the nation as a whole.

The only difference between the two cases is that in the second each person faces a wider market for his sales and his purchases, and therefore has a better chance of doing well at both.

Here is the objection people make: If everyone joins together not to draw a particular individual's products out of the circulation, he won't be able to draw anything out of the common stock in his turn. The same goes for a people.

Answer: If that people can draw nothing out of the common stock, it won't put anything into it either; it will work for itself. It will be forced to submit to exactly what you want to impose on it in advance, namely, isolation.

And that will be the ideal of the prohibitive system.

Isn't it comical that you inflict this system on it here and now, for fear that it might run the risk of arriving at it some day without you?

Chapter 16: Blocked Rivers Pleading for the Prohibitionists

A few years ago I was in Madrid. I went to the Cortes. They were debating a treaty with Portugal to improve navigation on the Douro. A deputy stood up and said: "If the Douro is canalized, freight on it will be cheaper. Portuguese grain will sell more cheaply in the Castiles and give our national labor formidable competition. I oppose the bill, unless the ministers undertake to raise the customs tariff so as to restore the balance." The assembly found the argument unanswerable.

Three months later I was in Lisbon. The same question was before the Senate. A noble hidalgo said: "Senhor presidente, the bill is absurd. You post guards, at great expense, along the banks of the Douro to prevent an invasion of Castilian grain into Portugal, and at the same time you want, again at great expense, to make that invasion easier. That is an inconsistency I cannot be party to. Let the Douro pass to our sons just as our fathers left it to us."

Later on, when there was talk of improving the Garonne, I remembered the arguments of these Iberian orators, and I said to myself: If the deputies from Toulouse were as good economists as the one from Palencia, and the representatives of Bordeaux as sharp logicians as the ones from Oporto, they would surely leave the Garonne

	To slumber, lulled by the sweet murmur of its tilted urn,

because canalizing the Garonne will encourage an invasion of Toulouse products to the detriment of Bordeaux, and a flood of Bordeaux products to the detriment of Toulouse.¹⁴

Chapter 17: A Negative Railroad

I said that when, unfortunately, people take the producer's interest as their point of view, they can't help colliding with the general interest, because the producer, as such, asks for nothing but efforts, needs, and obstacles.

I find a remarkable example of this in a Bordeaux newspaper.

Monsieur Simiot asks himself this question:

Should the railroad from Paris to Spain have a break in it at Bordeaux?

He answers yes, for a host of reasons I needn't examine, but among others for this one:

The railroad from Paris to Bayonne should have a gap at Bordeaux, so that goods and passengers, forced to stop in that city, will leave profits there for boatmen, porters, forwarding agents, consignees, innkeepers, and so on.

Clearly this is once again the interest of the agents of labor put ahead of the interest of consumers.

But if Bordeaux is to profit from the gap, and if that profit is in the public interest, then Angoulême, Poitiers, Tours, and Orléans, and indeed every point in between, Ruffec, Châtellerault, and so on and so forth, ought to ask for gaps too, and in the general interest, in the properly understood interest of national labor; for the more gaps there are, the more consignments, commissions, and transshipments there will be at every point along the line. With this system you end up with a railroad made of nothing but gaps, one after another: a negative railroad.

Whether the gentlemen of the protectionist party like it or not, it is no less certain that the principle of restriction is the same as the principle of gaps: the sacrifice of the consumer to the producer, of the end to the means.

Chapter 18: There Are No Absolute Principles

It's astonishing how easily people resign themselves to not knowing what matters most for them to know; and you can be sure they've made up their minds to doze off in their ignorance once they've got as far as proclaiming the axiom: There are no absolute principles.

You walk into the legislative chamber. The question before it is whether the law shall forbid international trade or set it free.

A deputy stands up and says:

"If you allow this trade, the foreigner will flood you with his products: the Englishman with textiles, the Belgian with coal, the Spaniard with wool, the Italian with silk, the Swiss with cattle, the Swede with iron, the Prussian with wheat; so that no industry will be possible here anymore."

Another answers:

"If you prohibit this trade, the various blessings nature has lavished on each climate will be, for you, as if they didn't exist. You won't share in the mechanical skill of the English, the wealth of the Belgian mines, the fertility of Polish soil, the richness of Swiss pastures, the cheapness of Spanish labor, the warmth of the Italian climate; and you'll have to wring out of stubborn production what you could have had from easy production by trade."

One of these deputies is certainly wrong. But which? It's worth finding out, since this isn't merely a matter of opinions. You stand before two roads, you must choose, and one of them necessarily leads to poverty.

To get out of the difficulty, people say: There are no absolute principles.

This axiom, so fashionable in our day, appeals not only to laziness but to ambition.

If the theory of prohibition were to prevail, or if the doctrine of freedom were to triumph, one tiny little law would make up our whole economic code. In the first case it would read: All trade with other countries is forbidden; in the second: All trade with foreigners is free; and a great many important personages would lose much of their importance.

But if exchange has no nature of its own, if it is governed by no natural law, if it is capriciously useful or harmful, if it doesn't find its spur in the good it does and its limit in the good it stops doing, if its effects can't be judged by the people who carry it out; in a word, if there are no absolute principles, oh, then transactions must be weighed, balanced, and regulated, the conditions of labor must be equalized, the level of profits must be sought: a colossal task, well suited to giving those who take it on large salaries and great influence.

As I came into Paris, which I had come to visit, I said to myself: Here are a million human beings who would all die within a few days if supplies of every kind stopped flowing into this vast metropolis. The imagination is staggered when it tries to grasp the immense variety of things that must come in through its gates tomorrow if the lives of its inhabitants are not to end in the convulsions of famine, riot, and looting. And yet at this moment they are all asleep, and their peaceful sleep isn't troubled for an instant by the thought of so frightful a prospect. Meanwhile eighty departments have worked today, without consulting one another, without any agreement, to supply Paris. How does each day bring what is needed, no more and no less, to this gigantic market? What ingenious and secret power presides over the astonishing regularity of movements so complicated, a regularity in which everyone has such carefree faith, though comfort and life itself depend on it? That power is an absolute principle, the principle of free exchange. We have faith in the inner light that Providence has placed in the heart of every man, to which it has entrusted the preservation and the endless improvement of our species: self-interest, since we must call it by its name, so active, so vigilant, so farsighted when it is free to act. Where would you be, people of Paris, if a minister took it into his head to replace this power with the schemes of his own genius, however superior we suppose it to be? If he thought of putting this prodigious mechanism under his supreme direction, gathering all its springs into his own hands, deciding by whom, where, how, and on what terms each thing must be produced, carried, exchanged, and consumed? Oh, though there is much suffering within your walls, though poverty, despair, and perhaps starvation draw more tears there than your warm charity can dry, it is probable, it is certain, I dare say, that the arbitrary intervention of government would multiply that suffering endlessly, and spread over all of you the ills that now strike only a small number of your fellow citizens.

Well, this faith we all have in a principle when it comes to our domestic transactions: why shouldn't we have it in the same principle applied to our international transactions, which are surely fewer, less delicate, and less complicated? And if it isn't necessary for the Paris prefecture to regulate our industries, weigh our chances, our profits, and our losses, worry about the drain of money, and equalize the conditions of our labor in domestic trade, why is it necessary for the customs, stepping outside its fiscal job, to claim to exercise a protective influence over our foreign trade?

Chapter 19: National Independence

Among the arguments put forward for the restrictive system, we mustn't forget the one drawn from national independence.

"What will we do in case of war," people say, "if we have put ourselves at England's mercy for iron and coal?"

The English monopolists, for their part, never fail to cry:

"What will become of Great Britain in time of war if she makes herself dependent on the French for her food?"

One thing goes unnoticed: the kind of dependence that comes from trade, from commercial dealings, is a mutual dependence. We can't depend on the foreigner without the foreigner depending on us. And that is the very essence of society. To break off natural relations is not to make yourself independent but to make yourself isolated.

And notice this: people isolate themselves in anticipation of war; but the very act of isolating yourself is a beginning of war. It makes war easier, less costly, and therefore less unpopular. Let peoples be permanent markets for one another; let their relations be impossible to break without inflicting on them the double suffering of going without and of being stuck with unsold goods; and they will no longer need the mighty navies that ruin them or the great armies that crush them. The peace of the world will not be put at risk by the whim of a Thiers or a Palmerston, the French and British ministers who nearly took their countries to war in 1840, and war will disappear for lack of fuel, means, motives, pretexts, and popular support.

I know very well I'll be reproached (it's the fashion of the day) for basing the brotherhood of nations on interest, vile and prosaic interest. People would rather it had its source in charity, in love; that it should even call for a little self-denial, and, by bruising people's material well-being, have the merit of a generous sacrifice.

When will we be done with these childish declamations? When will we finally banish Tartuffery from science? When will we stop putting this nauseating contradiction between our writings and our actions? We boo and hiss at interest, that is, at the useful, the good (for to say that all peoples have an interest in a thing is to say that the thing is good in itself), as if interest weren't the necessary, eternal, indestructible motive to which Providence has entrusted human improvement! Wouldn't you think we were all angels of unselfishness? And do people imagine the public isn't beginning to notice, with disgust, that this affected language fills precisely the pages it is charged the most for? Oh, affectation, affectation! It really is the disease of this century.

What! Because well-being and peace go together, because it has pleased God to establish this fine harmony in the moral world, you don't want me to admire and adore His decrees and accept with gratitude laws that make justice the condition of happiness? You want peace only on condition that it hurts our well-being, and freedom weighs on you because it doesn't impose sacrifices on you? And if self-denial has such charms for you, what's stopping you from practicing it in your private conduct? Society will be grateful to you, since somebody at least will reap the benefit. But to try to impose it on humanity as a principle is the height of absurdity, because the self-denial of all is the sacrifice of all, which is evil set up as a theory.

But thank heaven, a great deal of this declamation can be written and read without the world ceasing to obey its motive, which, like it or not, is interest.

After all, it's rather odd to see the feelings of the most sublime self-denial invoked in support of plunder itself. This, then, is what all this showy unselfishness comes to! These men, so poetically delicate that they want no part even of peace if it rests on the vile interest of mankind, are putting their hands into other people's pockets, and above all into the pockets of the poor; for what item in the tariff protects the poor? Well, gentlemen, dispose as you please of what belongs to you, but let us dispose of the fruit of our own sweat too, to use it or trade it as we like. Declaim about renouncing yourselves, for that is a fine thing; but at the same time, at least be honest.

Chapter 20: Human Labor and National Labor

Smashing machines and keeping out foreign goods are two acts that spring from the same doctrine.

There are people who clap their hands when a great invention is revealed to the world, and who nevertheless support the protective system. Those people are very inconsistent!

What do they hold against free trade? That it gets things made by foreigners more skilled or better placed than we are, things that without it we would make ourselves. In a word, they accuse it of harming national labor.

By the same token, shouldn't they hold it against machines that they get done by natural forces what, without them, would be the work of our hands, and so harm human labor?

The foreign worker, better placed than the French worker, is, as far as the French worker is concerned, a real economic machine that crushes him with its competition. In the same way, a machine that performs an operation more cheaply than a certain number of hands is, as far as those hands are concerned, a real foreign competitor that paralyzes them with its rivalry.

If, then, it is right to protect national labor against the competition of foreign labor, it is no less right to protect human labor against the rivalry of mechanical labor.

And so anyone who supports the protective system, if he has a little logic in his head, mustn't stop at prohibiting foreign products. He must also ban the products of the shuttle and the plow.

That's why I much prefer the logic of the men who, while declaiming against the invasion of foreign goods, at least have the courage to declaim as well against the overproduction that comes from the inventive power of the human mind.

Monsieur de Saint-Chamans is one of them. "One of the strongest arguments," he says, "against free trade and the excessive use of machines is that many workers are deprived of work, either by foreign competition, which brings down the factories, or by the instruments that take the place of men in the workshops." (Du système d'impôts, page 438.)

Monsieur de Saint-Chamans has seen perfectly well the analogy, or better, the identity, between imports and machines. That is why he bans both; and it really is a pleasure to deal with fearless arguers who, even in error, push their reasoning all the way.

But look at the difficulty waiting for them!

If it is true, a priori, that the domain of invention and the domain of labor can grow only at each other's expense, then it's in the countries with the most machines, Lancashire for example, that we should find the fewest workers. And if, on the contrary, we observe in fact that machinery and manual labor coexist to a higher degree among rich peoples than among savages, we must necessarily conclude that these two powers don't exclude each other.

I can't understand how a thinking being can enjoy a moment's rest in the face of this dilemma:

Either man's inventions do not harm his labor, as the general facts attest, since there is more of both among the English and the French than among the Hurons and the Cherokees; in which case I've taken a wrong road, though I don't know where or when I went astray. I would be committing a crime against humanity if I wrote my error into the laws of my country.

Or else the discoveries of the mind limit the labor of the hands, as particular facts seem to indicate, since every day I see a machine take the place of twenty or a hundred workers; and then I am forced to recognize a flagrant, eternal, incurable antithesis between man's intellectual power and his physical power, between his progress and his well-being; and I can't help saying that man's maker should have given him reason or arms, moral strength or brute strength, but that He made a fool of him by giving him both at once, faculties that destroy each other.

The difficulty is pressing. And do you know how people get out of it? With this strange maxim:

In political economy there are no absolute principles.

In plain, intelligible language, that means:

"I don't know where truth and falsehood lie; I don't know what makes up the general good or the general harm. I don't trouble myself about it. The immediate effect of each measure on my own personal well-being: that is the only law I'm willing to recognize."

There are no principles! But that's as if you said: There are no facts. For principles are nothing but formulas summing up a whole class of well-established facts.

Machines and imports certainly have effects. Those effects are good or bad. People may differ on this. But whichever view you take, it can be stated as one of two principles: Machines are a good thing, or machines are a bad thing. Imports are beneficial, or imports are harmful. But to say there are no principles is surely the lowest depth to which the human mind can sink; and I confess I blush for my country when I hear so monstrous a heresy uttered before the French Chambers, with their assent, that is, before and with the assent of the elite of our citizens; and all to excuse imposing laws on us in perfect ignorance of the matter.

"But then," someone will say, "destroy the sophism. Prove that machines don't harm human labor, nor imports national labor."

In a work of this kind, such proofs can't be very complete. My aim is more to raise the difficulties than to resolve them, and more to stir up reflection than to satisfy it. The only conviction the mind ever really owns is the one it owes to its own work. I'll try, all the same, to put it on the right track.

What misleads the opponents of imports and machines is that they judge them by their immediate and temporary effects, instead of going on to their general and final consequences.

The immediate effect of an ingenious machine is to make a certain amount of labor superfluous for a given result. But its action doesn't stop there. Precisely because that given result is obtained with less effort, it is offered to the public at a lower price; and the total savings thus made by all the buyers serves them to get other satisfactions, that is, to encourage labor in general, by exactly the amount taken away from the particular labor of the newly improved industry. The level of labor, then, has not fallen, although the level of satisfactions has risen.

Let's make this chain of effects visible with an example.

Suppose that ten million hats are bought in France at 15 francs each; that gives the hat industry a market of 150 million. A machine is invented that makes it possible to sell hats at 10 francs. The market for this industry falls to 100 million, assuming consumption doesn't increase. But the other 50 million aren't taken away from human labor on that account. Saved by the buyers of hats, they will serve them to satisfy other needs, and so to pay that much more to industry as a whole. With his 5 francs saved, John will buy a pair of shoes, James a book, Jerome a piece of furniture, and so on. Human labor, taken as a whole, will therefore go on being encouraged to the tune of 150 million; but that sum will produce the same number of hats as before, plus all the satisfactions corresponding to the 50 million the machine has saved. Those satisfactions are the net product France will have drawn from the invention. They are a free gift, a tribute that the genius of man will have levied on nature. We don't deny that in the course of the change a certain amount of labor will have been displaced; but we cannot grant that it will have been destroyed, or even reduced.

The same goes for imports. Let's take up the hypothesis again.

France was making ten million hats at a cost price of 15 francs. The foreigner invades our market and supplies us hats at 10 francs. I say that national labor will not be reduced in the least.

For it will have to produce up to the amount of 100 million to pay for 10 million hats at 10 francs.

And then each buyer will be left with 5 francs saved per hat, or 50 million in all, which will pay for other enjoyments, that is, for other labor.

The total of labor, then, will stay what it was, and the additional enjoyments, represented by the 50 million saved on hats, will be the net profit of imports, of free trade.

And no one should try to frighten us with a picture of the suffering that, on this hypothesis, would go along with the displacement of labor.

For if prohibition had never existed, labor would have sorted itself out according to the law of exchange, and no displacement would have taken place.

If, on the contrary, prohibition has brought about an artificial and unproductive arrangement of labor, then it is prohibition and not freedom that is responsible for the displacement that cannot be avoided in the passage from bad to good.

Unless someone means to claim that because an abuse can't be destroyed without hurting those who profit from it, its having existed for a moment is enough to make it last forever.

Chapter 21: Raw Materials

People say: The most advantageous trade of all is the one in which manufactured goods are given in exchange for raw materials, because raw materials are food for national labor.

And from this they conclude:

That the best customs law would be the one that made it as easy as possible to bring in raw materials and put the most obstacles in the way of goods that have received their first working.

There's no sophism in political economy more widespread than this one. It keeps not only the protectionist school going but also, and above all, the so-called liberal school; and that's unfortunate, because the worst thing for a good cause isn't being well attacked, it's being badly defended.

Free trade will probably share the fate of all freedoms: it will make its way into our laws only after it has taken possession of our minds. But if it's true that a reform must be generally understood to be firmly established, it follows that nothing can delay it so much as what leads opinion astray; and what could lead it astray better than writings that demand freedom on the strength of the doctrines of monopoly?

A few years ago three great French cities, Lyon, Bordeaux, and Le Havre, rose up in arms against the restrictive system. The country, all Europe, was stirred to see what they took for the flag of freedom raised. Alas, it was the flag of monopoly again! Of a monopoly rather pettier and much more absurd than the one they seemed to want to overthrow. Thanks to the sophism I'm going to try to unmask, the petitioners merely reproduced the doctrine of protection for national labor, adding one more inconsistency to it.

What, after all, is the prohibitive system? Let's hear Monsieur de Saint-Cricq.

"Labor makes up the wealth of a people, because labor alone creates the material things our needs demand, and universal comfort consists in the abundance of those things." That's the principle.

"But this abundance must be the product of national labor. If it were the product of foreign labor, national labor would soon come to a stop." That's the error. (See the previous sophism.)

"What, then, should an agricultural and manufacturing country do? Reserve its market for the products of its own soil and its own industry." That's the aim.

"And to do this, restrict by duties, and prohibit if need be, the products of the soil and industry of other peoples." That's the means.

Let's set beside this system the system of the Bordeaux petition.

It divided goods into three classes.

"The first contains foodstuffs and raw materials, untouched by any human labor. In principle, sound economics would require that this class not be taxed." Here there's no labor, so no protection.

"The second consists of goods that have received some preparation. That preparation allows some duties to be laid on it." Here protection begins, because, according to the petitioners, national labor begins.

"The third comprises finished goods, which can be of no use to national labor at all; we consider it the most taxable." Here labor, and protection with it, reach their maximum.

You can see that the petitioners held that foreign labor harms national labor: that's the error of the prohibitive system.

They asked that the French market be reserved for French labor: that's the aim of the prohibitive system.

They demanded that foreign labor be subjected to restrictions and taxes: that's the means of the prohibitive system.

What difference can anyone possibly find, then, between the Bordeaux petitioners and the leading chorister of restriction? Only one: how far to stretch the word labor.

Monsieur de Saint-Cricq stretches it to cover everything. And so he wants to protect everything.

"Labor makes up all the wealth of a people," he says. "To protect agricultural industry, all agricultural industry; manufacturing industry, all manufacturing industry: that is the cry that will always ring out in this Chamber."

The petitioners see no labor except the manufacturers'; and so they admit only that kind to the favors of protection.

"Raw materials are untouched by any human labor. In principle they should not be taxed. Manufactured goods can no longer be of use to national labor; we consider them the most taxable."

The point here isn't to examine whether protecting national labor is reasonable. Monsieur de Saint-Cricq and the men of Bordeaux agree on that, and we, as you have seen in the previous chapters, differ from both of them.

The question is which of them, Monsieur de Saint-Cricq or the Bordeaux men, gives the word labor its proper meaning.

And on this ground, it must be said, Monsieur de Saint-Cricq is a thousand times right, for here is the dialogue that might take place between them.

Monsieur de Saint-Cricq. You agree that national labor must be protected. You agree that no foreign labor can come into our market without destroying an equal quantity of our national labor. Only you claim that there are a host of goods that have value, since they sell, and that are nonetheless untouched by any human labor. And you name, among other things, wheat, flour, meat, cattle, bacon, salt, iron, copper, lead, coal, wool, hides, seeds, and so on.

If you prove to me that the value of these things isn't due to labor, I'll agree that there's no point in protecting them.

But by the same token, if I show you that there is as much labor in a hundred francs' worth of wool as in 100 francs' worth of cloth, you'll have to admit that one is owed protection as much as the other.

Now why is this sack of wool worth 100 francs? Isn't it because that's its cost price? And what is cost price, if not what had to be paid out in wages, salaries, labor, and interest to all the workers and capitalists who took part in producing the thing?

The Petitioners. It's true that for wool you might be right. But is a sack of wheat, an ingot of iron, a quintal of coal the product of labor? Isn't it nature that creates them?

Monsieur de Saint-Cricq. No doubt nature creates the elements of all these things, but it is labor that produces their value. I was wrong myself to say that labor creates material objects, and that faulty expression has led me into many other errors. It isn't given to man to create, to make something out of nothing, any more to the manufacturer than to the farmer. If by production we meant creation, all our labors would be unproductive, and yours, gentlemen of commerce, more than any others, except perhaps mine.

The farmer, then, doesn't claim to have created the wheat, but he does claim to have created its value; I mean that by his labor, and that of his servants, his ox drivers, and his reapers, he has transformed into wheat substances that didn't resemble it in the least. What more does the miller do who turns it into flour, or the baker who shapes it into bread?

For a man to be able to dress in woolen cloth, a host of operations are needed. Before any human labor comes in, the true raw materials of this product are the air, the water, the heat, the gases, the light, and the salts that must go into its makeup. Those are the raw materials that are truly untouched by any human labor, since they have no value, and I've no thought of protecting them. But a first labor turns these substances into fodder, a second into wool, a third into yarn, a fourth into cloth, a fifth into clothes. Who will dare say that everything in this work isn't labor, from the first stroke of the plow that begins it to the last stitch of the needle that finishes it?

And because, for greater speed and perfection in completing the final work, which is a garment, the labors have been divided among several classes of working people, you want, by an arbitrary distinction, to make the order in which these labors come the sole measure of their importance, so that the first doesn't even deserve the name of labor, and the last, labor par excellence, is alone worthy of the favors of protection?

The Petitioners. Yes, we're beginning to see that wheat, like wool, isn't altogether untouched by human labor. But at least the farmer hasn't done everything himself and with his workers, as the manufacturer has; nature has helped him; and if there is labor in wheat, not everything in it is labor.

Monsieur de Saint-Cricq. But everything in its value is labor. Grant that nature has played a part in the physical formation of the grain. Grant even that it is entirely her work. But admit that I have made her do it by my labor; and when I sell you wheat, note this well, it isn't nature's labor I'm charging you for, but mine.

And by your reckoning, manufactured goods wouldn't be products of labor either. Doesn't the manufacturer get help from nature too? Doesn't he harness the weight of the atmosphere with the steam engine, as I harness its moisture with the plow? Did he create the laws of gravitation, of the transmission of forces, of chemical affinity?

The Petitioners. All right, we'll give you wool too; but coal is surely the work, the exclusive work, of nature. It really is untouched by any human labor.

Monsieur de Saint-Cricq. Yes, nature made coal, but labor made its value. Coal had no value during the millions of years it lay buried and unknown a hundred feet underground. Someone had to go and get it: that's labor. Someone had to carry it to market: that's more labor. And, once again, the price you pay for it at market is nothing but the payment for this labor of digging and carrying.¹⁵

You can see that so far the advantage is all on Monsieur de Saint-Cricq's side: that the value of raw materials, like that of manufactured goods, represents the costs of production, that is, labor; that it's impossible to imagine an object that has value and is untouched by any human labor; that the petitioners' distinction is empty in theory; and that as the basis for an unequal handing out of favors it would be iniquitous in practice, since the result would be that the third of the French who work in manufacturing would get the sweets of monopoly on the grounds that they produce by working, while the other two thirds, the farming population, would be left to competition on the pretext that they produce without working.

People will insist, I'm sure, and say that it's more advantageous for a nation to import the materials called raw, whether or not they are the product of labor, and to export manufactured goods.

That's a very widely held opinion.

"The more plentiful raw materials are," says the Bordeaux petition, "the more manufactures multiply and flourish."

"Raw materials," it says elsewhere, "leave boundless scope for the work of the inhabitants of the countries into which they are imported."

"Raw materials," says the Le Havre petition, "being the elements of labor, must be subjected to a different system and admitted at once at the lowest rate."

The same petition wants the protection of manufactured goods to be reduced not at once but at some unspecified time; not to the lowest rate, but to 20 percent.

"Among other articles whose cheapness and abundance are a necessity," says the Lyon petition, "the manufacturers name all raw materials."

All this rests on an illusion.

We have seen that all value represents labor. Now it's quite true that manufacturing labor multiplies the value of a raw product ten times, sometimes a hundred times; that is, it spreads ten times, a hundred times more profit through the nation. And so people reason like this: Producing a quintal of iron earns workers of every class only 15 francs. Turning that quintal of iron into watch springs raises their earnings to 10,000 francs. Will you dare to say that the nation has no greater interest in securing 10,000 francs' worth of labor than 15 francs' worth?

What they forget is that exchanges between nations, any more than exchanges between individuals, aren't made by weight or measure. You don't trade a quintal of raw iron for a quintal of watch springs, or a pound of greasy wool for a pound of cashmere; you trade a certain value of one of these things for an equal value of another. And to trade equal value for equal value is to trade equal labor for equal labor. It isn't true, then, that the nation that gives 100 francs' worth of cloth or springs gains more than the nation that hands over 100 francs' worth of wool or iron.

In a country where no law can be passed and no tax imposed except with the consent of those the law is to govern or the tax to strike, the public can be robbed only if it is deceived first. Our ignorance is the raw material of every extortion practiced on us, and you can be sure in advance that every sophism is the herald of a plunder. Good public, when you see a sophism in a petition, put your hand on your wallet, for that is certainly what they are aiming at.

Let's see, then, what secret thought the shipowners of Bordeaux and Le Havre and the manufacturers of Lyon are wrapping up in this distinction between agricultural products and manufactured goods.

"It is chiefly in this first class (the one that includes raw materials, untouched by any human labor)," say the Bordeaux petitioners, "that our merchant marine finds its chief nourishment.... In principle, sound economics would require that this class not be taxed.... The second (goods that have received some preparation) may be burdened. The third (goods on which labor has nothing left to do) we consider the most taxable."

"Whereas," say the Le Havre petitioners, "it is indispensable to reduce raw materials at once to the lowest rate, so that industry may in turn set to work the naval forces that will provide it with its first and indispensable means of labor...."

The manufacturers couldn't be outdone in politeness by the shipowners. And so the Lyon petition asks for the free entry of raw materials "to prove," it says, "that the interests of the manufacturing towns are not always opposed to those of the seaports."

No; but it must be said that both, understood as the petitioners understand them, are terribly opposed to the interests of the countryside, of agriculture, and of consumers.

That, then, is what you were driving at, gentlemen! That's the purpose of your subtle economic distinctions! You want the law to stop finished goods from crossing the ocean, so that the much costlier carriage of raw materials, dirty and full of waste, will give more nourishment to your merchant marine and set your naval forces to work on a larger scale. That's what you call sound economics.

Well, why not demand as well that pine trees be brought from Russia with their branches, bark, and roots; gold from Mexico in the form of ore; and hides from Buenos Aires still attached to the bones of stinking carcasses?

Soon, I expect, the railroad shareholders, if they ever have a majority in the Chambers, will pass a law forbidding the brandy drunk in Paris to be distilled in Cognac. To order by law the carriage of ten casks of wine for every cask of brandy: wouldn't that at once supply Paris industry with the indispensable nourishment of its labor and set the power of the locomotives to work?

How long will people shut their eyes to this simple truth?

Industry, naval forces, and labor have as their aim the general good, the public good. To create useless industries, encourage superfluous carriage, and feed surplus labor, not for the good of the public but at the public's expense, is a perfect case of begging the question. It isn't labor that is desirable in itself; it's consumption. All labor without a result is a loss. To pay sailors to carry useless waste across the seas is like paying them to skip stones across the water. And so we arrive at this result: all the economic sophisms, for all their infinite variety, have this in common, that they confuse the means with the end, and develop the one at the expense of the other.

Chapter 22: Metaphors

Sometimes a sophism spreads itself out and runs through the whole fabric of a long, heavy theory. More often it squeezes itself down, contracts, turns itself into a principle, and hides entire inside a single word.

"God keep us," said Paul-Louis Courier, "from the Evil One and from metaphor!" And indeed it would be hard to say which of the two pours more harm onto our planet. "It's the Devil," you say; "he puts the spirit of plunder into every one of our hearts." Yes, but he leaves us free to put down abuses through the resistance of those who suffer from them. It's the sophism that paralyzes that resistance. The sword that malice puts into the hands of the attackers would be powerless if the sophism didn't break the shield on the arms of the attacked; and Malebranche was right to inscribe on the title page of his book the maxim: Error is the cause of men's misery.

And see what happens. Hypocritical, ambitious men will have some sinister interest in, for example, sowing the seeds of national hatred among the public. That deadly seed may grow, bring on a general conflagration, halt civilization, shed torrents of blood, and bring down on the country the most terrible of scourges, invasion. In any case, and in advance, these hateful feelings lower us in the opinion of other peoples and leave the French who still have some love of justice blushing for their country. These are great evils, surely; and for the public to guard itself against the schemes of those who would expose it to such risks, it would be enough for the public to see them clearly. How do they manage to hide them from it? With metaphor. They alter, strain, and corrupt the meaning of three or four words, and that does it.

Take the word invasion itself.

A French ironmaster says: Let's protect ourselves from the invasion of English iron. An English landlord cries: Let's repel the invasion of French wheat! And they propose to put up barriers between the two peoples. Barriers make for isolation, isolation leads to hatred, hatred to war, and war to invasion. "What of it?" say the two sophists. "Isn't it better to risk a possible invasion than to accept a certain one?" And the peoples believe them, and the barriers stay.

And yet what analogy is there between an exchange and an invasion? What likeness can anyone find between a warship that comes to spew iron, fire, and devastation onto our towns and a merchant ship that comes to offer us a free, voluntary trade of products for products?

I'll say as much of the word flood. It's usually taken in a bad sense, because floods are rather in the habit of laying waste fields and harvests. But if they left behind on the land a value greater than the value they carried off, as the floods of the Nile do, we ought, like the Egyptians, to bless them and make gods of them. Well, before declaiming against floods of foreign products, before setting up awkward and costly obstacles against them, does anyone ask whether these are the kind of floods that lay waste or the kind that make fertile? What would we think of Mehemet Ali if, instead of building dams across the Nile at great expense to spread its floods further, he spent his piastres digging it a deeper bed, so that Egypt wouldn't be soiled by that foreign silt come down from the Mountains of the Moon? We show exactly that degree of wisdom and good sense when we want, with millions upon millions, to protect our country... from what? From the blessings nature has bestowed on other climates.

Among the metaphors that conceal a whole pernicious theory, none is more common than the one in the words tribute and tributary.

These words have become so common that they are treated as synonyms for purchase and purchaser, and people use one or the other without distinction.

And yet a tribute is as far from a purchase as theft is from exchange; and I'd as soon hear someone say, "Cartouche broke into my safe and bought a thousand crowns there," as hear our honorable deputies repeat, "We have paid Germany the tribute of a thousand horses she sold us."

For what makes Cartouche's act not a purchase is that he didn't put into my safe, with my consent, a value equal to the one he took.

And what makes the 500,000 francs we handed over to Germany not a tribute is precisely that she didn't receive them for nothing, but by delivering to us in exchange a thousand horses that we ourselves judged to be worth our 500,000 francs.¹⁶

Must one seriously take up such abuses of language? Why not, since they are paraded quite seriously in the newspapers and in books?

And don't imagine that they slip only from the pens of a few writers who don't even know their own language! For every one who avoids them, I'll show you ten who indulge in them, and some of the grandest at that: the d'Argouts, the Dupins, the Villèles, peers, deputies, ministers; that is, the men whose words are laws and whose most shocking sophisms serve as the basis for governing the country.

A celebrated modern philosopher has added to Aristotle's categories the sophism that consists in packing a question-begging argument into a single word. He gives several examples. He could have added the word tributary to his list. The question, after all, is whether purchases made abroad are useful or harmful. They're harmful, you say. Why? Because they make us tributaries of the foreigner. Now there's a word that takes for granted exactly what is in question!¹⁷

How did this abusive figure of speech get into the rhetoric of the monopolists?

Coins leave the country to satisfy the greed of a victorious enemy. Other coins leave the country too, to pay for goods. The two cases are made out to be alike by considering only the circumstance in which they resemble each other and leaving out the circumstance in which they differ.

And yet that circumstance, namely no repayment in the first case and a freely agreed repayment in the second, makes such a difference between them that it really isn't possible to file them under the same label. Handing over 100 francs by force to someone who has you by the throat, or willingly to someone who gives you what you want: honestly, these are things that can't be lumped together. You might as well say it makes no difference whether you throw bread into the river or eat it, because either way it's bread destroyed. The fault in that reasoning, like the fault packed into the word tribute, would lie in building a complete likeness between two cases on their resemblance while leaving out their difference.

Conclusion

All the sophisms I've fought so far bear on a single question, the restrictive system; and even then, out of pity for the reader, "I pass over many, and some of the best": vested rights, bad timing, the drain of money, and so on and so forth.

But social economy isn't confined to this narrow circle. Fourierism, Saint-Simonism, communism, mysticism, sentimentalism, false philanthropy, affected yearnings for a fantasy equality and brotherhood, and the questions of luxury, wages, machines, the so-called tyranny of capital, colonies, outlets, conquests, population, association, emigration, taxes, and loans have cluttered the field of the science with a mass of parasitic arguments, sophisms crying out for the diligent economist's hoe and weeding fork.

Not that I fail to see the fault in this plan, or rather this lack of a plan. To attack one by one so many incoherent sophisms, which sometimes collide and more often overlap, is to condemn yourself to a disorderly, haphazard struggle and to perpetual repetition.

How much I'd prefer simply to say how things are, without bothering about the thousand ways ignorance sees them!... To set out the laws by which societies prosper or decline is to ruin virtually all the sophisms at once. When Laplace had described what can so far be known of the motions of the heavenly bodies, he dispelled all the astrological fancies of the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Hindus, without even naming them, far more surely than he could have by refuting them directly in countless volumes. Truth is one; the book that sets it out is an imposing and lasting edifice:

	It braves the greedy tyrant's hand,
	Bolder than the Pyramids stand,
	And more enduring than bronze.

Error is many and short-lived by nature; the work that fights it carries within itself no principle of greatness or endurance.

But if I lacked the strength, and perhaps the opportunity, to proceed in the manner of a Laplace or a Say, I can't help believing that the form I've adopted has its own modest usefulness too. Above all, it seems to me well suited to the needs of the age, to the hurried moments it can spare for study.

A treatise no doubt has an undeniable superiority, but on one condition: that it be read, pondered, and studied in depth. It speaks only to a select public. Its mission is first to fix, and then to enlarge, the circle of established knowledge.

The refutation of popular prejudices can't have so lofty a reach. It aims only to clear the road ahead of the advance of truth, to prepare minds, to straighten out public judgment, and to knock dangerous weapons out of impure hands.

It's above all in social economy that this hand-to-hand struggle, these battles forever renewed against popular errors, are of real practical use.

The sciences could be sorted into two categories.

Some, strictly speaking, need be known only by the learned. These are the ones whose application is the business of special professions. Ordinary people reap their fruits despite their ignorance: though they don't know mechanics or astronomy, they still enjoy the usefulness of a watch, and they're still carried along by the locomotive or the steamboat, trusting in the engineer and the pilot. We walk according to the laws of equilibrium without knowing them, just as Monsieur Jourdain spoke prose without knowing it.

But there are sciences whose influence on the public is in proportion to the public's own understanding, sciences that draw all their effectiveness not from the knowledge stored up in a few exceptional heads but from what is spread through the general reason. Such are morality, hygiene, social economy, and, in countries where men belong to themselves, politics. It is of these sciences above all that Bentham might have said: "What spreads them is worth more than what advances them." What does it matter that a great man, even a God, has proclaimed the laws of morality, as long as men steeped in false notions take virtues for vices and vices for virtues? What does it matter that Smith, Say, and, according to Monsieur de Saint-Chamans, economists of every school have proclaimed the superiority of freedom over compulsion in commercial dealings, if the people who make the laws, and the people for whom the laws are made, are convinced of the opposite?

These sciences, very aptly called social, have this further peculiarity: precisely because they are in everyday use, nobody admits to being ignorant of them. Do you need to solve a problem in chemistry or geometry? You don't claim to have the science by inspiration; you're not ashamed to consult Monsieur Thénard; you have no qualms about opening Legendre or Bézout. But in the social sciences, hardly any authorities are recognized. Since everyone practices morality, good or bad, every day, and hygiene, and economics, and politics, sensible or absurd, everyone thinks himself fit to comment, hold forth, decide, and lay down the law on these matters. Are you ill? There isn't an old granny who won't tell you on the spot the cause of your trouble and the cure. "It's the humors," she declares; "you need a purge." But what are the humors, and are there any humors at all? That doesn't trouble her. I can't help thinking of this old granny when I hear every social ill explained by stock phrases like: It's the overabundance of products, it's the tyranny of capital, it's industrial glut, and other such twaddle, of which you can't even say Verba et voces, praetereaque nihil, words and sounds and nothing more, because every one of them is a pernicious error.

Two things follow from all this: first, that the social sciences are bound to teem with sophisms far more than the others, because they are the ones in which everyone consults only his own judgment or his instincts; second, that it is in these sciences that the sophism does particular harm, because it leads opinion astray in a field where opinion is force, opinion is law.

These sciences, then, need two kinds of books: those that set them out and those that spread them, those that show the truth and those that fight error.

It seems to me that the defect inherent in the form of this little book, repetition, is what gives it its chief usefulness.

On the question I've dealt with, each sophism no doubt has its own formula and its own reach, but they all have a common root, which is forgetting people's interests as consumers. To show that the thousand roads of error all lead to this parent sophism is to teach the public to recognize it, size it up, and be on guard against it in every circumstance.

After all, what I hope to produce isn't exactly convictions, but doubts.

I don't flatter myself that the reader, putting down the book, will cry: I know! Heaven grant that he may say to himself, sincerely: I don't know!

"I don't know, because I'm beginning to fear there may be something illusory about the delights of scarcity." (Chapter 1.)

"I'm no longer so convinced of the charms of the obstacle." (Chapter 2.)

"Effort without result no longer seems to me as desirable as result without effort." (Chapter 3.)

"It may well be that the secret of trade doesn't consist, like the secret of swordplay (as the fencing master in The Bourgeois Gentleman defines it), in giving and not receiving." (Chapter 6.)

"I can see that a thing is worth more the more working it has received; but in exchange, do two equal values stop being equal because one comes from the plow and the other from the Jacquard loom?" (Chapter 21.)

"I confess I'm beginning to find it odd that humanity should improve itself through shackles and grow rich through taxes; and frankly I'd be relieved of a troublesome weight, I'd feel a pure joy, if it were proved to me, as the author of the Sophisms assures us, that there is no incompatibility between well-being and justice, between peace and freedom, between the growth of labor and the progress of intelligence." (Chapters 14 and 20.)

"And so, without considering myself satisfied by his arguments, which I don't know whether to call reasonings or paradoxes, I'll go and question the masters of the science."

Let me close this monograph on Sophism with one last and important observation.

The world doesn't realize how much influence Sophism has over it.

If I'm to say what I think, when the right of the strongest was dethroned, Sophism handed the empire over to the right of the slyest; and it would be hard to say which of these two tyrants has done more harm to humanity.

Men have a boundless love of pleasures, influence, esteem, and power; in a word, of wealth.

And at the same time they are driven by an immense inclination to get these things at other people's expense.

But these other people, who are the public, have an equally great inclination to keep what they have acquired, provided they can and they know how.

Plunder, which plays so large a part in the affairs of the world, therefore has only two agents, force and cunning, and only two limits, courage and enlightenment.

Force applied to plunder is the stuff of human history. To trace its history would be to retell almost the entire history of every people: Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes, Persians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Goths, Franks, Huns, Turks, Arabs, Mongols, Tartars, not to mention the Spanish in America, the English in India, the French in Africa, the Russians in Asia, and so on and so forth.

But at least among civilized nations, the people who produce wealth have become numerous enough and strong enough to defend it. Does that mean they're no longer robbed? Not at all. They're robbed as much as ever, and, what's more, they rob one another.

Only the agent has changed: it is no longer by force but by cunning that the public's wealth is seized.

To rob the public, you have to deceive it. To deceive it is to persuade it that it is being robbed for its own good; to get it to accept, in exchange for its goods, services that are fictitious, and often worse. Hence Sophism: theocratic Sophism, economic Sophism, political Sophism, financial Sophism. Since force has been held in check, then, Sophism is not merely an evil; it is the very genius of evil. It must be held in check in its turn. And to do that, the public must be made sharper than the sharpers, as it has become stronger than the strong.

Good public, it is under the patronage of this thought that I address this first essay to you, though the Preface comes strangely at the end, and the Dedication rather late.

Mugron, November 2, 1845.

Chapter 1: The Physiology of Plunder

Why should I go knocking my head against that dry science, political economy?

Why? It's a fair question. All work is unpleasant enough by nature that we have every right to ask where it leads.

Let's see. Let's look into it.

I'm not talking to those philosophers who make a profession of adoring poverty, if not in their own name, then at least in the name of humanity.

I'm talking to anyone who thinks wealth counts for something. And by that word I mean not the opulence of a few but the ease, the well-being, the security, the independence, the education, and the dignity of everyone.

There are only two ways of getting the things we need to keep life going, to make it more beautiful, and to make it better: Production and Plunder.

Some people say: Plunder is an accident, a local and passing abuse, condemned by morality, outlawed by the law, unworthy of the attention of political economy.

And yet, however much goodwill and optimism we carry in our hearts, we're forced to admit that Plunder goes on in this world on too vast a scale, and is mixed too universally into all the great facts of human life, for any social science, and political economy above all, to be excused from taking it into account.

I'll go further. What separates the social order from perfection (or at least from all the perfection it is capable of) is the constant effort of its members to live and grow at one another's expense.

Which means that if Plunder didn't exist, society would be perfect and the social sciences would have nothing to study.

I'll go further still. When Plunder has become the livelihood of a body of men bound together by social ties, they soon make themselves a law that sanctions it and a morality that glorifies it.

We need only name a few of the plainest forms of Plunder to show what a place it holds in human dealings.

First there is War. Among savages, the victor kills the vanquished to acquire a right to the game that is, if not indisputable, at least undisputed.

Next comes Slavery. When man understands that it's possible to make the earth fruitful by labor, he makes this division with his brother: "Yours the toil, mine the product."

Then Theocracy. "According to what you give me or refuse me of what is yours, I will open to you the gate of heaven or of hell."

And finally Monopoly. Its distinguishing mark is that it leaves the great social law standing (service for service) but brings force into the bargaining, and so upsets the fair proportion between the service received and the service rendered.

Plunder always carries within it the seed of its own death. It's rarely the many who plunder the few. If they did, the few would soon be reduced to a point where they could no longer satisfy the greed of the many, and Plunder would die for lack of food.

Almost always it's the many who are oppressed, and Plunder is condemned to death all the same.

For if its agent is Force, as in War and Slavery, it's natural that Force should pass in the long run to the side of the many.

And if its agent is Cunning, as in Theocracy and Monopoly, it's natural that the many should become enlightened; otherwise intelligence wouldn't be intelligence.

Another law of Providence plants a second seed of death in the heart of Plunder. It is this:

Plunder doesn't only shift wealth around; it always destroys some of it.

War annihilates a great many values.

Slavery paralyzes a great many faculties.

Theocracy turns a great deal of effort toward childish or harmful ends.

Monopoly, too, moves wealth from one pocket to another; but a good deal of it gets lost on the way.

This law is admirable. Without it, as long as there was a balance of force between oppressors and oppressed, Plunder would have no end. Thanks to it, that balance always tends to break: either because the Plunderers come to feel scruples about so much wasted wealth or, failing that feeling, because the evil keeps getting worse, and it's in the nature of what always gets worse to come to an end.

There comes a moment, in fact, when the waste of wealth, gathering speed, grows so great that the Plunderer is poorer than he would have been if he had stayed honest.

A people, for instance, whose wars cost more than the loot is worth.

A master who pays more for slave labor than he would for free labor.

A Theocracy that has so stupefied the people and destroyed their energy that it can't get anything more out of them.

A Monopoly that swells its efforts to soak things up as there is less and less to soak up, just as the effort of milking grows as the udder runs dry.

Monopoly, as you see, is a Species of the Genus Plunder. It comes in several Varieties, among them the Sinecure, the Privilege, and Restriction.

Some of the forms it takes are simple and naive. Feudal dues were like that. Under that system the masses are plundered and know it. It depends on the abuse of force and falls with it.

Others are very complicated. Then the masses are often plundered without knowing it. It may even happen that they believe they owe everything to Plunder: what is left to them, what is taken from them, and what is lost in the operation. More than that: I assert that with the passing of time, and thanks to the ingenious machinery of custom, many Plunderers plunder without knowing it and without meaning to. Monopolies of this variety are fathered by Cunning and nursed by Error. They vanish only before the Light.

I've said enough to show that political economy has an obvious practical use. It is the torch that, by unmasking Cunning and dispelling Error, destroys that social disorder, Plunder. Someone (a woman, I believe, and she was quite right) defined it like this: It is the safety lock on the people's savings.

Commentary.

If this little book were meant to last three or four thousand years, to be read, reread, pondered, and studied sentence by sentence, word by word, letter by letter, generation after generation, like a new Koran; if it were going to bring down avalanches of annotations, elucidations, and paraphrases in all the libraries of the world, I could leave the thoughts above to their fate, in their somewhat obscure brevity. But since they need a commentary, it seems prudent to write it myself.

The true and fair law of mankind is the freely bargained exchange of service for service. Plunder consists in banishing the freedom of the bargain, by force or by cunning, so as to receive a service without rendering one.

Plunder by force works like this: you wait until a man has produced something, and then you tear it from him, weapon in hand.

It is formally condemned by the Ten Commandments: You shall not take.

When it happens between one person and another, it's called theft, and it leads to the galleys; when it happens between one nation and another, it takes the name of conquest, and it leads to glory.

Why the difference? It's worth looking for the cause. It will reveal to us an irresistible power, Opinion, which wraps us round so completely, like the atmosphere, that we no longer notice it. For Rousseau never said a truer thing than this: "It takes a great deal of philosophy to observe the facts that are too close to us."

The thief, precisely because he acts alone, has public opinion against him. He alarms everyone around him. Yet if he has a few partners, he boasts to them of his exploits, and here we can begin to see the force of Opinion; for the approval of his accomplices is enough to take away his sense of his own baseness and even to make him proud of his disgrace.

The warrior lives in a different setting. The Opinion that condemns him is somewhere else, among the conquered nations; he doesn't feel its pressure. But the Opinion around him approves of him and backs him up. He and his comrades feel keenly the solidarity that binds them. The fatherland, which has made itself enemies and dangers, needs to stir up the courage of its sons. To the boldest, to those who have pushed its borders out and brought home the most loot, it hands out honors, renown, and glory. Poets sing their exploits and women weave them crowns. And such is the power of Opinion that it separates the idea of injustice from Plunder and takes away from the plunderer even the awareness that he's in the wrong.

The Opinion that reacts against military plunder is found not among the plundering people but among the plundered, and so it has very little influence. Still, it isn't altogether without effect, and it counts for more the more the nations mix with and understand one another. In this respect, we can see that the study of languages and free communication between peoples tend to make the opinion hostile to this kind of plunder prevail.

Unfortunately, the nations surrounding the plundering people are often plunderers themselves when they get the chance, and so steeped in the same prejudices.

Then there's only one remedy: time. The peoples have to learn, by hard experience, the enormous disadvantage of plundering one another.

Someone will mention another brake: moral improvement. But the aim of moral improvement is to multiply virtuous acts. How, then, could it restrain acts of plunder when Opinion ranks those acts among the highest virtues? Is there any more powerful means of improving a people's morals than Religion? Was there ever a Religion more favorable to peace, or more universally accepted, than Christianity? And yet what have we seen for eighteen centuries? We've seen men fight not only in spite of Religion but in the very name of Religion.

A conquering people doesn't always wage offensive war. It has its bad days too. Then its soldiers defend hearth and home, property, family, independence, liberty. War takes on a holy and noble character. The flag, blessed by the ministers of the God of peace, stands for everything sacred on earth; people cling to it as the living image of the fatherland and of honor; and the warlike virtues are exalted above all others. But once the danger is past, the Opinion remains, and by a natural reaction of the spirit of revenge, which blends with patriotism, people like to parade the beloved flag from capital to capital. It seems that nature has prepared the aggressor's punishment this way.

It's the fear of that punishment, and not the progress of philosophy, that keeps the weapons in the arsenals; for there's no denying that the most civilized peoples make war, and care very little about justice when they have no reprisals to fear. Witness the Himalayas, the Atlas, and the Caucasus, where the English, the French, and the Russians are fighting now.

If Religion has been powerless, and philosophy is powerless, how then will war end?

Political economy shows that, even if we look only at the victorious people, war is always made in the interest of the few and at the expense of the masses. All that's needed, then, is for the masses to see this truth clearly. The weight of Opinion, which is still divided, will then come down entirely on the side of peace.

Plunder by force takes yet another form. Instead of waiting for a man to produce something and then tearing it from him, you seize the man himself; you strip him of his own personhood; you force him to work. You don't say to him, If you take this trouble for me, I'll take that trouble for you; you say, Yours all the toil, mine all the enjoyment. That is Slavery, which always implies the abuse of force.

Now, it's a big question whether a force that nobody can challenge doesn't, by its very nature, always abuse itself. For my part, I don't trust it; I'd as soon expect a falling stone to supply the power that will stop its fall as trust force to set its own limit.

I'd at least like someone to show me a country, an era, in which Slavery was abolished by the free and gracious will of the masters.

Slavery provides a second and striking example of how inadequate religious and philanthropic feeling is when it comes up against the vigorous feeling of self-interest. That may seem sad to certain modern Schools that look to self-denial for the principle that will reform society. Let them start, then, by reforming human nature.

In the West Indies, the masters have professed the Christian religion, father to son, ever since slavery was established. Several times a day they repeat these words: "All men are brothers; to love your neighbor is to fulfill the whole law." And yet they own slaves. Nothing seems to them more natural or more legitimate. Do the modern reformers expect that their morality will ever be as universally accepted, as popular, as strong in authority, as often on everyone's lips as the Gospel? And if the Gospel hasn't been able to pass from the lips to the heart, over or through the great barrier of self-interest, how do they expect their morality to work that miracle?

What, then! Is Slavery invulnerable? No: what founded it will destroy it, I mean self-interest, provided that, to favor the special interests that created the sore, we don't thwart the general interests that must heal it.

It's another truth shown by political economy that free labor is by its nature progressive and slave labor necessarily stationary, so that the triumph of the first over the second is inevitable. What has become of indigo grown by Black slaves?

Free labor applied to producing sugar will bring its price down further and further. As it does, the slave will be less and less profitable to his master. Slavery would long ago have collapsed of its own accord in America if, in Europe, the laws hadn't raised the price of sugar artificially. And so we see the masters, their creditors, and their delegates working hard to keep those laws in place, for today they are the pillars of the whole building.

Unfortunately, they still have the sympathy of the populations among whom slavery has disappeared; which shows us that here again Opinion is sovereign.

If it is sovereign even in the realm of Force, it is all the more so in the world of Cunning. That, to tell the truth, is its proper domain. Cunning is the abuse of intelligence; the progress of opinion is the progress of intelligence. The two powers are at least of the same nature. Imposture in the plunderer implies credulity in the plundered, and the natural antidote to credulity is truth. It follows that to enlighten minds is to cut off this kind of plunder's food supply.

I'll briefly review a few of the forms of plunder that are carried on by Cunning on a very large scale.

The first that comes to mind is Plunder by theocratic cunning.

What is it about? Getting real services, in the form of food, clothing, luxury, respect, influence, and power, in return for fictitious ones.

If I said to a man, "I'm going to render you some immediate services," I'd have to keep my word; otherwise he would soon know where he stood, and my trick would quickly be unmasked.

But if I say to him, "In exchange for your services, I will render you immense services, not in this world but in the next. After this life you may be eternally happy or eternally miserable, and that depends on me; I am a go-between standing between God and his creature, and I can open the gates of heaven or of hell to you as I please," then, if this man believes me even a little, he's at my mercy.

This kind of imposture has been practiced on a grand scale since the beginning of the world, and we know what absolute power the Egyptian priests had reached.

It's easy to know how impostors go about it. You need only ask yourself what you would do in their place.

If I arrived, with designs of this kind, among an ignorant tribe, and managed, by some extraordinary act with an appearance of the miraculous, to pass for a supernatural being, I would present myself as a messenger from God, with absolute power over the future destinies of men.

Next, I would forbid any examination of my credentials. I'd go further: since reason would be my most dangerous enemy, I would forbid the use of reason itself, at least where this fearsome subject was concerned. I would make this question, and every question connected with it, taboo, as the savages say. To settle them, to debate them, even to think about them, would be an unforgivable crime.

It would certainly be the height of the art to put a taboo barrier across every road of the mind that might lead to the discovery of my fraud. What better guarantee of its lasting than to make doubt itself a sacrilege?

To this basic guarantee, however, I would add some extra ones. For example, so that the light could never reach the masses, I would give myself and my accomplices a monopoly of all knowledge; I would hide it under the veils of a dead language and a hieroglyphic script; and so as never to be caught off guard by any danger, I would take care to invent an institution that let me into the secrets of every conscience, day by day.

It wouldn't be a bad idea, either, to satisfy some of my people's real needs, especially if in doing so I could increase my influence and my authority. Men have a great need for education and for moral teaching, for instance: I would make myself their dispenser. That way I could steer the minds and hearts of my people as I liked. I would weave morality and my authority together into an unbreakable chain; I would make them out to be unable to exist without each other, so that if some bold spirit finally tried to stir up a taboo question, the whole of society, which can't do without morality, would feel the ground shake under its feet and would turn in fury on this reckless innovator.

Once things had come to that, it's clear that this people would belong to me more than if they were my slaves. The slave curses his chain; my people would bless theirs, and I would have succeeded in stamping the seal of servitude not on their foreheads but deep in their consciences.

Opinion alone can bring down such a building of iniquity; but where can it make a start, if every stone is taboo? That is the business of time and of the printing press.

God forbid that I should want to shake here those consoling beliefs that bind this life of trials to a life of bliss! But that people have abused the irresistible pull that draws us toward them, nobody, not even the head of Christendom, could deny. There is, it seems to me, a sign by which to tell whether a people is being duped or not. Look at the Religion and at the priest; look at whether the priest is the instrument of the Religion, or the Religion the instrument of the priest.

If the priest is the instrument of the Religion, if his only thought is to spread its morality and its blessings over the earth, he will be gentle, tolerant, humble, charitable, full of zeal; his life will reflect that of his divine model; he will preach liberty and equality among men, and peace and brotherhood among nations; he will push away the temptations of worldly power, wanting no alliance with the thing that most needs reining in in this world; he will be the man of the people, the man of good counsel and gentle consolation, the man of Opinion, the man of the Gospel.

If, on the other hand, the Religion is the instrument of the priest, he will treat it the way one treats a tool: altering it, bending it, turning it every which way so as to get the greatest advantage out of it for himself. He will multiply the taboo questions; his morality will be as flexible as the times, the people, and the circumstances. He will try to impress with studied gestures and poses; he will mumble a hundred times a day words whose meaning has evaporated and which are no more than an empty formality. He will traffic in holy things, but only just enough not to shake the faith in their holiness, and he will take care that the traffic is less openly brisk the more clear-sighted the people are. He will meddle in earthly intrigues; he will always take the side of the powerful, on the sole condition that the powerful take his. In a word, in everything he does you will see that he wants not to advance the Religion through the clergy but the clergy through the Religion; and since so much effort implies an aim, and since that aim, on this hypothesis, can only be power and wealth, the final sign that the people is being duped is when the priest is rich and powerful.

It's quite obvious that a true Religion can be abused as well as a false one. Indeed, the more respectable its authority, the more there is to fear that the test will be pushed a long way. But the results are very different. Abuse always provokes the sound, enlightened, independent part of a people into revolt. Faith can't help being shaken by it, and the weakening of a true religion is far more disastrous than the shaking of a false one.

Plunder by this method and the clear-sightedness of a people are always in inverse proportion to each other, for it's in the nature of abuses to go as far as they find a road. Not that you won't find pure and devoted priests even among the most ignorant population; but how can you stop the cheat from putting on the cassock and ambition from donning the miter? Plunderers obey the law of Malthus: they multiply as fast as their means of subsistence, and the cheats' means of subsistence is the credulity of their dupes. Look where you will, you always find that Opinion has to be enlightened. There is no other Panacea.

Another variety of Plunder by cunning is called commercial fraud, a name that seems to me much too narrow, because the guilty party isn't only the merchant who adulterates his goods or shortens his meter stick, but also the doctor who gets paid for harmful advice, the lawyer who tangles up lawsuits, and so on. In the exchange between two services, one is counterfeit; but here, since the service received is always accepted beforehand and of the buyer's own free will, it's clear that plunder of this kind must retreat as the public's clear-sightedness advances.

Next comes the abuse of public services, an immense field of Plunder, so immense that we can only cast a glance at it.

If God had made man a solitary animal, each of us would work for himself. Individual wealth would be in proportion to the services each person rendered himself.

But since man is sociable, services are exchanged for one another, a proposition you can, if you like, turn around and read backward.

There are needs in society so general, so universal, that its members provide for them by organizing public services. Such is the need for security. People get together and pool their money to pay, in various services, those who render the service of watching over the common security.

There's nothing in this that lies outside political economy: Do this for me, and I'll do that for you. The essence of the transaction is the same; only the method of payment is different. But that circumstance has great consequences.

In ordinary transactions each party remains the judge both of the service he receives and of the service he renders. He can always refuse the exchange or make it somewhere else; hence the need to bring to market only services that people will accept of their own free will.

It isn't like that with the State, especially before the arrival of representative government. Whether or not we need its services, whether they're genuine or counterfeit, we always have to accept them as it supplies them and pay for them at the price it sets.

Now, all men tend to look at the services they render through the small end of the telescope and at the services they receive through the big end; and we'd be fleeced in no time if, in private transactions, we didn't have the guarantee of the bargained price.

That guarantee we don't have, or hardly have, in public transactions. And yet the State, being made up of men (though people hint at the contrary these days), obeys the universal tendency. It wants to serve us a great deal, to serve us more than we want, and to get us to accept as a genuine service what is sometimes far from being one, all so as to demand from us, in return, services or taxes.

The State, too, is subject to the law of Malthus. It tends to outgrow its means of subsistence; it swells in proportion to those means; and what keeps it alive is the substance of the people. Woe, then, to peoples who don't know how to limit the State's sphere of action. Liberty, private enterprise, wealth, well-being, independence, dignity: everything will go into it.

For there's one circumstance we have to notice, and it's this. Of all the services we ask of the State, the chief is security. To guarantee it, the State has to command a force capable of overcoming every other force, private or collective, internal or external, that might endanger it. Combine that with the unfortunate disposition we observe in men to live at others' expense, and the danger leaps to the eye.

And see, then, on what an immense scale Plunder by the abuse and excess of government has been carried on since history began! Ask yourself what services the public powers have rendered their peoples, and what services they have taken from them, among the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Romans, the Persians, the Turks, the Chinese, the Russians, the English, the Spanish, and the French. The imagination is staggered by the enormous disproportion.

At last representative government was invented, and a priori one might have thought the disorder was going to stop as if by magic.

For the principle of these governments is this:

"The population itself, through its representatives, will decide the nature and extent of the functions it sees fit to set up as public services, and the amount of the payment it means to attach to those services."

The tendency to seize other people's property and the tendency to defend one's own were thus brought face to face. One might have expected the second to win over the first.

I am certainly convinced that the thing will succeed in the long run. But we have to admit that so far it hasn't.

Why not? For two very simple reasons: governments have had too much sagacity, and the people not enough.

Governments are very skillful. They act methodically, consistently, on a well-laid plan that tradition and experience are constantly improving. They study men and their passions. If they see, for example, that men have an instinct for war, they fan and stir up that fatal inclination. Through diplomacy they surround the nation with dangers, and then, quite naturally, they ask it for soldiers, sailors, arsenals, and fortifications; often they don't even have to ask, only let them be offered. Then they have ranks, pensions, and posts to hand out. All this takes a great deal of money; taxes and loans are there for that.

If the nation is generous, they offer to cure all the ills of humanity. They will revive commerce, they say, make agriculture prosper, develop manufacturing, encourage letters and the arts, root out poverty, and so on and so forth. It's only a matter of creating posts and paying officials.

In a word, the tactic consists in presenting as real services what are nothing but hindrances; and then the nation pays not to be served but to be ill-served. Governments, swelling to gigantic proportions, end up absorbing half of all incomes. And the people wonder why they work so hard, why they hear marvelous inventions announced that are supposed to multiply products without end, and why they're still... every bit as poor as before.

The reason is that while the government shows so much skill, the people show hardly any. Called on to choose their representatives, the men who are to fix the sphere and the payment of government action, whom do they choose? The government's own agents. They hand the executive power the job of setting the limits of its own activity and its own demands. They act like the Bourgeois Gentleman, who, for the choice and number of his suits, leaves it all... to his tailor.

Meanwhile things go from bad to worse, and the people at last open their eyes, not to the remedy (they haven't got that far yet) but to the disease.

Governing is such a pleasant trade that everyone wants it. And so the people's advisers never stop telling them: We see your sufferings and we deplore them. It would be different if we were governing you.

This period, which is usually a very long one, is the period of rebellions and riots. When the people are beaten, the cost of the war is added to their burdens. When they win, the personnel of government changes and the abuses stay.

And this goes on until at last the people learn to understand and defend their true interests. Therefore we always come back to this: There is no hope except in the progress of public Reason.

Certain nations seem wonderfully well disposed to become the prey of governmental Plunder. They are the ones in which men, setting no store by their own dignity and their own energy, would think themselves lost if they weren't administered and governed in everything. Without having traveled much, I've seen countries where people think agriculture can make no progress unless the State keeps experimental farms; that there will soon be no more horses unless the State has stud farms; that fathers won't have their children educated, or will have them taught only immoral things, unless the State decides what it is good to learn; and so on and so forth. In such a country, revolutions may follow one another rapidly and rulers may tumble one on top of another. But the governed will be governed at the mercy of their rulers all the same (for the disposition I'm describing is the very cloth governments are cut from), until the people finally see that it's better to leave as many services as possible in the category of those the interested parties exchange at a bargained price.

We've seen that society is the exchange of services. It ought to be nothing but an exchange of good and honest services. But we have also found that men have a great interest, and therefore an irresistible inclination, in exaggerating the relative value of the services they render. And truly, I can see no other limit to that claim than the free acceptance or the free refusal of those to whom the services are offered.

That is why certain men turn to the law to have it reduce, in other people, the natural prerogatives of this freedom. This kind of plunder is called Privilege or Monopoly. Let's mark its origin and character carefully.

Everyone knows that the services he brings to the general market will be valued and paid all the more highly the scarcer they are there. Everyone, therefore, will beg the law to step in and keep out of the market all those who come to offer similar services; or, what comes to the same thing, if some instrument is indispensable for rendering the service, he will ask the law to give him exclusive possession of it.

Since this variety of Plunder is the main subject of this volume, I'll say little about it here and confine myself to one remark.

When monopoly is an isolated fact, it never fails to enrich the man the law has invested with it. It may then happen that every class of workers, instead of working for the fall of that monopoly, demands a similar monopoly for itself. This kind of Plunder, turned into a system in this way, then becomes the most ridiculous of hoaxes for everybody, and the final result is that everyone thinks he gets more out of a general market impoverished in everything.

There's no need to add that this strange regime also sets up a universal antagonism between all classes, all professions, and all peoples; that it demands a constant but always uncertain interference by the government; that it thereby plays into the very abuses discussed in the previous paragraphs; that it puts every industry in incurable insecurity; and that it teaches men to lay the responsibility for their own existence on the law rather than on themselves. It would be hard to imagine a more active cause of social upheaval.

Justification.

People will say: "Why that ugly word, Plunder? Besides being coarse, it wounds, it irritates, it turns calm and moderate men against you, it poisons the struggle."

I say it out loud: I respect the men themselves. I believe in the sincerity of nearly all the supporters of Protection, and I claim no right to suspect anyone's personal honesty, scrupulousness, or philanthropy. I repeat once more that Protection is the work, the disastrous work, of a common error of which everyone, or at least the great majority, is at once the victim and the accomplice. Having said that, I can't stop things from being what they are.

Imagine a sort of Diogenes poking his head out of his barrel and saying: "Athenians, you have yourselves served by slaves. Has it never occurred to you that you are practicing the most iniquitous of plunders on your brothers?"

Or again, a tribune speaking like this in the Forum: "Romans, you have built your whole livelihood on the successive pillage of every people."

They would certainly be stating an undeniable truth. Should we conclude from it that Athens and Rome were inhabited only by dishonest people? That Socrates and Plato, Cato and Cincinnatus were contemptible characters?

Who could think such a thing? But these great men lived in a setting that took away their awareness of their injustice. We know that Aristotle couldn't even conceive of a society existing without slavery.

In modern times slavery has lived on to our own day without stirring many scruples in the souls of the planters. Armies have served as the instruments of great conquests, that is, of great plunders. Does that mean they aren't full of soldiers and officers personally as scrupulous as, perhaps more scrupulous than, people generally are in the business world: men whom the mere thought of a theft would make blush, and who would face a thousand deaths rather than stoop to a low act?

What deserves blame is not individuals but the general movement that carries them along and blinds them, a movement of which the whole of society is guilty.

It is the same with Monopoly. I accuse the system, not individuals; society as a whole, not this or that member of it. If the greatest philosophers could deceive themselves about the iniquity of slavery, how much more easily may farmers and manufacturers be mistaken about the nature and effects of the restrictive system?

Chapter 2: Two Moralities

Having reached the end of the previous chapter, if he reaches it, I think I can hear the reader cry out:

"Well! Is it any wonder people accuse economists of being dry and cold? What a portrait of humanity! What! Plunder is supposed to be a fatal power, almost a normal one, taking every form, working under every pretext, outside the law and through the law, abusing the holiest things, exploiting weakness and credulity by turns, and thriving all the more, the more of that double diet it finds around it! Could anyone paint a sadder picture of the world?"

The question isn't whether the picture is sad but whether it's true. History is there to tell us.

It's rather odd that the people who run down political economy (or economism, as they like to call the science) because it studies man and the world as they are should push pessimism much further than it does, at least as far as the past and the present are concerned. Open their books and their newspapers. What do you find? Bitterness and hatred of society, to the point that the very word civilization means to them injustice, disorder, and anarchy. They have come to curse liberty, so little faith do they have in the development of the human race as the result of its natural makeup. Liberty! According to them, it's liberty that is pushing us closer and closer to the abyss.

It's true that they're optimists about the future. For if humanity, helpless on its own, has been on the wrong road for six thousand years, a prophet has come who has shown it the way to salvation; and if only the flock will follow the shepherd's crook, it will be led into that promised land where well-being comes without effort, and where order, security, and harmony are the easy reward of not thinking ahead.

All humanity has to do is consent to let the reformers change, as Rousseau puts it, its physical and moral constitution.

Political economy hasn't taken on the mission of finding out what society would be like if God had made man otherwise than he was pleased to make him. It may be unfortunate that Providence forgot, at the beginning, to call a few of our modern organizers into its councils. And just as the mechanics of the heavens would be quite different if the Creator had consulted Alfonso the Wise, the king of Castile who said he could have given Him some useful hints, so, if He hadn't neglected Fourier's advice, the social order would look nothing like the one in which we are forced to breathe, live, and move. But since we're in it, since in it we live, and move, and have our being, all we can do is study it and learn its laws, especially if its improvement depends essentially on that knowledge.

We can't prevent the heart of man from being a furnace of insatiable desires.

We can't arrange for those desires to be satisfied without labor.

We can't keep man from disliking labor as much as he likes satisfaction.

We can't prevent this makeup from producing a perpetual effort among men to increase their share of enjoyments by shifting the burden of toil onto one another, by force or by cunning.

It isn't in our power to wipe out universal history, to stifle the voice of the past bearing witness that things have gone this way from the beginning. We can't deny that war, slavery, serfdom, theocracy, the abuse of government, privileges, frauds of every kind, and monopolies have been the undeniable and terrible expressions of these two feelings combined in the heart of man: a liking for enjoyment, a dislike of toil.

"By the sweat of your brow you will eat your bread." But everyone wants as much bread and as little sweat as possible. That's the conclusion of history.

Thank heaven, history also shows that enjoyments and toils tend to be shared out among men more and more equally.

Unless we deny that the sun shines, we have to admit that society has made some progress in this respect.

If that's so, then there is a natural, providential force in society, a law that keeps driving back the principle of iniquity and making the principle of justice more and more of a reality.

We say that this force is in society and that God put it there. If it weren't there, we would be reduced, like the utopians, to looking for it in artificial means, in arrangements that require first altering man's physical and moral constitution; or rather we'd think the search useless and vain, because we can't understand how a lever works without a fulcrum.

Let's try, then, to point out the beneficent force that tends, little by little, to overcome the maleficent force we have named Plunder, whose presence reasoning explains only too well and experience confirms.

Every harmful act necessarily has two ends: the point it comes from and the point it lands on; the man who performs the act and the man on whom it is performed; or, as the schoolmen say, the agent and the patient.

There are, then, two chances of the harmful act being stopped: the voluntary abstention of the active party and the resistance of the passive one.

From this come two moralities which, far from working against each other, work together: religious or philosophical morality, and the morality I'll take the liberty of calling economic.

Religious morality, to put an end to the harmful act, speaks to its author, to man as agent. It tells him: "Mend your ways; purify yourself; stop doing evil; do good, master your passions; sacrifice your interests; don't oppress your neighbor, whom it is your duty to love and relieve; be just first and charitable after." This morality will always be the most beautiful, the most moving, the one that shows the human race in all its majesty, that lends itself best to the flights of eloquence and stirs men's admiration and sympathy the most.

Economic morality aims at the same result, but it speaks mainly to man as patient. It shows him the effects of human actions, and by that simple account it spurs him to react against those that hurt him and to honor those that are useful to him. It tries to spread enough good sense, enlightenment, and healthy distrust among the oppressed masses to make oppression more and more difficult and dangerous.

Notice that economic morality also acts on the oppressor. A harmful act produces goods and evils: evils for the man who suffers it and goods for the man who commits it, or it wouldn't happen. But they are very far from balancing out. The sum of the evils always, and necessarily, outweighs the sum of the goods, because the very fact of oppressing wastes strength, creates dangers, provokes reprisals, and demands costly precautions. A simple account of these effects, then, doesn't just provoke the oppressed to react; it brings over to the side of justice everyone whose heart isn't perverted, and it unsettles the security of the oppressors themselves.

But it's easy to understand why this morality has been accused of being dry and prosaic: a morality more implicit than explicit, which is after all nothing but a scientific demonstration; which would even lose its force if it changed its character; which speaks not to the heart but to the intelligence; which seeks not to persuade but to convince; which gives not advice but proofs; whose mission is not to move but to enlighten; and which wins no other victory over vice than to starve it.

The charge is true without being fair. It amounts to saying that political economy doesn't say everything, doesn't take in everything, isn't the universal science. But who has ever made so outrageous a claim in its name?

The accusation would be well founded only if political economy presented its methods as the only ones, and had the presumption, as they say, to forbid philosophy and religion all their own direct means of working for man's improvement.

Let us grant, then, that morality properly so called and political economy act at the same time: the one condemning the harmful act at its motive, by showing us its ugliness; the other discrediting it in our convictions, by painting its effects.

Let's even admit that the religious moralist's triumph, when it comes, is finer, more consoling, and more radical. But at the same time it's hard not to see that the triumph of economic science is easier and surer.

In a few lines worth more than many fat volumes, J.-B. Say has already pointed out that there are two ways to end the disorder that hypocrisy brings into a respectable family: reform Tartuffe or wise up Orgon. Molière, that great painter of the human heart, seems to have had the second method constantly in view, as the more effective.

It's the same on the stage of the world.

Tell me what Caesar did, and I'll tell you what the Romans of his time were like.

Tell me what modern diplomacy achieves, and I'll tell you the moral condition of the nations.

We wouldn't be paying nearly two billion francs in taxes if we didn't give the job of voting them to the very people who eat them.

We wouldn't have all the difficulties and all the burdens of the African question, our conquest of Algeria, if we were thoroughly convinced that two and two make four in political economy as in arithmetic.

Monsieur Guizot, the head of the government, would never have had occasion to say, France is rich enough to pay for her glory, if France had never fallen in love with false glory.

The same statesman would never have said, Liberty is precious enough that France should not haggle over its price, if France properly understood that a heavy budget and liberty are incompatible.

It isn't the monopolists, as people think, who keep monopolies going; it's the monopolized.

And in elections, it isn't because there are corrupters that there are corruptibles; it's the other way around. The proof is that the corruptibles pay all the costs of the corruption. Isn't it up to them, then, to put an end to it?

Let religious morality touch the hearts, then, if it can, of the Tartuffes, the Caesars, the colonial party, the sinecurists, the monopolists, and so on. The task of political economy is to enlighten their dupes.

Which of these two methods works more effectively for social progress? Need I say it? I believe it's the second. I fear that humanity can't escape the need to learn defensive morality first.

Look, read, observe, and question as I may, I can't see a single abuse practiced on any large scale that has died because those who profit from it gave it up of their own accord.

I see many, on the other hand, that give way before the manly resistance of those who suffer from them.

Describing the consequences of abuses, then, is the most effective way of destroying them. And how true that is, above all when the abuses are ones that, like the restrictive system, inflict real harm on the masses while holding nothing but illusion and disappointment for those who think they profit from them!

Will this kind of moral improvement, after all that, bring about on its own all the social perfection that the sympathetic nature of the human soul and its noblest faculties lead us to hope for and foresee? I'm far from claiming so. Suppose defensive morality were completely spread, which is after all nothing but knowledge of one's interests rightly understood, always in agreement with general utility and with justice. Such a society, though certainly well ordered, might be very unattractive: one in which there were no more rogues only because there were no more dupes; in which vice, always latent and numbed, so to speak, by famine, would need only a little food to revive; in which everyone's prudence would be enforced by everyone's vigilance; and in which, finally, reform, regulating outward acts but stopping at the skin, would not have reached the depths of men's consciences. Such a society sometimes appears to us in the shape of one of those precise, rigorous, just men, ready to repel the slightest encroachment on their rights, skilled at never letting themselves be nibbled on any side. You respect him; you may even admire him; you'd make him your deputy; you wouldn't make him your friend.

Let the two moralities, then, instead of running each other down, work together, attacking vice from both poles. While the economists do their work, opening the eyes of the Orgons, uprooting prejudices, stirring up a just and necessary distrust, studying and setting out the true nature of things and actions, let the religious moralist carry on his own more attractive but more difficult labors. Let him grapple with iniquity hand to hand; let him pursue it into the finest fibers of the heart; let him paint the charms of kindness, self-denial, and devotion; let him open the springs of virtue where all we can do is dry up the springs of vice. That is his task, and it is a noble and beautiful one. But why should he dispute the usefulness of the task that falls to us?

In a society which, without being virtuous at heart, was nonetheless well ordered by the action of economic morality (which is knowledge of the economy of the social body), wouldn't the chances of progress open up before religious morality?

Habit, they say, is second nature.

A country in which, over a long time, everyone had been weaned from injustice by nothing but the resistance of an enlightened public might still be a dreary place. But it would be well prepared, it seems to me, to receive a higher and purer teaching. To have lost the habit of evil is a long step toward good. Men can't stand still. Turned away from the road of vice once it led only to disgrace, they would feel the attraction of virtue all the more.

Society may have to pass through this prosaic state, in which men practice virtue out of calculation, in order to rise from there to that more poetic region where it will no longer need that motive.

Chapter 3: The Two Axes

Petition of Jacques Bonhomme, carpenter, to Monsieur Cunin-Gridaine, Minister of Commerce.¹⁸

Monsieur Manufacturer-Minister,

I am a carpenter, as Jesus was; I handle the ax and the adze, at your service.

Now, as I hack and hew from dawn till dark on the lands of our lord the King, it has come into my head that my labor is just as national as yours.

And that being so, I don't see why Protection shouldn't visit my lumberyard as well as your mill.

For after all, if you make cloth, I make roofs. Both of us, by different means, shelter our customers from the cold and the rain.

And yet I run after my customers, while yours run after you. You've managed to force them to, by stopping them from buying anywhere else, while mine go to whomever they please.

What's so surprising about that? Monsieur Cunin the minister has remembered Monsieur Cunin the weaver; that's only natural. But alas, my humble trade has never given France a minister, though it gave the world a God.

And that God, in the immortal code he left to men, didn't slip in the tiniest word that carpenters could cite as their authority for getting rich, as you do, at other people's expense.

Just look at my position, then. I earn thirty sous a day, when it isn't Sunday or a holiday. If I come before you at the same time as a Flemish carpenter, you give him the job if he asks a sou less.

But suppose I want to buy clothes? If a Belgian weaver sets his cloth beside yours, you chase him and his cloth out of the country.

And so, forced into your shop, which is the dearest, I find that my poor thirty sous are really worth only twenty-eight.

What am I saying? They aren't worth twenty-six! For instead of throwing out the Belgian weaver at your own expense (that would be the least you could do), you make me pay the men you set on his heels in your own interest.

And since a great many of your fellow lawmakers, with whom you get on famously, each take a sou or two from me, under color of protecting iron in one case, coal in another, oil here and wheat there, when all is said and done I don't save fifteen sous of the thirty from the looting.

You'll tell me, no doubt, that these little sous, passing in this way from my pocket into yours with nothing in return, keep people in work around your château and let you live in grand style. To which I'll point out that if you left them with me, they'd keep people in work around me.

Be that as it may, Monsieur Minister-Manufacturer, knowing I'd be badly received, I haven't come to summon you, as I'd have every right to, to give up the restriction you impose on your customers. I'd rather follow the general fashion and ask for a little scrap of protection myself.

Here you'll raise a difficulty: "My friend," you'll say, "I'd be glad to protect you and your kind; but how can customs favors be granted to carpenters' work? Should we prohibit the entry of houses by land and by sea?"

That would be rather ridiculous. But by dint of dreaming about it, I've found another way to favor the children of Saint Joseph; and I hope you'll welcome it all the more readily because it doesn't differ in the least from the one that makes up the privilege you vote yourself every year.

This marvelous means is to forbid the use of sharpened axes in France.

I say that this restriction would be neither more illogical nor more arbitrary than the one you subject us to on account of your cloth.

Why do you chase the Belgians out? Because they sell more cheaply than you. And why do they sell more cheaply than you? Because, as weavers, they have some advantage over you, whatever it may be.

Between you and a Belgian, then, there is exactly the difference between a blunt ax and a sharp one.

And you force me, a carpenter, to buy from you the product of the blunt ax!

Think of France as a worker who wants to get everything he needs by his labor, cloth among other things.

There are two ways of doing it:

The first is to spin and weave the wool;

The second is to make, for example, clocks, wallpaper, or wines, and hand them over to the Belgians in exchange for cloth.

Whichever of these two methods gives the better result can be represented by the sharp ax, the other by the blunt one.

You don't deny that at present, in France, it takes more toil to get a length of cloth out of a loom (that's the blunt ax) than out of a vine (that's the sharp ax). You deny it so little that it's precisely on account of this extra toil (which you take to be wealth) that you recommend, or rather impose, the worse of the two axes.

Very well! Be consistent; be impartial, if you won't be just; and treat the poor carpenters the way you treat yourself.

Pass a law that reads:

"No one may use any beams or joists but those produced by blunt axes."

At once, here is what will happen.

Where we now strike a hundred blows of the ax, we'll strike three hundred. What we do in an hour will take three. What a powerful encouragement to labor! Apprentices, journeymen, and masters, we'll never be able to keep up. We'll be in demand, and therefore well paid. Anyone who wants a roof over his head will have to meet our terms, just as anyone who wants cloth has to submit to yours.

And if those theorists of free trade ever dare to question the usefulness of the measure, we'll know where to look for a crushing refutation. There's your inquiry of 1834. We'll beat them with it, for in it you pleaded admirably for prohibitions and for blunted axes, which is one and the same thing.

Chapter 4: The Lower Council of Labor

"What! You have the nerve to demand for every citizen the right to sell, buy, barter, exchange, render and receive service for service, and judge for himself, on the sole condition that he stay within the bounds of honesty and satisfy the public treasury? Then you want to rob the workers of their work, their wages, and their bread?"

That's what they tell us. I know what I think of it; but I wanted to know what the workers themselves think of it.

I had an excellent instrument of inquiry ready to hand.

It wasn't one of those Higher Councils of Industry where big landowners who call themselves farmers, powerful shipowners who think they're sailors, and rich shareholders who claim to be workers practice that philanthropy we all know so well.

No; these were workers in earnest, serious workers, as people say these days: joiners, carpenters, masons, tailors, shoemakers, dyers, blacksmiths, innkeepers, grocers, and so on and so forth, who have founded a mutual aid society in my village.

On my own private authority I turned it into a Lower Council of Labor, and I got out of it an inquiry as good as any other, though it isn't stuffed with figures and swollen to the size of a quarto printed at the State's expense.

The point was to ask these good people how they are affected, or think they're affected, by the protective system. The president did point out to me that this rather broke the conditions on which the association is allowed to exist. For in France, that land of liberty, people who associate give up talking about politics, which is to say about their common interests. Still, after much hesitation, he put the question on the agenda.

The assembly was divided into as many committees as it had groups making up separate trades. Each was handed a chart, to be filled in after a fortnight of discussion.

On the appointed day the venerable president took his place in the presidential armchair (official style, for it was a plain chair) and found on the bench (official style again, for it was a poplar-wood table) some fifteen reports, which he read out one after another.

The first to come up was the tailors'. Here it is, as exact as if it were a facsimile.

Effects of Protection: Report of the Tailors

* Measure it as we might, we could find no angle from which the protective system did our trade any good.

Here is another chart:

Effects of Protection: Report of the Blacksmiths

All the other charts, which I'll spare the reader, sang the same tune. Gardeners, carpenters, shoemakers, clog makers, boatmen, millers: all of them poured out the same grievances.

I regretted that there were no farm laborers in our association. Their report would certainly have been very instructive.

But alas, in our country of the Landes the poor farmhands, protected as they are, haven't a sou to their names; they can put their livestock into a mutual aid society, but they can't afford to join one themselves. The so-called favors of protection don't stop them from being the pariahs of our social order. And what shall I say of the winegrowers?

What struck me most was the good sense with which our villagers had seen not only the direct harm the protective system does them but also the indirect harm which, hitting their customers, comes back on them on the rebound.

That's just what the economists of the Moniteur industriel, the protectionists' paper, don't seem to understand, I said to myself.

And perhaps the men whose eyes are dazzled by a little protection, the farmers in particular, would gladly give it up if they saw this side of the question.

They might say to themselves: "Better to stand on our own feet among prosperous customers than to be protected among impoverished ones."

For to try to enrich each industry in turn, by emptying out the space around each of them in turn, is as vain an effort as trying to jump over your own shadow.

Chapter 5: Dearness and Cheapness

I feel I ought to put before my readers a few remarks (theoretical ones, alas) on the illusions that grow out of the words dear and cheap. At first glance, I know, people will be inclined to find these remarks a little subtle; but subtle or not, the question is whether they're true. And I believe they are perfectly true, and above all well worth the attention of the many people who sincerely believe in the protective system.

Friends of freedom and defenders of restriction alike, we are all reduced to using these words, dearness and cheapness. The first declare themselves for cheapness, having the consumer's interest in view; the second come out for dearness, being chiefly concerned with the producer. Others step in and say, Producer and consumer are one and the same, which leaves it perfectly undecided whether the law ought to pursue cheapness or dearness.

In the middle of this conflict, it would seem there's only one course open to the law: to let prices settle themselves naturally. But then you run into the sworn enemies of laissez faire. They insist that the law must act, even without knowing which way it ought to act. And yet it ought to be up to whoever wants to use the law to bring about an artificial dearness or an unnatural cheapness to explain the reason for his preference and make it prevail. The onus probandi, the burden of proof, falls on him alone. It follows that freedom is always presumed good until proved otherwise, because letting prices settle themselves naturally is freedom.

But the roles have been reversed. The partisans of dearness have made their system triumph, and it's up to the defenders of natural prices to prove that theirs is good. Both sides argue with two words. It's essential, then, to know what those two words contain.

Let's say first of all that a series of facts has come about that is well suited to baffle the champions of both camps.

To produce dearness, the restrictionists got protective duties passed, and a cheapness they found inexplicable came along to dash their hopes.

To bring about cheapness, the free traders have sometimes managed to get freedom adopted, and to their great astonishment it was a rise in prices that followed.

An example: in France, to favor agriculture, a duty of 22 percent was put on foreign wool, and it so happened that domestic wool sold for less after the measure than before.

In England, to relieve the consumer, the duty on foreign wool was lowered and finally abolished, and it so happened that home-grown wool sold for more than ever.

And this isn't an isolated fact, for the price of wool has no special nature of its own that exempts it from the general law governing prices. The same thing has happened in every similar case. Against all expectation, protection has tended to bring prices down and competition to push them up.

Then the confusion in the debate reached its peak, with the protectionists telling their opponents, "This cheapness you boast about so much is our system's doing," and the others answering, "This dearness you found so useful is freedom's doing."¹⁹

Wouldn't it be funny to see cheapness become the watchword on the rue Hauteville, where the protectionists have their headquarters, and dearness on the rue Choiseul, where we have ours?

Obviously there is a misunderstanding in all this, an illusion that has to be destroyed. That is what I'm going to try to do.

Suppose there are two isolated nations, each made up of a million inhabitants. Let's grant that, other things being equal, one of them has exactly twice as much of every sort of thing as the other: twice as much wheat, meat, iron, furniture, fuel, books, clothing, and so on.

You'll agree that the first will be twice as rich.

And yet there's no reason to assert that absolute prices will differ between the two peoples. They may even be higher in the richer one. It may be that in the United States everything is nominally dearer than in Poland, and that people there are nonetheless better provided with everything; which shows that it isn't the absolute price of products that makes wealth, but their abundance. When we want to compare restriction and freedom, then, we shouldn't ask which of the two produces cheapness or dearness, but which of the two brings abundance or scarcity.

For notice this: since products are exchanged for one another, a relative scarcity of everything and a relative abundance of everything leave the absolute price of things exactly where it was, but not the condition of men.

Let's go a little deeper into the subject.

When people saw raised and lowered duties produce effects so contrary to what was expected of them, with a fall in price often following the tax and a rise sometimes going along with free entry, political economy had to look for the explanation of a phenomenon that upset received ideas; for, whatever anyone says, science, if it deserves the name, is nothing but the faithful account and correct explanation of facts.

And the fact we're pointing to here is very well explained by one circumstance that must never be lost sight of.

It is that dearness has two causes, not one.

The same is true of cheapness.

One of the best established points in political economy is that price is determined by the state of Supply compared with that of Demand.

There are, then, two terms that affect price: Supply and Demand. These terms are essentially variable. They can combine in the same direction or in opposite directions, and in infinitely varied proportions. Hence an inexhaustible number of combinations of price.

Price rises either because Supply falls or because Demand grows.

It falls either because Supply grows or because Demand falls.

Hence two kinds of dearness and two kinds of cheapness.

There is a dearness of the bad kind, the one that comes from a fall in Supply, because that one implies scarcity, implies privation (such is the dearness that has been felt in wheat this year); and there is a dearness of the good kind, the one that comes from an increase in demand, because that one presupposes the growth of general wealth.

In the same way, there is a desirable cheapness, the one whose source is abundance; and a disastrous cheapness, the one caused by the falling away of demand, the ruin of the customers.

Now please notice this: restriction tends to bring about at the same time both the bad one of the two dearnesses and the bad one of the two cheapnesses. The bad dearness, because it reduces Supply, which is in fact its avowed aim; and the bad cheapness, because it reduces Demand as well, since it sends capital and labor in the wrong direction and weighs down the customers with taxes and hindrances.

The result is that, as far as price is concerned, these two tendencies cancel each other out; and that's why this system, restricting Demand at the same time as Supply, doesn't in the end even achieve the dearness that is its object.

But as far as the people's condition is concerned, they don't cancel each other out; on the contrary, they combine to make it worse.

The effect of freedom is exactly the opposite. In its general result, it may not achieve the cheapness it promised either; for it too has two tendencies, one toward the desirable cheapness, through the growth of Supply, or abundance, the other toward the welcome dearness, through the growth of Demand, or of general wealth. These two tendencies cancel each other out as far as absolute prices go; but they combine where the improvement of people's lot is concerned.

In a word, under the restrictive system, insofar as it works, men go backward toward a state of affairs in which everything weakens, Supply and Demand alike; under the system of freedom, they go forward toward a state of affairs in which the two grow at the same pace, without the absolute price of things necessarily being affected. That price is not a good criterion of wealth. It may very well stay the same whether society sinks into the most abject poverty or advances toward great prosperity.

Allow us to apply this doctrine in a few words.

A farmer in the South thinks he's sitting on a gold mine because he is protected by duties against foreign rivalry. He's as poor as Job, but no matter; he still supposes that protection will make him rich sooner or later. In these circumstances, if you put the question to him the way the Odier committee does, in these terms:

"Do you want, yes or no, to be subjected to foreign competition?" his first impulse is to answer, "No." And the Odier committee proudly gives that answer a great deal of publicity.

But we have to go a little deeper. No doubt foreign competition, and competition in general, is always a nuisance; and if a single trade could free itself from it, that trade would do good business for a while.

But protection isn't an isolated favor; it's a system. If it tends to create a scarcity of wheat and meat for the benefit of this farmer, it also tends to create a scarcity of iron, cloth, fuel, tools, and so on for the benefit of other manufacturers: a scarcity, that is, of everything.

Now if the scarcity of wheat works toward raising its price, by reducing Supply, the scarcity of all the other goods for which wheat is exchanged works toward lowering the price of wheat, by reducing Demand; so that it's by no means certain that in the end wheat will be one centime dearer than under the system of freedom. Only one thing is certain: since there is less of everything in the country, everyone must be less well provided with everything.

The farmer really ought to ask himself whether it wouldn't be better for him if a little wheat and livestock came in from abroad, while on the other hand he was surrounded by a prosperous population, able to consume and pay for every sort of farm product.

There are departments where people are dressed in rags, live in hovels, and feed on chestnuts. How can you expect agriculture to flourish there? What can you get the land to produce with any well-founded hope of a fair return? Meat? Nobody eats it. Milk? They drink nothing but spring water. Butter? It's a luxury. Wool? They do without it as much as they can. Does anyone think that all these articles of consumption can be passed over like this by the masses without that neglect pushing prices down, at the same time as protection is pushing them up?

What we say of a farmer we can say of a manufacturer. The cloth makers assure us that foreign competition will drive prices down by increasing Supply. Very well; but won't those prices rise again through an increase in Demand? Is the consumption of cloth a fixed, invariable quantity? Is everyone as well provided with it as he could and should be? And if general wealth grew through the abolition of all these taxes and hindrances, wouldn't the first use the population made of it be to dress better?

The question, then, the eternal question, isn't whether protection favors this or that particular branch of industry, but whether, everything balanced and all the sums done, restriction is by its nature more productive than freedom.

Now nobody dares to maintain that. That is even what explains the admission we hear all the time: "You are right in principle."

If that's so, if restriction does each particular industry good only by doing greater harm to general wealth, let us understand, then, that price itself, considered on its own, expresses a relation between each particular industry and industry in general, between Supply and Demand; and that, on these premises, the remunerative price that is the object of protection is more thwarted than helped by it.

Supplement

Under this title, Dearness and Cheapness, we published an article that brought us the following two letters. We print them below, followed by our answers.

Dear Editor,

You're turning all my ideas upside down. I was campaigning for free trade, and I found it so handy to put cheapness in the front of the window! I went around everywhere saying, "With freedom, bread, meat, cloth, linen, iron, and fuel are going to come down in price." That annoyed the people who sell them but pleased the people who buy them. Now you cast doubt on whether the result of free trade will be cheapness. But then what good will it be? What will the people gain, if foreign competition, which may hurt them in their sales, doesn't help them in their purchases?

Dear Free Trader,

Allow us to tell you that you have read only half of the article that prompted your letter. We said that free trade acts exactly like roads, canals, and railroads, like everything that makes communication easier, like everything that destroys obstacles. Its first tendency is to increase the abundance of the article set free, and therefore to lower its price. But by increasing at the same time the abundance of all the things for which that article is exchanged, it increases the demand for it, and the price rises again from that other side. You ask what the people will gain. Suppose they have a scale with several pans, in each of which they have, for their own use, a certain quantity of the goods you listed. If you add a little wheat to one pan, it will tend to sink; but if you add a little cloth, a little iron, and a little fuel to the other pans, the balance will be kept. If you look only at the beam, nothing will have changed. If you look at the people, you'll see them better fed, better clothed, and better warmed.

Dear Editor,

I am a cloth manufacturer and a protectionist. I admit that your article on dearness and cheapness has set me thinking. There is something plausible in it which, if only it were properly established, would be enough to make a convert.

Dear Protectionist,

We say that your restrictive measures aim at an iniquitous thing, artificial dearness. But we don't say that they always fulfill the hopes of those who call for them. It is certain that they inflict on the consumer all the harm of dearness. It is not certain that they hand the producer its profit. Why? Because if they reduce supply, they reduce demand as well.

That proves there is a moral force in the economic arrangement of this world, a vis medicatrix, a healing power, which ensures that in the long run unjust ambition runs headlong into disappointment.

Please note, sir, that one of the elements of the prosperity of each particular industry is general wealth. The price of a house depends not only on what it cost but also on the number and the fortunes of its tenants. Do two exactly identical houses necessarily have the same price? Certainly not, if one stands in Paris and the other in Lower Brittany. Let's never talk about price without taking the surroundings into account, and let's understand that no attempt is more futile than trying to build the prosperity of the parts on the ruin of the whole. And yet that is just what the restrictive system claims to do.

Competition has always been, and always will be, a nuisance to those who are subjected to it. And so we see men, at all times and in all places, striving to get rid of it. We know (and perhaps you do too) a town council in which the resident merchants wage a fierce war on the traveling ones. Their missiles are town tolls, stall fees, display fees, road tolls, and so on and so forth.

Now consider what would have become of Paris, for example, if that war had been waged there successfully.

Suppose the first shoemaker who set up there had managed to drive out all the others; and that the first tailor, the first mason, the first printer, the first watchmaker, the first barber, the first doctor, and the first baker had been just as lucky. Paris would still be a village of 1,200 to 1,500 inhabitants today. That isn't how it went. Everyone (except those you still keep out) came to work this market, and that is precisely what made it grow. For the enemies of competition it was nothing but a long string of bruises; and from bruise to bruise, Paris has become a city of a million inhabitants. General wealth has gained by it, no doubt; but has the private wealth of the shoemakers and tailors lost by it? For you, that's the question. As the competitors arrived, you would have said: the price of boots is going to fall. And did it? No; for if supply increased, demand increased too.

It will be the same with cloth, sir; let it in. You'll have more competitors, it's true; but you'll also have more customers, and above all richer customers. Why, has it never crossed your mind, when you see nine tenths of your countrymen going without, all winter long, the very cloth you make so well?

It's a long lesson to learn, this one: Do you want to prosper? Let your customers prosper.

But once it is learned, everyone will look for his own good in the general good. Then the jealousies between individual and individual, town and town, province and province, nation and nation, will no longer trouble the world.

Chapter 6: To Artisans and Workers

Several newspapers have attacked me in front of you. Won't you read my defense?

I'm not a suspicious man. When someone writes or speaks, I believe he means what he says.

And yet, however often I read and reread the papers I'm answering, I seem to find some sad tendencies in them.

What was the question? To find out which is better for you, restriction or freedom.

I believe it's freedom; they believe it's restriction. It's up to each of us to prove his case.

Was there any need to hint that we are agents of England, of the South, of the Government?

See how easy it would be for us to answer in kind on that ground.

We are agents of the English, they say, because some of us have used the words meeting and free trader!

And don't they use the words drawback and budget?

We imitate Cobden, the leader of the English free-trade league, and English democracy!

And don't they ape Lord George Bentinck and the British aristocracy?

We borrow the doctrine of freedom from perfidious Albion!

And don't they borrow the quibbles of protection from her?

We follow the lead of Bordeaux and the South!

And don't they serve the greed of Lille and the North?

We are furthering the secret designs of the ministry, which wants to distract attention from its policies!

And aren't they furthering the aims of the civil list, the King's own purse, which gains more from the protective system than anyone else in the world?

You see, then, that if we didn't despise this war of mudslinging, we wouldn't be short of weapons.

But that isn't the point.

The question, and I won't lose sight of it, is this:

What is better for the working classes: to be free, or not to be free, to buy from abroad?

Workers, you are told: "If you're free to buy from abroad what you now make yourselves, you won't make it any more; you'll be without work, without wages, and without bread. It's for your own good, then, that your freedom is restricted."

This objection comes back in every form. People say, for example: "If we dress in English cloth, if we make our plows from English iron, if we cut our bread with English knives, if we wipe our hands on English napkins, what will become of the French workers, what will become of national labor?"

Tell me, workers: suppose a man stood on the quay at Boulogne and said to every Englishman who came ashore, "Will you give me those English boots? I'll give you this French hat." Or: "Will you let me have that English horse? I'll let you have this French gig." Or: "Would you care to exchange that Birmingham machine for this Paris clock?" Or again: "Would it suit you to swap that Newcastle coal for this champagne?" I ask you: assuming our man showed some judgment in his offers, could anyone say that our national labor, taken as a whole, would be harmed?

Would it be harmed any more if there were twenty of these traders at Boulogne instead of one, if a million swaps were made instead of four, and if merchants and money were brought in to make them easier and multiply them without end?

Now, whether one country buys from another wholesale to sell retail, or retail to sell wholesale, if you follow the thing to the end you will always find that trade is nothing but a set of swaps for swaps, products for products, services for services. If one swap, then, does no harm to national labor, since it involves as much national labor given as foreign labor received, a hundred thousand million swaps will do it no more harm.

"But where's the profit?" you'll say. The profit is in making the best use of each country's resources, so that the same amount of labor yields more satisfaction and well-being everywhere.

Some people use a curious tactic on you. They begin by agreeing that the free system is better than the prohibitive one, no doubt so as not to have to defend themselves on that ground.

Next, they point out that in the passage from one system to the other, there will be some displacement of work.

Then they dwell on the suffering that, according to them, this displacement is bound to cause. They exaggerate it, they blow it up, they make it the main subject of the question, they present it as the one and only, final result of the reform, and in this way they try to enlist you under the flag of monopoly.

It's a tactic, by the way, that has been put at the service of every abuse; and I must confess one thing frankly: it always embarrasses the friends of reform, even of the reforms most useful to the people. You'll see why.

When an abuse exists, everything arranges itself around it.

Livelihoods attach themselves to it, others to those, and still others to those, and the whole thing makes a great building.

Do you want to lay a hand on it? Everybody cries out; and (mark this well) the shouters always seem, at first glance, to be right, because it's easier to show the disruption that must come with the reform than the new arrangement that must follow it.

The supporters of the abuse cite particular facts; they name the persons, and their suppliers and their workers, who are going to be hurt, while the poor devil of a reformer can only refer to the general good, which must spread little by little through the masses. That doesn't make nearly as strong an impression.

Is there talk of abolishing slavery, for instance? "You poor wretches," they tell the Black slaves, "who will feed you now? The overseer hands out lashes, but he also hands out the cassava."

And the slave misses his chain, because he wonders: Where will my cassava come from?

He doesn't see that it isn't the overseer who feeds him but his own labor, which feeds the overseer too.

When the monasteries were reformed in Spain, people said to the beggars: "Where will you find your soup and your homespun robe? The prior is your Providence. Isn't it very handy to go to him?"

And the beggars said: "That's true. If the prior goes, we can see clearly what we'll lose, but we can't see what will come to us in its place."

They didn't notice that if the monasteries gave alms, they also lived on alms, so that the people had more to give them than to receive from them.

In the same way, workers, monopoly quietly puts taxes on the shoulders of every one of you, and then, with the proceeds of those taxes, it gives you work.

And your false friends tell you: If there were no monopoly, who would give you work?

And you answer: That's true, that's true. The work the monopolists give us is certain. The promises of freedom are uncertain.

For you don't see that first they take money from you, and then they give you back part of that money in return for your work.

You ask who will give you work? Why, confound it, you'll give one another work! With the money that will no longer be taken from you, the shoemaker will dress better and give work to the tailor. The tailor will buy new shoes more often and give work to the shoemaker. And so on through every trade.

People say that with freedom there will be fewer workers in the mines and the spinning mills.

I don't believe it. But if it does happen, then there will necessarily be more working freely at home and in the sunshine.

For if these mines and mills can only keep going, as people say, with the help of taxes levied for their benefit on everybody, then once those taxes are abolished, everybody will be better off, and it's everybody's prosperity that feeds each person's work.

Forgive me if I dwell a little longer on this demonstration. I'd so like to see you on the side of freedom!

In France, let's suppose, capital invested in industry earns a profit of 5 percent. But here is Mondor, who has 100,000 francs in a factory that leaves him a loss of 5 percent. Between the loss and the gain, the difference is 10,000 francs. What do they do? Ever so softly, like a cat, they share out among you a little tax of 10,000 francs and give it to Mondor. You don't notice it, because the whole business is very cleverly disguised. It isn't the tax collector who comes to ask you for your share of the tax; you pay it to Mondor the ironmaster every time you buy your axes, your trowels, and your planes. Then they tell you: If you don't pay this tax, Mondor will stop giving work; his workers, Jean and Jacques, will be out of a job. Good heavens! If the tax were left in your pockets, wouldn't you give work yourselves, and on your own account at that?

And besides, don't worry: once he no longer has that soft pillow of a price padded by the tax, Mondor will put his wits to work to turn his loss into a profit, and Jean and Jacques won't be laid off. Then everything will be profit for everyone.

You may insist and say: "We understand that after the reform there will be more work in general than before; but in the meantime, Jean and Jacques will be out on the street."

To which I reply:

First, when work moves only to increase, a man with heart and arms isn't out on the street for long.

Second, nothing prevents the State from setting aside some funds to head off, during the transition, the unemployment which, for my part, I don't believe in.

Finally, if, to get out of a rut and into a state of things that is better for everyone, and above all fairer, we have no choice but to face a few hard moments, the workers are ready, or I don't know them. God grant the employers are the same!

What! Because you are workers, aren't you intelligent and moral? Your so-called friends seem to forget it. Isn't it astonishing that they discuss such a question in front of you, talking of wages and interests, without so much as uttering the word justice? They know very well that restriction is unjust. Why, then, don't they have the courage to warn you and tell you: "Workers, an iniquity prevails in the country, but it profits you, and you must support it"? Why? Because they know you would answer: No.

But it isn't true that this iniquity profits you. Give me a few more moments of your attention, and judge for yourselves.

What is protected in France? Things made by big employers in big factories: iron, coal, woolen cloth, textiles. And you're told that this is done not in the employers' interest but in yours, to guarantee you work.

And yet whenever foreign labor turns up in our market in a form that might hurt you but serves the big employers, isn't it let in?

Aren't there thirty thousand Germans in Paris making clothes and shoes? Why are they allowed to set up shop beside you, when cloth is kept out? Because cloth is made in great factories belonging to manufacturer-legislators. But clothes are made at home by workers. For turning wool into cloth, these gentlemen want no competition, because that's their trade; but for turning cloth into clothes, they admit it very readily, because that's yours.

When the railroads were built, English rails were kept out, but English workers were brought in. Why? Oh, it's very simple: because English rails compete with the great factories, while English hands compete only with your hands.

We, for our part, don't ask that the German tailors and the English navvies be kept out. We ask that cloth and rails be let in. We ask for justice for all, equality before the law for all!

It's a mockery to come and tell us that customs restriction has your advantage in view. Tailors, shoemakers, carpenters, joiners, masons, blacksmiths, merchants, grocers, watchmakers, butchers, bakers, upholsterers, milliners: I challenge you to name me a single way in which restriction profits you, and whenever you like I'll name you four in which it hurts you.

And after all, look how likely it is, this self-denial your newspapers credit the monopolists with.

I think we can call the natural rate of wages the rate that would settle itself naturally under the system of freedom. When you're told that restriction profits you, then, it's as if you were told that it adds a surplus to your natural wages. Now a surplus of wages beyond nature has to be taken from somewhere; it doesn't fall from the moon; it has to be taken from those who pay it.

You're led, then, to this conclusion: according to your so-called friends, the protective system was created and brought into the world so that the capitalists might be sacrificed to the workers.

Tell me, is that likely?

Where is your seat in the Chamber of Peers? When did you sit in the Palais-Bourbon, with the deputies? Who consulted you? Where did you get this idea of setting up the protective system?

I hear you answer: It wasn't we who set it up. Alas, we are neither peers nor deputies nor councillors of state. It was the capitalists who did it.

By the great God in heaven! They must have been in a fine mood that day! What! The capitalists made the law; they set up the prohibitive system; and they did it so that you, the workers, could make a profit at their expense!

But here is something stranger still.

How is it that your so-called friends, who talk to you today about the goodness, the generosity, and the self-denial of the capitalists, never stop pitying you for not enjoying your political rights? From their point of view, what could you do with them? The capitalists have the monopoly of legislation; that's true. Thanks to that monopoly, they've awarded themselves the monopoly of iron, cloth, linen, coal, timber, and meat; that's true too. But here are your so-called friends saying that by acting this way the capitalists have stripped themselves, without being obliged to, so as to enrich you, without your having any right to it! Surely, if you were voters and deputies, you wouldn't manage your affairs any better; you wouldn't even manage them as well.

If the industrial organization that rules us is made in your interest, then it's a betrayal to demand political rights for you; for these democrats of a new kind will never get out of this dilemma: the law, made by the middle class, gives you either more or less than your natural wages. If it gives you less, they're deceiving you by inviting you to support it. If it gives you more, they're deceiving you again by urging you to demand political rights, when the middle class is making sacrifices for you that you, in your honesty, would never dare to vote for.

Workers, God forbid that this piece should sow the seeds of anger against the rich classes in your hearts! If misunderstood interests, or sincerely alarmed ones, still uphold monopoly, let's not forget that it is rooted in errors common to capitalists and workers alike. Far from stirring them up against each other, then, let's work to bring them together. And what must we do for that? If it's true that the natural tendencies of society work to wipe out inequality among men, all we need do is let those tendencies act, remove the artificial obstructions that hold back their effect, and let the relations between the various classes settle on the principle of justice, which is one and the same, at least in my mind, with the principle of liberty.

Chapter 7: A Chinese Tale

People cry out against the greed and selfishness of the age!

For my part, I see a world, and a Paris above all, peopled with Deciuses, every one of them ready to sacrifice himself for the public good like that Roman hero.

Open the thousand volumes, the thousand newspapers, the thousand serials that the Paris presses spew out over the country every day: isn't it all the work of little saints?

What verve in painting the vices of the age! What touching tenderness for the masses! How liberally the rich are invited to share with the poor, if not the poor with the rich! How many plans for social reforms, social improvements, social organizations! Is there a writer so slight that he doesn't devote himself to the well-being of the working classes? All anyone has to do is advance him a few crowns to give him the leisure to pursue his humanitarian lucubrations.

And then people talk about the selfishness and individualism of our time!

There's nothing they don't claim to make serve the well-being and moral improvement of the people, nothing, not even the Customs. You may think it's a tax machine, like the octroi, the town toll on goods coming in through the gates, or the toll at the end of the bridge? Not at all. It's an institution essentially civilizing, fraternal, and egalitarian. What can you do? It's the fashion. You have to put sentiment, or pretend to put sentiment, sentimentality even, into everything, right down to the sentry box of What have you got there?

But to fulfill these philanthropic aspirations, the customs, it must be admitted, has some strange methods.

It puts on foot an army of directors, assistant directors, inspectors, assistant inspectors, controllers, examiners, receivers, chiefs, deputy chiefs, clerks, supernumeraries, aspiring supernumeraries, and aspirants to aspiration, not counting the active service on the frontier; and all this to exercise on the people's industry that negative action which is summed up in the word prevent.

Notice that I don't say tax, but really and truly prevent.

And prevent not acts condemned by morality or contrary to public order, but innocent transactions, transactions that are even, as everyone agrees, favorable to peace and to the union of peoples.

Yet humanity is so flexible and so supple that, one way or another, it always gets over the preventions. It's a matter of extra labor.

Prevent a people from getting its food from abroad, and it grows it at home. That's harder, but people have to live. Prevent it from crossing the valley, and it climbs over the peaks. That takes longer, but people have to get there.

That much is sad; but here's the funny part. When the law has created a certain amount of obstacles in this way, and humanity has diverted a corresponding amount of labor to overcoming them, you're no longer allowed to ask for the law to be reformed. For if you point to the obstacle, they point to the work it gives rise to; and if you say, That isn't work created but work diverted, you get the answer the newspaper Esprit public gives: "The impoverishment alone is certain and immediate; as for the enrichment, it is more than hypothetical."

This reminds me of a Chinese story, which I'm going to tell you.

There were once in China two great cities, Tchin and Tchan. A magnificent canal joined them. The emperor saw fit to have enormous blocks of rock thrown into it to put it out of service.

Seeing this, Kouang, his first mandarin, said to him:

"Son of Heaven, you are making a mistake."

To which the emperor replied:

"Kouang, you are talking nonsense."

I'm only giving the substance of the dialogue here, of course.

At the end of three moons, the celestial emperor sent for the mandarin and said to him:

"Kouang, look."

And Kouang opened his eyes and looked.

And at some distance from the canal he saw a multitude of men working. Some were digging, others were filling in; these were leveling, those were paving; and the mandarin, who was very well read, thought to himself: They are building a road.

At the end of three more moons, the emperor called Kouang and said to him:

"Look."

And Kouang looked.

And he saw that the road was finished, and he noticed that along the way, at intervals, inns had sprung up. A crowd of people on foot, of carts, and of palanquins came and went, and countless Chinese, worn out with fatigue, carried heavy loads back and forth from Tchin to Tchan and from Tchan to Tchin. And Kouang said to himself: It's the destruction of the canal that gives these poor people work. But it never occurred to him that this work was diverted from other uses.

And three moons went by, and the emperor said to Kouang:

"Look."

And Kouang looked.

And he saw that the inns were always full of travelers, and that since these travelers were hungry, shops of butchers, bakers, pork butchers, and sellers of swallows' nests had gathered around them. And since these honest tradesmen couldn't go about naked, tailors, shoemakers, and sellers of parasols and fans had set up as well; and since nobody sleeps under the stars, even in the Celestial Empire, carpenters, masons, and roofers had come running. Then came police officers, judges, and fakirs; in a word, a town with its suburbs grew up around every inn.

And the emperor said to Kouang: "What do you think of it?"

And Kouang answered: "I would never have believed that destroying a canal could create so much work for the people." For it never occurred to him that this wasn't work created but work diverted; that travelers had eaten when they went by the canal just as much as since they had been forced to go by the road.

Meanwhile, to the great astonishment of the Chinese, the emperor died, and this son of Heaven was laid in the earth.

His successor sent for Kouang and said to him: "Have the canal cleared."

And Kouang said to the new emperor:

"Son of Heaven, you are making a mistake."

And the emperor replied:

"Kouang, you are talking nonsense."

But Kouang persisted and said: "Sire, what is your aim?"

"My aim," said the emperor, "is to make it easier for men and goods to move between Tchin and Tchan, and to make transport less costly, so that the people may have tea and clothing more cheaply."

But Kouang was well prepared. The day before, he had received a few numbers of the Moniteur industriel, a Chinese newspaper. Knowing his lesson by heart, he asked permission to reply, and having got it, and having knocked his forehead on the floor nine times, he said:

"Sire, you aim to lower the price of articles of consumption by making transport easy, so as to put them within the people's reach; and to do that you begin by making the people lose all the work that the destruction of the canal had brought into being. Sire, in political economy, absolute cheapness..."

The emperor: "I think you're reciting."

Kouang: "That's true; it will be easier for me to read." And unfolding the Esprit public, he read: "In political economy, the absolute cheapness of articles of consumption is only a secondary question. The problem lies in the balance between the price of labor and the price of the things necessary to existence. Abundance of labor is the wealth of nations, and the best economic system is the one that provides them with the greatest possible amount of labor. Do not go asking whether it is better to pay 4 cash or 8 cash for a cup of tea, 5 taels or 10 taels for a shirt. These are childish matters unworthy of a serious mind. Nobody disputes your proposition. The question is whether it is better to pay more for an article and to have, through the abundance and the price of labor, more means of acquiring it; or whether it is better to impoverish the sources of labor, to diminish the mass of national production, to carry articles of consumption by roads that move, more cheaply, it is true, but at the same time to take away from a portion of our workers the possibility of buying them even at these reduced prices."

The emperor not being quite convinced, Kouang said to him: "Sire, deign to wait. I still have the Moniteur industriel to quote."

But the emperor said:

"I don't need your Chinese newspapers to know that to create obstacles is to call labor in that direction. But that isn't my mission. Go and clear the canal. Then we'll reform the customs."

And Kouang went off tearing his beard and crying: "O Fô! O Pê! O Lî! and all you monosyllabic, circumflexed gods of Cathay, take pity on your people; for an emperor of the English school has come to us, and I can see that before long we shall lack everything, since we shall no longer need to do anything."

Chapter 8: Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc

After this, therefore because of this: the commonest and the falsest of all arguments.

Real suffering has appeared in England.

This fact comes on the heels of two others:

First, the customs reform;

Second, the failure of two harvests in a row.

To which of these last two circumstances should we attribute the first?

The protectionists never fail to cry: "It's this accursed freedom that's doing all the harm. It promised us the moon, we welcomed it in, and now look: the factories are shutting down and the people are suffering. Cum hoc, ergo propter hoc: with this, therefore because of this."

Freedom of trade shares out the fruits that Providence grants to human labor in the most even and the fairest way possible. If part of those fruits is carried off by a calamity, freedom still sees to the fair sharing of what is left. People are less well provided, no doubt; but is that the fault of freedom or of the calamity?

Freedom works on the same principle as insurance. When disaster strikes, it spreads over a great many people and a great many years losses that, without it, would pile up on one people and one moment. Now, has anyone ever thought of saying that fire stopped being a calamity once there was fire insurance?

In 1842, 43, and 44, England began reducing its duties. At the same time its harvests were very plentiful, and we may reasonably believe that these two circumstances together produced the unheard-of prosperity the country displayed during that period.

In 1845 the harvest was bad; in 1846 it was worse still.

Food grew dear; the people spent their means on feeding themselves and cut back on everything else they bought. There was less demand for clothing, less work in the factories, and wages showed a tendency to fall. Fortunately, in that same year the restrictive barriers were lowered again, and an enormous mass of food was able to reach the English market. Without that, it's practically certain that a terrible revolution would be bathing Great Britain in blood at this very moment.

And people come along and blame freedom for disasters that it prevents, and at least partly repairs!

A poor leper lived in solitude. Whatever he had touched, nobody would touch. Reduced to providing everything for himself, he dragged out a wretched existence in this world. A great doctor cured him. And there was our hermit in full possession of free trade. What a fine prospect opened before him! He enjoyed reckoning up all the good use he could make, thanks to his dealings with other men, of his strong arms. Then he happened to break both of them. Alas, his lot was more dreadful than ever. The journalists of that country, witnessing his misery, said: "See what the freedom to trade has brought him to! Really, he was less to be pitied when he lived alone." "What!" the doctor replied. "Don't you take any account of his two broken arms? Do they count for nothing in his sad fate? His misfortune is to have lost the use of his arms, not to have been cured of leprosy. He would be far more to be pitied if he were armless and a leper into the bargain."

Post hoc, ergo propter hoc: beware of that sophism.

Chapter 9: Theft by Bounty

People find my little book of Sophisms too theoretical, scientific, metaphysical. Very well. Let's try the trivial, the commonplace, and, if need be, the crude. Convinced that the public is being duped on the subject of protection, I wanted to prove it to them. They'd rather have it shouted at them. Then let's shout:

Midas, King Midas has donkey's ears!

An explosion of frankness often does better than the politest circumlocutions. You remember Oronte, and the trouble the Misanthrope has, misanthrope though he is, in convincing him of his folly.

	Alceste. You risk being cast in a sorry part.
	Oronte. Do you mean to tell me, then, by this,
	That I am wrong to want...
	Alceste. I don't say that. But...
	Oronte. Then do I write so badly?
	Alceste. I don't say that. But still...
	Oronte. But may I not be told what in my sonnet...?
	Alceste. Frankly, it's only fit for the privy.

Frankly, good public, you're being robbed. That's crude, but it's clear.

The words theft, steal, and thief will strike many people as being in bad taste. I'll ask them what Harpagon asked Élise: Is it the word or the thing that frightens you?

"Whoever has fraudulently taken a thing that does not belong to him is guilty of theft." (Penal Code, Article 379.)

To steal: To take by stealth or by force. (Dictionary of the Académie française.)

Thief: One who demands more than is due to him. (Ibid.)

Now, the monopolist who, by a law of his own making, forces me to pay him 20 francs for what I can get elsewhere for 15, isn't he fraudulently taking from me 5 francs that belong to me?

Isn't he taking by stealth or by force?

Isn't he demanding more than is due to him?

He takes, he removes, he demands, people will say; but not by stealth or by force, which is what would make it theft.

When our tax bills come loaded with the 5 francs for the bounty that the monopolist takes, removes, or demands, what could be more stealthy, since so few of us suspect it? And for those who aren't fooled, what could be more forced, since at the first refusal the bailiff's man is at our doors?

But the monopolists may rest easy. Theft by bounty or by tariff, though it offends against fairness every bit as much as the confidence trick, doesn't break the law. On the contrary, it is committed by authority of the law. That only makes it worse; but it has nothing to fear from the police court.

Besides, like it or not, we are all thieves and all robbed in this business. The author of this volume may cry Stop thief! when he buys, but people can cry it after him when he sells.²⁰ If he differs from many of his fellow countrymen, it's only in this: he knows he loses more at the game than he wins, and they don't know it. If they knew it, the game would soon stop.

Nor do I boast of being the first to give the thing back its true name. More than sixty years ago Smith said:

"When manufacturers come together, you may expect a conspiracy to be hatched against the public's pockets." Is that any wonder, when the public pays no attention to it?

Well then, an assembly of manufacturers holds official deliberations under the name of the General Councils. What goes on there, and what is resolved?

Here, much abridged, are the minutes of one session.

A Shipowner. Our merchant marine is in desperate straits (warlike digression). That's no surprise: I can't build ships without iron. I can find it at 10 francs on the world market; but by law the French ironmaster forces me to pay him 15 francs. That's 5 francs, then, that he takes from me. I demand the freedom to buy where I please.

An Ironmaster. I can get goods carried for 20 francs on the world market. By act of the legislature, the shipowner demands 30. That's 10 francs, then, that he takes from me. He pillages me, I pillage him; all is for the best.

A Statesman. The shipowner's conclusion is most imprudent. Oh, let us cherish the touching union that is our strength! If we strike out one iota of the theory of protection, farewell to the whole theory.

The Shipowner. But for us protection has failed. I repeat that the merchant marine is in desperate straits.

A Seaman. Very well, let's raise the surtax on foreign ships, and let the shipowner, who takes 30 from the public for his freight, take 40.

A Minister. The government will push the fine mechanism of the surtax to its utmost limits; but I fear that will not be enough.²¹

An Official. You're all in a great fuss over very little. Is the tariff our only salvation? Have you forgotten taxation? If the consumer is good-natured, the taxpayer is no less so. Let's load him with taxes, and let the shipowner be satisfied. I propose a bounty of 5 francs, to be taken out of public taxes and handed to the shipbuilder for every quintal of iron he uses.

Mixed voices. Hear, hear! A Farmer: A bounty of 3 francs for me on every hectoliter of wheat! A Weaver: A bounty of 2 francs for me on every meter of linen! And so on and so forth.

The President. That is agreed, then. Our session will have given birth to the system of bounties, and that will be its everlasting glory. What industry can ever lose money from now on, since we have two such simple ways of turning losses into profits: the tariff and the bounty? The session is closed.

Some supernatural vision must have shown me in a dream the coming appearance of the bounty (who knows, I may even have put the idea into Monsieur Dupin's head) when, a few months ago, I wrote these words:

"It seems obvious to me that protection could have taken the form of a direct tax levied by the state and paid out as compensating bounties to the privileged industries, without any change in its nature or its effects."

And after comparing the protective duty with the bounty:

"I frankly confess my preference for the second system. It seems to me fairer, cheaper, and more honest: fairer, because if society wants to hand out largesse to some of its members, everyone should contribute to it; cheaper, because it would save a great deal in collection costs and do away with many obstacles; and more honest, finally, because the public would see clearly what was going on and know what it was being made to do."²²

Since the opportunity has been so kindly offered us, let's study theft by bounty. Whatever can be said about it applies to theft by tariff as well; and since that one is a little better disguised, the direct swindle will help us understand the indirect one. That's how the mind proceeds: from the simple to the complex.

But look here! Isn't there some variety of theft that is simpler still? Indeed there is: highway robbery. All it lacks is to be legalized, monopolized, or, as they say these days, organized.

Now here is what I read in a book of travels:

"When we arrived in the kingdom of A..., every industry claimed to be in distress. Agriculture groaned, manufacturing complained, commerce muttered, shipping grumbled, and the government didn't know whom to listen to. At first it thought of taxing all the malcontents heavily and handing out the proceeds of those taxes among them, after taking its own cut: that would have been like the lottery in our dear Spain. There are a thousand of you; the State takes a piastre from each of you; then it slyly palms 250 piastres and shares out 750 among the players in prizes large and small. The worthy hidalgo who receives three quarters of a piastre, forgetting that he paid in a whole piastre, is beside himself with joy and runs off to spend his fifteen reales at the tavern. It would also have been something like what goes on in France. Be that as it may, barbarous as the country was, the government didn't count enough on the stupidity of the inhabitants to get them to accept such peculiar forms of protection, and here is what it thought up instead.

"The country was crisscrossed with roads. The government had them measured off exactly in kilometers, and then it said to the farmer: 'Whatever you can steal from travelers between these two milestones is yours: let it serve you as a bounty, as protection, as encouragement.' Next it assigned each manufacturer and each shipowner a stretch of road to work, according to this formula:

	Dono tibi et concedo
	Virtutem et mightiam
	Stealandi,
	Pillagandi,
	Robbandi,
	Swindlandi,
	Et cheatandi,
	Impune per totam istam
	Viam.

"Now it so happens that the natives of the kingdom of A... are today so used to this regime, so accustomed to counting only what they steal and not what is stolen from them, so deeply inclined to look at pillage only from the pillager's point of view, that they regard the sum of all the private thefts as a national profit, and they refuse to give up a system of protection without which, they say, there isn't a single industry that could keep going."

You protest? It isn't possible, you say, for a whole people to agree to see an increase in wealth in what its inhabitants steal from one another.

And why not? We hold that very conviction in France, and every day we organize and perfect reciprocal theft there, under the name of bounties and protective tariffs.

Let's not exaggerate, though. Let's grant that as to the method of collection, and in its side effects, the system of the kingdom of A... may be worse than ours. But let's also say that as to principles and necessary effects, there isn't an atom of difference between all these species of theft legally organized to supply extra profits to industry.

Notice that if highway robbery has a few drawbacks in the execution, it also has advantages you don't find in theft by tariff.

For example, it can be shared out fairly among all producers. Not so with customs duties. They are powerless by their very nature to protect certain classes of society, such as artisans, merchants, men of letters, men of the law, men of the sword, laborers, and so on and so forth.

It's true that theft by bounty also lends itself to infinite subdivision, and in that respect it is every bit as perfect as highway robbery. But on the other hand it often leads to results so odd, so nincompoopish, that the natives of the kingdom of A... could laugh at them with good reason.

In highway robbery, what the victim loses, the robber gains. The stolen article at least stays in the country. But under the reign of theft by bounty, what taxation takes from the French is often handed to the Chinese, the Khoikhoi, the Xhosa, and the Algonquins, and here's how.

A length of cloth is worth a hundred francs in Bordeaux. It can't be sold for less without a loss. It can't be sold for more, because competition among the merchants won't allow it. In these circumstances, if a Frenchman comes to buy this cloth, he'll have to pay a hundred francs for it or go without. But if it's an Englishman, then the government steps in and says to the merchant: Sell your cloth, and I'll have the taxpayers give you twenty francs. The merchant, who neither wants nor is able to get more than a hundred francs for his cloth, lets the Englishman have it for 80 francs. That sum, added to the 20 francs, the proceeds of theft by bounty, makes his account come out exactly right. It's just as if the taxpayers had given 20 francs to the Englishman on condition that he buy French cloth at 20 francs off, 20 francs below the cost of production, 20 francs below what it costs us ourselves. Therefore theft by bounty has this peculiarity: the robbed are in the country that tolerates it, and the robbers are scattered over the face of the globe.

Truly, it's a miracle that people go on treating this proposition as proven: Whatever the individual steals from the mass is a general gain. Perpetual motion, the philosopher's stone, and the squaring of the circle have fallen into oblivion; but the theory of Progress by Theft is still held in honor. And yet, a priori, one would have thought that of all childish notions it was the least likely to survive.

Some people tell us: You're supporters of laissez passer, then? Economists of the outdated school of Smith and Say? Then you don't want the organization of labor? Why, gentlemen, organize labor as much as you please. We, for our part, will see to it that you don't organize theft.

Others, more numerous, keep saying: Bounties, tariffs, all that may have been overdone. We must use them without abusing them. A wise freedom, combined with a moderate protection: that's what serious and practical men call for. Let's beware of absolute principles.

That, according to the Spanish traveler, is exactly what people said in the kingdom of A... "Highway robbery," said the wise men, "is neither good nor bad; it depends on the circumstances. It's only a matter of weighing things up properly, and of paying us officials well for this work of weighing. Perhaps pillage has been given too much latitude, perhaps not enough. Let us see; let us examine; let us balance the accounts of every worker. To those who don't earn enough, we'll give a little more road to work. For those who earn too much, we'll cut back the hours, days, or months of pillage."

Those who talked this way won a great reputation for moderation, prudence, and wisdom. They never failed to rise to the highest offices of State.

As for those who said, Let's put down injustices and fractions of injustice; let's tolerate neither theft nor half-theft nor quarter-theft: they passed for ideologues, boring dreamers who kept saying the same thing over and over. Besides, the people found their reasoning too easy to follow. How could anything so simple be true!

Chapter 10: The Tax Collector

Jacques Bonhomme, winegrower;

Monsieur Lasouche, tax collector.

Lasouche. You harvested twenty casks of wine?

Jacques. Yes, by dint of care and sweat.

Lasouche. Kindly hand over six of them, and the best ones.

Jacques. Six casks out of twenty! Merciful heavens! You want to ruin me. And what, if you please, are they for?

Lasouche. The first will go to the State's creditors. When you have debts, the least you can do is pay the interest on them.

Jacques. And where did the capital go?

Lasouche. That would take too long to tell. Part of it was turned, once upon a time, into cartridges that made the finest smoke in the world. Another part paid men to get themselves crippled on foreign soil after they'd laid it waste. Then, when all this spending had brought our friends the enemy to our country, they wouldn't clear out without taking money with them, which had to be borrowed.

Jacques. And what do I get out of it today?

Lasouche. The satisfaction of saying:

	How proud I am to be a Frenchman
	When I look upon the Vendôme Column!

Jacques. And the humiliation of leaving my heirs land burdened with a perpetual annuity. Well, you have to pay what you owe, however foolishly you spent it. One cask, then; but the other five?

Lasouche. One is needed to pay for the public services: the civil list, the judges who make your neighbor give back the furrow he tries to grab, the gendarmes who chase thieves while you sleep, the road mender who keeps up the road that takes you to town, the priest who baptizes your children, the schoolmaster who teaches them, and your humble servant, who doesn't work for nothing.

Jacques. Fair enough: service for service. There's nothing to be said against that. I'd just as soon settle directly with my priest and my schoolmaster; but I won't press the point. All right, the second cask. It's a long way to six.

Lasouche. Do you think two casks is too much for your share of the costs of the army and the navy?

Jacques. Alas, it's a small thing compared with what they cost me already, for they've taken from me two sons I loved dearly.

Lasouche. The balance of the European powers has to be maintained.

Jacques. Good Lord! The balance would be the same if those powers were cut everywhere by half or by three quarters. We'd keep our children and our incomes. It would only take an agreement.

Lasouche. Yes; but nobody agrees.

Jacques. That's what flabbergasts me. Because after all, everybody suffers from it.

Lasouche. You asked for it, Jacques Bonhomme.²³

Jacques. You're joking, Monsieur Tax Collector. Do I have any say in the matter?

Lasouche. Whom did you elect as your deputy?

Jacques. A fine army general, who'll be a marshal before long if God spares him.

Lasouche. And what does the fine general live on?

Jacques. On my casks, I imagine.

Lasouche. And what would happen if he voted to cut the army and your share of its cost?

Jacques. Instead of being made a marshal, he'd be pensioned off.

Lasouche. Do you understand now that you yourself...

Jacques. Let's go on to the fifth cask, if you please.

Lasouche. This one is off to Algeria.

Jacques. To Algeria! And they tell us all Muslims are wine-haters, the barbarians! I've often wondered, in fact, whether they don't know Médoc because they're infidels, or, what's more likely, whether they're infidels because they don't know Médoc. Besides, what services do they render me in return for this nectar that has cost me so much labor?

Lasouche. None. And so it isn't meant for Muslims at all, but for good Christians who cross over to Barbary every day.

Jacques. And what are they going there to do that could be of any use to me?

Lasouche. Carry out raids and suffer raids; kill and get killed; catch dysentery and come home to be treated; dig harbors, cut roads, build villages, and fill them with Maltese, Italians, Spaniards, and Swiss, who live on your cask and on a good many other casks I'll be coming to ask you for.

Jacques. Mercy! This is too much. I refuse you my cask point-blank. They'd send a winegrower who did such crazy things to the madhouse at Bicêtre. Cutting roads in the Atlas, good God, when I can't get out of my own door! Digging harbors in Barbary when the Garonne silts up more every day! Taking away the children I love to go and torment the Kabyles! Making me pay for the houses, the seed, and the horses handed out to Greeks and Maltese, when there are so many poor people all around us!

Lasouche. The poor! Exactly. We're ridding the country of that surplus.

Jacques. Thanks very much! By sending after them to Algeria the capital that would have kept them alive here.

Lasouche. And then you're laying the foundations of a great empire, you're carrying civilization to Africa, and you're adorning your fatherland with immortal glory.

Jacques. You're a poet, Monsieur Tax Collector; but I'm a winegrower, and I refuse.

Lasouche. Consider that in a thousand years or so you'll get your advances back a hundredfold. That's what the men running the enterprise say.

Jacques. Meanwhile, to cover the costs, they asked at first for only one barrel of wine, then two, then three, and now here I am taxed a whole cask! I persist in my refusal.

Lasouche. It's too late. Your proxy has already granted on your behalf one cask, or four whole barrels.

Jacques. That's only too true. Cursed weakness! I had a feeling, when I gave him my power of attorney, that I was doing something rash; for what does an army general have in common with a winegrower?

Lasouche. You can see there is something you have in common, if only the wine you harvest and he votes to himself in your name.

Jacques. Go on, laugh at me, I deserve it, Monsieur Tax Collector. But be reasonable, now: leave me the sixth cask at least. That pays the interest on the debts, provides for the civil list, keeps the public services going, and keeps the African war going forever. What more do you want?

Lasouche. I don't haggle. You should have told the general what you wanted. Now he's disposed of your vintage.

Jacques. Confounded old grouch! But tell me, what do you mean to do with this poor cask, the pride of my cellar? Here, taste this wine. How mellow it is, full-bodied, round, velvety, silky!...

Lasouche. Excellent! Delicious! It will do very nicely for Monsieur D..., the cloth manufacturer.

Jacques. For Monsieur D..., the manufacturer? What do you mean?

Lasouche. That he'll make good use of it.

Jacques. How? What's this? Devil take me if I understand you!

Lasouche. Don't you know that Monsieur D... has founded a superb enterprise, very useful to the country, which, all things balanced, makes a considerable loss every year?

Jacques. I pity him with all my heart. But what can I do about it?

Lasouche. The Chamber understood that if things went on this way, Monsieur D... would have to choose between running it better and closing his factory.

Jacques. But what connection is there between Monsieur D...'s bad speculations and my cask?

Lasouche. The Chamber thought that if it handed Monsieur D... a little wine taken from your cellar, a few hectoliters of wheat taken from your neighbors, and a few sous cut from the workers' wages, his losses would turn into profits.

Jacques. The recipe is as infallible as it is ingenious. But confound it, it's terribly iniquitous! What! Monsieur D... is going to cover his losses by taking my wine?

Lasouche. Not the wine exactly, but its price. That's what they call bounties for encouragement. But you look thunderstruck! Don't you see the great service you're rendering your country?

Jacques. You mean, to Monsieur D...?

Lasouche. To your country. Monsieur D... assures us that his industry is prospering thanks to this arrangement, and that this, he says, is how the country grows rich. He was saying so again the other day in the Chamber, of which he's a member.

Jacques. It's a barefaced swindle! What! Some boor goes into a foolish enterprise and squanders his capital; and if he squeezes enough wine or wheat out of me to make good his losses and even make himself a profit, that's to be seen as a gain for everyone!

Lasouche. Since your attorney has judged it so, all that's left for you is to hand me the six casks of wine and sell the fourteen casks I'm leaving you as well as you can.

Jacques. That's my business.

Lasouche. Because, you see, it would be a great pity if you didn't get a good price for them.

Jacques. I'll see to it.

Lasouche. Because there are a great many things that price has to meet.

Jacques. I know, sir, I know.

Lasouche. First of all, if you buy iron to replace your spades and your plows, a law decides that you'll pay the ironmaster twice what it's worth.

Jacques. Well, now! Are we in the Black Forest among the robbers, then?

Lasouche. Next, if you need oil, meat, linen, coal, wool, or sugar, everyone, by law, will charge you double their value.

Jacques. But that's horrible, dreadful, abominable!

Lasouche. What's the good of these complaints? You yourself, through your bearer of power of attorney...

Jacques. Leave me in peace about my power of attorney. I put it in very strange hands, it's true. But they won't catch me that way again, and I'll have myself represented by good, plain country folk.

Lasouche. Bah! You'll reelect the fine general.

Jacques. Me? I'm going to reelect the general, to hand out my wine to the Africans and the manufacturers?

Lasouche. You'll reelect him, I tell you.

Jacques. That's a bit much. I won't reelect him if I don't want to.

Lasouche. But you'll want to, and you'll reelect him.

Jacques. Let him come and try it. He'll find he's met his match.

Lasouche. We'll see. Goodbye. I'm taking your six casks, and I'm off to share them out as the general has decided.

Chapter 11: The Utopian

"If I were His Majesty's minister!..."

"Well, what would you do?"

"I'd begin by... by... well, by being very much at a loss. Because after all, I'd only be minister because I had the majority; I'd only have the majority because I'd made it for myself; and I'd only have made it, by honest means at least, by governing according to its ideas... Therefore, if I set out to make my ideas prevail by going against its ideas, I wouldn't have the majority any more, and if I didn't have the majority, I wouldn't be His Majesty's minister."

"Suppose you are, and that consequently the majority is no obstacle to you. What would you do?"

"I would look for which side the just is on."

"And then?"

"I would look for which side the useful is on."

"And then?"

"I would look to see whether they agree or come to blows."

"And if you found they didn't agree?"

	I'd say to King Philippe:
	"Take back your portfolio, Sire."
	The rhyme is thin, the style is old and worn;
	But don't you see it's better, far and away,
	Than those compromises common sense must scorn,
	And that plain honesty is speaking here today?

"But if you find that the just and the useful are one and the same?"

"Then I'll go straight ahead."

"Very good. But to bring about the useful by means of the just, you need a third thing."

"What's that?"

"The possibility."

"You granted it to me."

"When?"

"Just now."

"How?"

"By granting me the majority."

"I did think at the time that the concession was a very rash one, because after all it implies that the majority sees clearly what is just, sees clearly what is useful, and sees clearly that they are in perfect harmony."

"And if it saw all that clearly, the good would get done, so to speak, all by itself."

"That's where you keep bringing me: to seeing no reform as possible except through the progress of general reason."

"Just as I see every reform as certain through that progress."

"Wonderful. But this preliminary progress is itself rather slow. Suppose it achieved. What would you do? Because I'm in a hurry to see you at work, in action, in practice."

"First, I'd reduce the postage on letters to 10 centimes."

"I'd heard you talk of 5 centimes."

"Yes; but since I have other reforms in view, I have to proceed prudently, to avoid a deficit."

"Good grief! What prudence! There you are already with a deficit of 30 million."

"Next, I'd reduce the salt tax to 10 francs."

"Fine! There you are with a deficit of another 30 million. You've no doubt invented a new tax?"

"Heaven forbid! Besides, I don't flatter myself that I have so inventive a mind."

"But you'll have to... ah, I see. What was I thinking of? You're simply going to cut spending. It didn't occur to me."

"You're not the only one. I'll get to that; but for the moment, it isn't what I'm counting on."

"Indeed! You cut revenue without cutting spending, and you avoid a deficit?"

"Yes, by cutting other taxes at the same time."

(Here the other man lays the forefinger of his right hand on his forehead and shakes his head, which may be translated: he's lost his wits.)

"My word! The method is ingenious. I pay 100 francs into the Treasury; you relieve me of 5 francs on salt and 5 francs on postage; and so that the Treasury still takes in 100 francs, you relieve me of 10 francs on some other tax?"

"Shake on it; you've understood me."

"Devil take me if I have! I'm not even sure I heard you."

"I repeat: I balance one tax cut with another."

"Confound it! I have a few moments to waste; I may as well listen to you work out this paradox."

"Here is the whole mystery. I know of a tax that costs you 20 francs, of which not a farthing reaches the Treasury. I let you off half of it, and I send the other half down the road to the Ministry of Finance on the rue de Rivoli."

"Really! You're a financier without equal. There's just one difficulty. In what way, if you please, do I pay a tax that doesn't go to the Treasury?"

"How much did that coat cost you?"

"100 francs."

"And if you'd had the cloth sent from Verviers, how much would it cost you?"

"80 francs."

"Then why didn't you order it from Verviers?"

"Because it's forbidden."

"And why is it forbidden?"

"To make the coat cost me 100 francs instead of 80."

"Then this ban costs you 20 francs?"

"Without any doubt."

"And where do they go, those 20 francs?"

"Where would they go? To the cloth manufacturer."

"Well, then! Give me 10 francs for the Treasury, I'll have the ban lifted, and you'll still be 10 francs ahead."

"Oho! I'm beginning to see daylight. Here's the Treasury's account: it loses 5 francs on postage and 5 on salt, and gains 10 francs on cloth. All square."

"And here is your own account: you gain 5 francs on salt, 5 francs on postage, and 10 francs on cloth."

"Total, 20 francs. I rather like this plan. But what will become of the poor cloth manufacturer?"

"Oh, I've thought of him. I'm arranging compensations for him, always by means of tax cuts that profit the Treasury; and what I've done for you in the matter of cloth, I do for him in the matter of wool, coal, machinery, and so on, so that he'll be able to lower his price without losing."

"But are you sure it will balance?"

"It will tip in his favor. The 20 francs I save you on cloth will grow by what I save you as well on wheat, meat, fuel, and so on. It will add up to a great deal; and a similar saving will be made by every one of your thirty-five million fellow citizens. That's enough to exhaust the cloth of Verviers and of Elbeuf both. The nation will be better dressed, that's all."

"I'll think about it, because it's all getting a little muddled in my head."

"After all, where clothes are concerned, the essential thing is to be clothed. Your limbs are your property, not the manufacturer's. Keeping them from shivering is your business, not his! If the law takes his side against you, the law is unjust, and you've allowed me to argue on the assumption that what is unjust is harmful."

"Perhaps I went too far; but go on with the account of your financial plan."

"Next, then, I'll make a customs law."

"In two folio volumes?"

"No, in two articles."

"This time, nobody will be able to say any more that the famous axiom 'Ignorance of the law is no excuse' is a fiction. Let's see your tariff, then."

"Here it is:

"Art. 1. All imported goods shall pay a duty of 5 percent of their value."

"Even raw materials?"

"Unless they have no value."

"But they all have some, a little or a lot."

"In that case they'll pay a little or a lot."

"How do you expect our factories to compete with foreign factories that get their raw materials duty-free?"

"Given the State's expenses, if we close this source of revenue we'll have to open another. That won't reduce the relative inferiority of our factories, and there'll be one more administration to create and pay for."

"That's true; I was reasoning as though the point were to abolish the tax and not to move it. I'll think about it. Let's see your second article?..."

"Art. 2. All exported goods shall pay a duty of 5 percent of their value."

"Mercy, Monsieur Utopian! You'll get yourself stoned, and if need be I'll throw the first stone myself."

"We agreed that the majority is enlightened."

"Enlightened! Will you maintain that an export duty isn't a burden?"

"Every tax is a burden, but this one less than any other."

"Carnival season excuses a good many eccentricities. Treat yourself to the pleasure of making this new paradox plausible, if that's possible."

"How much did you pay for this wine?"

"A franc a liter."

"How much would you have paid for it outside the city gates?"

"Fifty centimes."

"Why the difference?"

"Ask the octroi, which took ten sous off the top."

"And who set up the octroi?"

"The city of Paris, to pave and light the streets."

"Then it's an import duty. But if the neighboring towns had set up the toll for their own benefit, what would happen?"

"I'd still pay 1 franc for my 50-centime wine, and the other 50 centimes would pave and light Montmartre and the Batignolles."

"Which means that in the end it's the consumer who pays the tax?"

"There's no doubt about it."

"Therefore, by putting a duty on exports, you make the foreigner contribute to your expenses."

"I've caught you out: that isn't justice any more."

"Why not? For a product to be made, the country has to have education, security, roads: things that cost money. Why shouldn't the foreigner bear the charges this product has occasioned, since he's the one who will finally consume it?"

"That runs against received ideas."

"Not in the least. The final buyer must repay all the costs of production, direct or indirect."

"Say what you like, it's obvious that such a measure would paralyze trade and close our outlets."

"That's an illusion. If you paid this tax on top of all the others, you'd be right. But if the 100 million raised this way take the place of as much in other taxes, you reappear on the markets abroad with all your advantages, and even with more advantages, if this tax has caused less trouble and expense."

"I'll think about it. Well, then: salt, the post, and the customs settled. Is that the end of it?"

"I'm only just beginning."

"Please, initiate me into your other utopias."

"I'd lost 60 million on salt and the post. The customs gets it back for me; but it gives me something more precious."

"And what's that, if you please?"

"International relations founded on justice, and a likelihood of peace that amounts to a certainty. I'm disbanding the army."

"The whole army?"

"Except the specialist corps, which will be recruited voluntarily like every other profession. As you see, conscription is abolished."

"Sir, you must say recruitment."

"Ah, I forgot. I do admire how easy it is, in certain countries, to keep the most unpopular things going forever by giving them another name."

"Like the combined duties, which became indirect taxes."

"And the gendarmes, who took the name of municipal guards."

"In short, you're disarming the country on the strength of a utopia."

"I said I was disbanding the army, not disarming the country. On the contrary, I mean to give it an invincible force."

"How do you reconcile this heap of contradictions?"

"I call every citizen to serve."

"It was hardly worth exempting a few just to call up everybody."

"You didn't make me minister to leave things as they are. And so, on coming to power, I'll say with Richelieu: 'The maxims of the State have changed.' And my first maxim, the one that will be the foundation of my administration, is this: Every citizen must know how to do two things: provide for his own living and defend his country."

"At first sight, I must say, there seems to be a spark of good sense in that."

"Accordingly, I'm founding national defense on a law in two articles:

"Art. 1. Every able-bodied citizen, without exception, shall remain with the colors for four years, from the age of 21 to 25, to receive military training."

"Now there's a fine economy! You dismiss 400,000 soldiers and you make 10 million."

"Wait for my second article.

"Art. 2. Unless he proves, at 21, that he knows the platoon drill perfectly."

"I didn't expect that twist. It's certain that, to avoid four years of service, there'd be a tremendous competition among our young men to learn right flank, march and loading in twelve motions. It's a peculiar idea."

"It's better than that. For after all, without bringing grief into families and without offending equality, doesn't it give the country, simply and cheaply, 10 million defenders able to defy the combined standing armies of the whole globe?"

"Really, if I weren't on my guard, I'd end up taking an interest in your fantasies."

The Utopian, warming up: "Thank heaven, that relieves my budget of 200 million! I abolish the octroi, I recast the indirect taxes, I..."

"Now, now, Monsieur Utopian!"

The Utopian, warming up more and more: "I proclaim freedom of worship and freedom of education. New resources. I buy the railroads, I pay off the debt, I starve the speculators."

"Monsieur Utopian!"

"Relieved of too many cares, I concentrate all the forces of government on putting down fraud and giving everyone swift and sound justice, I..."

"Monsieur Utopian, you're taking on too much; the nation won't follow you!"

"You gave me the majority."

"I'm taking it back."

"Splendid! Then I'm no longer minister, and my plans remain what they are: utopias."

Chapter 12: Salt, the Post Office, and the Customs

1846.

A few days ago people were expecting to see the representative machinery give birth to a brand-new product, one its gears had never yet managed to turn out: relief for the taxpayer.

Everyone was watching closely; the experiment was as interesting as it was new. Nobody has any worries about this machine's powers of suction. In that department it works admirably, whatever the weather, the place, the season, or the circumstances.

But as for reforms that tend to simplify, equalize, and lighten the public burdens, nobody yet knows what it can do.

People said: You'll see; now's the moment. This is the work of fourth sessions, the last before an election, when popularity is good for something. 1842 brought us the railroads; 1846 is going to give us lower taxes on salt and on letters; 1850 has in store for us the overhaul of the tariffs and the indirect taxes. The fourth session is the taxpayer's jubilee.

Everyone, then, was full of hope, and everything seemed to favor the experiment. The Moniteur had announced that from quarter to quarter the sources of revenue keep on swelling; and what better use could be made of these unexpected receipts than to allow the villager one more grain of salt for his lukewarm water, one more letter from the battlefield where his son's life is at stake?

But what happened? Like those two sugary substances which, they say, prevent each other from crystallizing; or like those two dogs whose fight was so fierce that nothing was left of them but their two tails, the two reforms devoured each other. All we have left are the tails: plenty of bills, statements of reasons, reports, statistics, and appendices, in which we have the consolation of seeing our sufferings philanthropically assessed and homeopathically calculated. As for the reforms themselves, they didn't crystallize. Nothing came out of the crucible, and the experiment failed.

Soon the chemists will come before the jury to explain this disappointment, and they will say,

One: "I had proposed postal reform; but the Chamber wanted to cut the salt tax, and I had to withdraw it."

The other: "I had voted to cut the salt tax; but the ministry proposed postal reform, and the vote came to nothing."

And the jury, finding the reason excellent, will start the test again on the same data and send the same chemists back to work.

This shows us that there may well be something sensible, despite its source, in the practice that has taken hold over the last half century on the other side of the Channel, which is for the public to pursue only one reform at a time. It's slow, it's tedious; but it gets somewhere.

We have a dozen reforms in the works; they crowd together like the shades at the gate of oblivion, and not one gets in.

Ohimè! che lasso! Una a la volta, per carità. (Alas, I'm worn out! One at a time, for pity's sake.)

That's what Jacques Bonhomme said in a dialogue with John Bull on postal reform. It's worth reporting.

Jacques Bonhomme, John Bull.

Jacques Bonhomme. Oh, who will deliver me from this hurricane of reforms! My head is splitting with them. I think they invent a new one every day: university reform, financial reform, sanitary reform, parliamentary reform; electoral reform, commercial reform, social reform; and now here comes postal reform!

John Bull. As for that one, it's so easy to carry out and so useful, as we've found at home, that I venture to recommend it to you.

Jacques. And yet they say it turned out badly in England, and that your Exchequer lost ten million by it.

John. Which produced a hundred million for the public.

Jacques. Is that quite certain?

John. Look at all the signs by which the public's satisfaction shows itself. Look at the nation, with Peel and Russell at its head, giving Mr. Rowland Hill, the inventor of the penny post, substantial tokens of gratitude in the British manner. Look at the poor, who never send a letter without first stamping it with their feelings, by means of sealing wafers bearing this motto: To Postal Reform, from a Grateful People. Look at the leaders of the League, the Anti-Corn-Law League, declaring in open Parliament that without it they would have needed thirty years to accomplish their great undertaking, the freeing of the poor man's food. Look at the officials of the Board of Trade declaring that it's a pity English coinage doesn't allow an even more radical cut in the postage on letters! What more proof do you need?

Jacques. Yes, but the Treasury?

John. Aren't the Treasury and the public in the same boat?

Jacques. Not quite. And besides, is it really certain that our postal system needs reforming?

John. That's the question. Let's look a little at how things are done. What becomes of the letters that are put in the post?

Jacques. Oh, it's a mechanism of admirable simplicity. The postmaster opens the box at a certain hour and takes out, let's say, a hundred letters.

John. And then?

Jacques. Then he inspects them one after another. With a geographical table before his eyes and a scale in his hand, he works out which category each one belongs to, from the double point of view of distance and weight. There are only eleven zones and as many grades of weight.

John. That makes 121 combinations for each letter.

Jacques. Yes, and you have to double that number, because the letter may or may not belong to the rural service.

John. That's 24,200 lookups, then, for the hundred letters. What does Monsieur the Postmaster do next?

Jacques. He writes the weight in one corner and the charge right in the middle of the address, in the form of a hieroglyph agreed upon in the administration.

John. And then?

Jacques. He stamps them; he divides the letters into ten bundles, according to the offices he corresponds with. He adds up the total charges on the ten bundles.

John. And then?

Jacques. Then he enters the ten sums lengthwise in one register and crosswise in another.

John. And then?

Jacques. Then he writes a letter to each of the ten corresponding postmasters, to inform him of the accounting entry that concerns him.

John. And if the letters are prepaid?

Jacques. Oh, then I admit the service gets a little complicated. He has to receive the letter, weigh it and measure it as before, take the payment and give change; choose from among thirty stamps the right one; record on the letter its serial number, its weight, and its charge; copy the whole address into a first register, then into a second, then into a third, then onto a detachable slip; wrap the letter in the slip, send the whole thing, well tied up, to the corresponding postmaster, and record every one of these circumstances in a dozen columns chosen from the fifty that stripe the ledgers.

John. And all that for 40 centimes!

Jacques. Yes, on average.

John. I see that the departure is indeed quite simple. Let's see how things go at the arrival.

Jacques. The postmaster opens the mailbag.

John. And after that?

Jacques. He reads the ten advice notes from his correspondents.

John. And after that?

Jacques. He compares the total stated on each note with the total that comes from each of the ten bundles of letters.

John. And after that?

Jacques. He makes a total of the totals and knows what lump sum he will hold the letter carriers responsible for.

John. And after that?

Jacques. After that, with the table of distances before him and the scale in his hand, he checks and corrects the charge on each letter.

John. And after that?

Jacques. He enters, from register to register and from column to column, according to countless circumstances, the overs and the shorts.

John. And after that?

Jacques. He starts a correspondence with the ten postmasters to point out errors of 10 or 20 centimes.

John. And after that?

Jacques. He sorts all the letters he's received all over again to hand them to the letter carriers.

John. And after that?

Jacques. He totals the charges each carrier takes responsibility for.

John. And after that?

Jacques. The carrier checks; they argue over the meaning of the hieroglyphs. The carrier advances the sum and sets off.

John. Go on.

Jacques. The carrier goes to the addressee's house; he knocks at the door; a servant comes down. There are six letters for this address. The charges are added up, separately at first, then together. They come to 2 francs 70 centimes.

John. Go on.

Jacques. The servant goes to find his master, who proceeds to check the hieroglyphs. He takes the 3s for 2s and the 9s for 4s; he has doubts about the weights and the distances; in short, the carrier has to be called up, and while he waits the master tries to guess who wrote the letters, thinking it might be wise to refuse them.

John. Go on.

Jacques. The carrier arrives and pleads the administration's case. They argue, they examine, they weigh, they measure; at last the addressee accepts five letters and refuses one.

John. Go on.

Jacques. Now there's only the payment. The servant goes to the grocer's for change. At last, after twenty minutes, the carrier is free, and off he runs to start the same ceremony over again from door to door.

John. Go on.

Jacques. He goes back to the office. He counts and recounts with the postmaster. He hands back the refused letters and gets his advances repaid. He reports the addressees' objections about weights and distances.

John. Go on.

Jacques. The postmaster looks out the registers, the ledgers, and the special slips to make up his accounts of refusals.

John. Go on, if you please.

Jacques. Well, upon my word, I'm not a postmaster. We'd come now to the ten-day accounts, the twenty-day accounts, the end-of-month accounts; to the means devised not only to keep but to check so minute an accounting, covering 50 million francs, coming from average charges of 43 centimes on 116 million letters, each of which may belong to any of 242 categories.

John. That's a very complicated simplicity. The man who solved that problem must certainly have had a hundred times more genius than your Monsieur Piron or our Rowland Hill.

Jacques. But you, who look as if you're laughing at our system, explain yours to me.

John. In England the government has envelopes and wrappers sold, wherever it thinks useful, at a penny apiece.

Jacques. And after that?

John. You write your letter, fold it in four, put it in one of these envelopes, and drop it or send it to the post.

Jacques. And after that?

John. After that, that's all there is to it. There are no weights, no distances, no overs, no shorts, no refusals, no slips, no registers, no ledgers, no columns, no accounting, no checking, no change to give and receive, no hieroglyphs, no arguments and interpretations, no shortfalls charged to the clerks, and so on and so forth.

Jacques. Really, that seems simple. But isn't it too simple? A child could understand it. It's with reforms like that that the genius of great administrators gets smothered. For my part, I stick to the French way. And besides, your uniform rate has the greatest defect of all. It's unjust.

John. Why so?

Jacques. Because it's unjust to make people pay as much for a letter carried next door as for one carried two hundred and fifty miles.

John. In any case, you'll grant that the injustice is confined within the limits of a penny.

Jacques. What does that matter? It's still an injustice.

John. It can never even amount to more than a halfpenny, because the other half goes to costs that are fixed for every letter, whatever the distance.

Jacques. Penny or halfpenny, there's still a principle of injustice in it.

John. Finally, this injustice, which at the maximum can only come to a halfpenny in a particular case, disappears for each citizen over the whole of his correspondence, since everyone writes sometimes far away, sometimes close by.

Jacques. I won't budge. The injustice is reduced to nothing, if you like; it's imperceptible, infinitesimal, homeopathic; but it exists.

John. Does the State charge you more for a gram of tobacco you buy on the rue de Clichy than for one retailed to you on the quai d'Orsay?

Jacques. What connection is there between the two things you're comparing?

John. This: in the one case as in the other, the cost of carriage had to be paid. Mathematically, it would be just for every pinch of tobacco to cost a few millionths of a centime more on the rue de Clichy than on the quai d'Orsay.

Jacques. That's true; one should only want what's possible.

John. Add that your postal system is just only in appearance. Two houses stand side by side, but one is outside the zone and the other inside. The first will pay 10 centimes more than the second, just as much as the whole postage on a letter costs in England. You can see that, in spite of appearances, injustice is committed on a much larger scale in your country.

Jacques. That seems true enough. My objection isn't worth much; but there's still the loss of revenue.

Here I stopped hearing the two speakers. It appears, however, that Jacques Bonhomme was entirely converted; for a few days later, when Monsieur de Vuitry's report had come out, he wrote the following letter to the honorable lawmaker:

J. Bonhomme to Monsieur de Vuitry, Deputy, Rapporteur of the Committee Charged with Examining the Bill on the Postage of Letters.

"Sir,

"Although I am well aware of the extreme disfavor one brings on oneself by pleading for an absolute theory, I do not think I ought to abandon the cause of a single rate, reduced to the bare repayment of the service rendered.

"In addressing you, I am certainly giving you the advantage. On one side, a hothead, an armchair reformer, who talks of overturning a whole system abruptly, without transition; a dreamer who has perhaps never cast his eyes over that mountain of laws, ordinances, tables, appendices, and statistics that accompanies your report; and, to say it all in a word, a theorist! On the other, a grave, prudent, moderate lawmaker, who has weighed and compared, who takes care of the various interests, who rejects all systems, or, what comes to the same thing, makes one of his own out of what he borrows from all the others. The outcome of the contest can hardly be in doubt.

"Nevertheless, as long as the question is undecided, convictions have the right to make themselves heard. I know that mine is decided enough to bring a mocking smile to the reader's lips. All I dare expect of him is that he lavish it on me, if there is cause, after and not before he has heard my reasons.

"For after all, I too can appeal to experience. A great people has made the trial. How does it judge it? Nobody denies that it is skilled in these matters, and its judgment carries some weight.

"Well, there is not a voice in England that does not bless postal reform. I call as witness the subscription opened for Mr. Rowland Hill; I call as witness the original way the people, so John Bull told me, express their gratitude; I call as witness the admission so often repeated by the League: 'Without penny postage we should never have built up the public opinion that is now overthrowing the protective system.' I call as witness what I read in a work from an official pen:

"'The postage on letters should be fixed not with a view to revenue, but with the sole object of covering the expense.'

"To which Mr. MacGregor adds:

"'It is true that since the postage has come down to the level of our smallest coin, it is not possible to lower it further, although it yields a revenue. But this revenue, which will keep on growing, must be devoted to improving the service and to developing our system of packet boats on every sea.'

"This brings me to examine the committee's basic idea, which is, on the contrary, that the postage on letters ought to be a source of revenue for the State.

"This idea dominates your whole report, and I confess that, in the grip of this preoccupation, you could not arrive at anything great or anything complete; you will be fortunate if, in trying to reconcile every system, you have not combined their various drawbacks.

"The first question that arises, then, is this: Is the correspondence between private persons a good taxable item?

"I will not go back to abstract principles. I will not point out that, since society is nothing but the communication of ideas, the object of every government must be to encourage and not to obstruct that communication.

"I will examine the existing facts.

"The total length of the royal, departmental, and local roads is a million kilometers. Supposing that each kilometer has cost 100,000 francs, that makes a capital of a hundred billion spent by the State to encourage the movement of things and people.

"Now I ask you: if one of your honorable colleagues proposed to the Chamber a bill worded as follows:

"'From January 1, 1847, the State will levy on all travelers a tax calculated not only to cover the expenses of the roads, but also to bring back into its coffers four or five times the amount of that expense...'

"Wouldn't you find this proposal antisocial and monstrous?

"How does it happen that this idea of profit, what am I saying, of mere repayment, has never entered anyone's head where the circulation of things is concerned, and that it seems so natural to you where the circulation of ideas is concerned?

"I venture to say that it comes from habit. If the question were one of creating the post office, it would surely seem monstrous to found it on the fiscal principle.

"And please notice that here the oppression is even more clearly marked.

"When the State has opened a road, it forces no one to use it. (No doubt it would, if the use of the road were taxed.) But once the royal post exists, no one has the right any more to write by any other channel, even to his mother.

"Therefore, in principle, the postage on letters ought to be a repayment, and for that reason uniform.

"If we start from this idea, how can we fail to marvel at the ease, the beauty, and the simplicity of the reform?

"Here it is in full, drawn up, apart from the wording, as a bill:

"Art. 1. From January 1, 1847, there shall be put on sale, wherever the administration sees fit, stamped envelopes and wrappers at the price of five (or ten) centimes.

"2. Every letter placed in one of these envelopes and not exceeding 15 grams in weight, and every newspaper or printed matter placed under one of these wrappers and not exceeding ... grams, shall be carried and delivered free of charge to its address.

"3. The accounting of the post office is abolished altogether.

"4. All offenses and penalties relating to the carrying of letters are abolished.

"That is very simple, I confess, much too simple, and I expect a cloud of objections.

"But supposing this system has drawbacks, that is not the question; the question is whether yours does not have greater ones.

"And in good faith, can yours, in any respect whatever (apart from the revenue), bear comparison with it for a moment?

"Examine them both; compare them in point of ease, convenience, speed, simplicity, order, economy, justice, equality, increase of business, satisfaction of the affections, intellectual and moral development, and civilizing power; and say, hand on heart, whether it is possible to hesitate for a moment.

"I shall take good care not to develop each of these considerations. I give you the headings of twelve chapters and leave the rest blank, convinced that no one is better placed than you to fill them in.

"But since there is only one objection, the revenue, I must say a word about it.

"You have drawn up a table from which it emerges that a single rate, even at 20 centimes, would put the Treasury at a loss of 22 million.

"At 10 centimes the loss would be 28 million, and at 5 centimes 33 million: hypotheses so frightening that you do not even state them.

"But allow me to tell you that the figures in your report dance about a little too freely. In all your tables, in all your calculations, you take these words for granted: All other things being equal. You assume the same costs with a simple administration as with a complicated one, the same number of letters with an average rate of 43 as with a single rate of 20 centimes. You confine yourself to this rule of three: 87 million letters at 42 1/2 centimes have yielded so much; therefore at 20 centimes they would yield so much; though you do admit a few distinctions when they tell against the reform.

"To estimate the Treasury's real sacrifice, one would need to know, first, what would be saved on the service, and second, in what proportion the volume of correspondence would increase. Let us take account only of the second, because we can assume that the saving on costs would come down to this: the present staff would handle a larger service.

"No doubt it is impossible to fix the figure for the growth in the circulation of letters; but in these matters a reasonable analogy has always been accepted.

"You say yourself that in England a reduction of 7/8 in the rate brought an increase of 360 percent in correspondence.

"With us, lowering to 5 centimes the rate that now averages 43 centimes would also be a reduction of 7/8. We may therefore expect the same result, that is, 417 million letters instead of 116 million.

"But let us calculate on 300 million.

"Is it an exaggeration to suppose that with a rate half as high we shall reach 8 letters per inhabitant, when the English have reached 13?

	300 million letters at 5 centimes yield  15 million
	100 million newspapers and printed items at 5 centimes  5
	Passengers by the mail coaches  4
	Money orders  4
	Total receipts  28 million
	Present expenditure (which may fall)  31 million
	Less that of the packet boats  5
	Leaves, for the mails, passengers, and money orders  26 million
	Net product  2
	Today the net product is  19
	Loss, or rather reduction in gain  17 million

"Now I ask whether the State, which makes a positive sacrifice of 800 million a year to make possible the free circulation of persons, ought not to make a negative sacrifice of 17 million so as not to profit from the circulation of ideas.

"But after all, the Treasury, I know, has its habits; and just as easily as it gets used to seeing its receipts grow, it finds it hard to get used to seeing them shrink by a single farthing. It seems to be fitted with those admirable valves which, in our bodies, let the blood flow in one direction but stop it from going back. So be it. The Treasury is a little too old for us to change its ways. Let us not hope, then, to persuade it to let go. But what would it say if I, Jacques Bonhomme, showed it a simple, easy, convenient, thoroughly practical way of doing the country a great deal of good without its costing a centime!

	The post brings the Treasury, gross  50 million
	Salt  70
	The customs  160
	Total for these three services  280 million

"Very well! Put the postage on letters at a uniform rate of 5 centimes.

"Lower the salt tax to 10 francs a quintal, as the Chamber voted.

"Give me the power to change the customs tariff, on the understanding that I shall be formally forbidden to raise any duty but free to lower them as I please.

"And I, Jacques Bonhomme, guarantee you not 280 but 300 million. Two hundred bankers of France will stand surety for me. All I ask as my bonus is whatever these three taxes yield above the 300 million.

"Now do I need to list the advantages of my proposal?

"First, the people will reap the whole benefit of cheapness in the price of a basic necessity, salt.

"Second, fathers will be able to write to their sons, mothers to their daughters. Affection, feeling, the outpourings of love and friendship will no longer be driven back into the depths of people's hearts by the hand of the Treasury.

"Third, carrying a letter for a friend to a friend will no longer be written into our codes as a criminal act.

"Fourth, trade will flourish again with freedom; our merchant marine will rise out of its humiliation.

"Fifth, the Treasury will gain twenty million at once; and then everything that will flow into the other branches of revenue from what each citizen saves on salt, on letters, and on the goods whose duties have been lowered.

"If my proposal is not accepted, what am I to conclude? Provided that the company of bankers I present offers sufficient guarantees, on what pretext could my offer be rejected? No one can invoke the balancing of the budget. It will certainly be unbalanced, but unbalanced in such a way that receipts exceed expenditure. This is not a matter of a theory, a system, a statistic, a probability, a conjecture: it is an offer, an offer like that of a company asking for a railroad concession. The Treasury tells me what it gets out of the post office, salt, and the customs. I offer to give it more. The objection, then, cannot come from the Treasury. I offer to lower the rates on salt, the post, and the customs; I undertake not to raise them; the objection, then, cannot come from the taxpayers. From whom would it come, then? From the monopolists? It remains to be seen whether their voice is to drown out, in France, the voice of the State and the voice of the people. To make sure, I beg you to pass my proposal on to the Council of Ministers.

"Jacques Bonhomme."

"P.S. Here is the text of my offer:

"I, Jacques Bonhomme, representing a company of bankers and capitalists ready to give every guarantee and to put up every bond that may be required;

"Having learned that the State draws only 280 million from the customs, the post, and salt, by means of the duties as they are now fixed;

"Offer to give it 300 million of the gross product of these three services;

"Even if it reduces the salt tax from 30 francs to 10 francs;

"Even if it reduces the postage on letters from an average of 42 1/2 centimes to a single, uniform rate of 5 to 10 centimes;

"On the sole condition that I be allowed not to raise (which shall be formally forbidden me), but to lower the customs duties as far as I please.

"Jacques Bonhomme."

"But you're mad," I said to Jacques Bonhomme, who was showing me his letter. "You never could take anything in moderation. The other day you were crying out against the hurricane of reforms, and here you are demanding three, and making one of them the condition of the other two. You'll ruin yourself."

"Don't worry," he said. "I've done all my sums. God grant they accept! But they won't."

Thereupon we parted, our heads full, his of figures, mine of reflections, which I'll spare the reader.

Chapter 13: Protection, or The Three Aldermen

A Demonstration in Four Tableaux

First Tableau

(The scene is the town house of Alderman Pierre. The window looks out on a fine park; three men sit at table by a good fire.)

Pierre. Upon my word, hurrah for a fire once Messer Gaster, the belly, has had his fill! You have to admit it's a pleasant thing. But alas, how many good people, like the King of Yvetot in the song,

	For lack of wood to burn,
	Blow on their fingers in turn.

Unhappy creatures! Heaven inspires me with a charitable thought. You see those fine trees? I mean to cut them down and distribute the wood to the poor.

Paul and Jean. What! Free?

Pierre. Not exactly. My good works would soon be over if I squandered my property that way. I reckon my park is worth twenty thousand livres; by cutting it down I'll get a good deal more out of it.

Paul. You're wrong. Your wood standing has more value than the wood in the neighboring forests, because it renders services theirs can't. Cut down, it will be good, like theirs, only for burning, and it won't be worth a penny more a cord.

Pierre. Oho! Mister Theorist, you forget that I am a practical man. I thought my reputation as a speculator was well enough established to keep me from being taken for a simpleton. Do you think I'm going to amuse myself selling my wood at the price of the wood they float down the river?

Paul. You'll have to.

Pierre. Innocent! And what if I stop the floated wood from reaching Paris?

Paul. That would change things. But how will you go about it?

Pierre. Here's the whole secret. You know that floated wood pays an entry duty of ten sous a cord. Tomorrow I'll persuade the Aldermen to raise the duty to 100, 200, 300 livres; high enough, in short, that not enough comes in to make a single log. Eh? Do you follow me? If the good people don't want to freeze to death, they'll have to come to my woodyard. They'll fight over my wood; I'll sell it for its weight in gold; and this well-ordered charity, which begins at home, will put me in a position to do others.

Paul. By thunder, what a fine invention! It suggests another to me, every bit as good.

Jean. Let's hear it, then. Is philanthropy in on this one too?

Paul. What did you think of this Normandy butter?

Jean. Excellent.

Paul. Ha! It seemed passable to me a moment ago. But don't you find it catches you in the throat? I mean to make better in Paris. I'll keep four or five hundred cows; I'll make a distribution of milk, butter, and cheese to the poor people.

Pierre and Jean. What! Out of charity?

Paul. Bah! Let's always put charity out in front. She has such a lovely face that even her mask is an excellent passport. I'll give my butter to the people, and the people will give me their money. Is that what you call selling?

Jean. No, not according to the Bourgeois Gentleman; but call it what you like, you'll ruin yourself. Can Paris compete with Normandy at raising cows?

Paul. I'll have the saving on transport on my side.

Jean. Granted. But even after paying for transport, the Normans are able to beat the Parisians.

Paul. Do you call it beating someone to let him have things cheap?

Jean. That's the accepted word. The fact remains that you'll be beaten.

Paul. Yes, like Don Quixote. The blows will land on Sancho. Jean, my friend, you're forgetting the octroi.

Jean. The octroi! What has that got to do with your butter?

Paul. First thing tomorrow I'll demand protection; I'll persuade the town to prohibit butter from Normandy and Brittany. The people will have to go without, or buy mine, and at my price too.

Jean. By heaven, gentlemen, your philanthropy carries me away.

	One learns, as the fellow says, to howl with the wolves.

My mind's made up. Nobody will say I'm an unworthy Alderman. Pierre, this crackling fire has set your soul alight; Paul, this butter has oiled the springs of your mind; well, I feel this bit of salt pork stimulating my intelligence too. Tomorrow I'll vote, and get others to vote, for the exclusion of pigs, dead or alive. That done, I'll build superb sties right in the middle of Paris,

	For the unclean beast the Hebrews were forbidden.

I'll turn swineherd and pork butcher. We'll see how the good people of Lutetia manage not to come and buy their supplies at my shop.

Pierre. Easy, gentlemen, easy. If you make butter and salt meat dear like that, you're whittling away in advance the profit I expected from my wood.

Paul. Well, really! My speculation isn't so marvelous either, if you hold me to ransom with your logs and your hams.

Jean. And what will I gain by making you overpay for my sausages, if you make me overpay for my bread and butter and my firewood?

Pierre. Come now, are we going to quarrel? Let's join together instead. Let's make one another concessions. Besides, it isn't good to listen only to base self-interest. Humanity is at stake: mustn't we make sure the people are warm?

Paul. Quite right. And the people must have butter to spread on their bread.

Jean. No doubt. And they must be able to put bacon in their stew.

All three together. Forward, charity! Long live philanthropy! Till tomorrow! Till tomorrow! We take the octroi by storm.

Pierre. Ah, I was forgetting. One more word: it's essential. My friends, in this age of selfishness the world is suspicious, and the purest intentions are often misread. Paul, you plead for the wood; Jean, you defend the butter; and I'll devote myself to the local pig. It's a good thing to forestall malicious suspicions.

Paul and Jean (going out). Upon my word, there's a clever man!

Second Tableau

The Council of Aldermen

Paul. My dear colleagues, masses of wood come into Paris every day, which sends masses of cash out of it. At this rate we'll all be ruined in three years, and what will become of the poor people? (Bravo!) Let's prohibit foreign wood. I'm not speaking for myself, for you couldn't make a toothpick out of all the wood I own. I am therefore perfectly disinterested in the question. (Hear, hear!) But here is Pierre, who has a park; he will guarantee our fellow citizens their heating, and they'll no longer be at the mercy of the charcoal burners of the Yonne. Have you ever thought of the danger we run of dying of cold, if the owners of the foreign forests took it into their heads to stop bringing wood to Paris? Let's prohibit wood, then. By doing so we'll prevent the draining away of our cash, we'll create the woodcutting industry, and we'll open a new source of work and wages for our workers. (Applause.)

Jean. I support the motion of the honorable previous speaker, so philanthropic and above all so disinterested, as he said himself. It is time we put a stop to this insolent laissez passer, which has brought unbridled competition into our market, so that there isn't a province favorably placed for producing anything at all that doesn't come and flood us, sell it to us dirt cheap, and destroy Parisian labor. It is up to the State to level the conditions of production by wisely weighted duties, to let in from outside only what is dearer there than in Paris, and so to spare us an unequal struggle. How, for instance, can anyone expect us to produce milk and butter in Paris, face to face with Brittany and Normandy? Just think, gentlemen: the Bretons have cheaper land, hay closer at hand, and labor on more favorable terms. Doesn't common sense tell us that the odds must be evened by a protective octroi tariff? I ask that the duty on milk and butter be raised to 1,000 percent, and higher if need be. The people's breakfast will be a little dearer, but just think how their wages will rise! We'll see cowsheds and dairies go up, butter churns multiply, and new industries founded. Not that I have the slightest interest in my proposal. I am not a cowherd, nor do I wish to be. I am moved solely by the desire to be useful to the working classes. (Murmurs of approval.)

Pierre. I am happy to see in this assembly statesmen so pure, so enlightened, so devoted to the interests of the people. (Bravos.) I admire their self-denial, and I can do no better than imitate so noble an example. I support their motion, and I add to it a motion to prohibit the pigs of Poitou. Not that I mean to become a swineherd or a pork butcher; in that case my conscience would make it my duty to abstain. But isn't it shameful, gentlemen, that we should be tributaries of these Poitou peasants, who have the audacity to come right into our own market and seize work we could do ourselves; who, after flooding us with sausages and hams, perhaps take nothing from us in return? In any case, who's to say the balance of trade isn't in their favor and that we aren't obliged to pay them a balance in cash? Isn't it clear that if the Poitou industry were planted in Paris, it would open sure outlets for Parisian labor? And then, gentlemen, isn't it quite possible, as Monsieur Lestiboudois put it so well, that we are buying Poitou salt pork not out of our income but out of our capital? Where would that lead us? Let us not allow greedy, grasping, perfidious rivals to come here and sell things cheap and make it impossible for us to make them ourselves. Aldermen, Paris has placed its trust in us; it is up to us to justify it. The people are without work; it is up to us to create work for them; and if salt meat costs them a little more, we shall at least have the satisfaction of knowing we sacrificed our interests to those of the masses, as every good alderman should. (Thunderous applause.)

A voice. I hear a great deal of talk about the poor people; but on the pretext of giving them work, you begin by taking away from them what's worth more than work itself: wood, butter, and soup.

Pierre, Paul, and Jean. Vote! Vote! Down with the utopians, the theorists, the generalizers! Vote! Vote! (The three motions are carried.)

Third Tableau

Twenty Years Later

The Son. Father, make up your mind: we have to leave Paris. Nobody can live here any more. There's no work, and everything is dear.

The Father. My child, you don't know what it costs to abandon the place where we were born.

The Son. The worst thing of all is to die of want here.

The Father. Go, my son, look for a more welcoming land. As for me, I won't go far from this grave where your mother, your brothers, and your sisters have gone down. I long to find in it at last, beside them, the rest that has been denied me in this city of desolation.

The Son. Courage, dear father. We'll find work abroad: in Poitou, in Normandy, in Brittany. They say all the industry of Paris is gradually moving to those distant lands.

The Father. That's only natural. Since they can no longer sell wood and food, they've stopped producing more than they need; whatever time and capital they have to spare, they devote to making for themselves what we used to supply them with.

The Son. Just as in Paris people are giving up making fine furniture and fine clothes in order to plant trees and raise pigs and cows. Young as I am, I've seen vast warehouses, splendid neighborhoods, and busy quays along the banks of the Seine that are overrun now with meadows and thickets.

The Father. While the provinces are covering themselves with towns, Paris is turning into countryside. What a dreadful revolution! And all it took to bring this terrible calamity down on us was three misguided Aldermen, helped by public ignorance.

The Son. Tell me the story, father.

The Father. It's very simple. On the pretext of planting three new industries in Paris and so giving the workers something to work at, these men had wood, butter, and meat prohibited. They claimed for themselves the right to supply their fellow citizens with them. At first these things rose to an exorbitant price. Nobody earned enough to buy them, and the few who could get them, spending all their profits on them, were in no position to buy anything else. For that reason every industry came to a stop at once, all the faster because the provinces no longer offered any outlets either. Poverty, death, and emigration began to empty Paris.

The Son. And when will it stop?

The Father. When Paris has become a forest and a meadow.

The Son. The three Aldermen must have made a great fortune?

The Father. At first they made enormous profits; but in the long run they were swept into the common poverty.

The Son. How is that possible?

The Father. You see that ruin? It was a magnificent town house surrounded by a fine park. If Paris had gone on progressing, Master Pierre would be getting more in rent from it than it is worth today as capital.

The Son. How can that be, since he got rid of competition?

The Father. Competition to sell has disappeared; but competition to buy is disappearing too, every day, and will go on disappearing until Paris is open country and Master Pierre's thicket is worth no more than an equal area of thicket in the forest of Bondy. That is how monopoly, like every injustice, carries its own punishment within itself.

The Son. That doesn't seem very clear to me; but what's undeniable is the decline of Paris. Is there no way, then, to overturn this iniquitous measure that Pierre and his colleagues got passed twenty years ago?

The Father. I'll let you into my secret. That's why I'm staying in Paris: I'm going to call on the people to help me. It's up to them to put the octroi back on its old footing, and to free it from the fatal principle that was grafted onto it and has grown there like a parasitic fungus.

The Son. You're bound to succeed on the very first day.

The Father. Oh, on the contrary, the work is hard and slow. Pierre, Paul, and Jean get on famously together. They're ready to do anything rather than let wood, butter, and meat into Paris. They have on their side the people themselves, who see clearly the work the three protected industries give them, who know how many woodcutters and cowherds they employ, but who can't have so precise an idea of the work that would grow up in the open air of freedom.

The Son. If that's all, you'll enlighten them.

The Father. Child, at your age nothing seems impossible. If I write, the people won't read, for every hour they have is barely enough to keep their wretched lives going. If I speak, the Aldermen will shut my mouth. The people will therefore remain in their fatal error for a long time; the political parties, which build their hopes on the people's passions, will be less concerned to clear away their prejudices than to exploit them. I'll have the powerful of the day, the people, and the parties all on my back at once. Oh, I can see a terrible storm ready to break over the head of the bold man who dares to rise up against an iniquity so deeply rooted in the country.

The Son. You'll have justice and truth on your side.

The Father. And they'll have force and slander on theirs. If only I were young! But age and suffering have worn out my strength.

The Son. Well then, father, devote what strength you have left to the service of your country. Begin this work of liberation, and leave me the task of finishing it as my inheritance.

Fourth Tableau

The Agitation

Jacques Bonhomme. Parisians, let's demand the reform of the octroi; let it be restored to its original purpose. Let every citizen be free to buy wood, butter, and meat wherever he pleases.

The People. Long live, long live liberty!

Pierre. Parisians, don't let yourselves be seduced by that word. What does the freedom to buy matter to you, if you don't have the means? And how will you have the means, if you have no work? Can Paris produce wood as cheaply as the forest of Bondy? Meat as cheaply as Poitou? Butter on terms as good as Normandy's? If you throw the doors wide open to these rival products, what will become of the cowherds, the woodcutters, and the pork butchers? They can't do without protection.

The People. Long live, long live protection!

Jacques. Protection! But are you protected, you workers? Don't you compete with one another? Then let the wood merchants put up with competition in their turn. They have no right to raise the price of their wood by law unless they also raise the rate of wages by law. Aren't you the people who love equality any more?

The People. Long live, long live equality!

Pierre. Don't listen to this troublemaker. We've raised the price of wood, meat, and butter, it's true; but it's so that we can pay the workers good wages. We are moved by charity.

The People. Long live, long live charity!

Jacques. Use the octroi, if you can, to raise wages, or else don't use it to raise the price of goods. The Parisians aren't asking for charity, but for justice.

The People. Long live, long live justice!

Pierre. It's precisely high prices for goods that will bring high wages.

The People. Long live, long live high prices!

Jacques. If butter is dear, it isn't because you pay the workers well; it isn't even that you make big profits. It's solely because Paris is badly placed for that industry, because you wanted the town to do what ought to be done in the country, and the country what used to be done in town. The people don't have more work; they only work at something else. They don't have more wages; they only don't buy things as cheaply.

The People. Long live, long live cheapness!

Pierre. This man is seducing you with his fine phrases. Let's put the question in all its simplicity. Isn't it true that if we let in butter, wood, and meat, we'll be flooded with them? We'll die of plethora. There is no other way, then, to protect ourselves from this new kind of invasion than to shut the door on it; and no other way to keep prices up than to cause an artificial scarcity of things.

A few voices, very scarce. Long live, long live scarcity!

Jacques. Let's put the question in all its truth. Among all the Parisians, we can share out only what there is in Paris; if there is less wood, meat, and butter, everyone's share will be smaller. And there will be less if we keep them out than if we let them in. Parisians, there can be abundance for each only insofar as there is abundance for all.

The People. Long live, long live abundance!

Pierre. Say what he likes, this man won't prove to you that it's in your interest to submit to unbridled competition.

The People. Down, down with competition!

Jacques. Rant as he likes, this man won't make you relish the delights of restriction.

The People. Down, down with restriction!

Pierre. And I declare that if the poor cowherds and swineherds are deprived of their livelihood, if they are sacrificed to theories, I will no longer answer for public order. Workers, beware of this man. He is an agent of perfidious Normandy; he goes abroad for his inspiration. He's a traitor; he must be hanged. (The people are silent.)

Jacques. Parisians, everything I say today I was saying twenty years ago, when Pierre took it into his head to exploit the octroi for his own profit and to your cost. I'm not an agent of the Normans, then. Hang me if you like; but that won't stop oppression from being oppression. Friends, it isn't Jacques or Pierre you should kill, but freedom, if it frightens you, or restriction, if it hurts you.

The People. Let's hang nobody, and set everybody free.

Chapter 14: Something Else

"What is restriction?"

"A partial prohibition."

"What is prohibition?"

"An absolute restriction."

"Which means that what is said of one is true of the other?"

"Yes, except in degree. There is the same relation between them as between an arc and the circle."

"Therefore, if prohibition is bad, restriction can't be good?"

"No more than the arc can be straight if the circle is curved."

"What name do restriction and prohibition have in common?"

"Protection."

"What is the final effect of protection?"

"To require of men more labor for the same result."

"Why are men so attached to the protective system?"

"Because freedom would bring the same result for less labor, and this apparent reduction of labor frightens them."

"Why do you say apparent?"

"Because any labor saved can be devoted to something else."

"To what something else?"

"That can't be specified, and doesn't need to be."

"Why not?"

"Because if all the satisfactions France enjoys today could be had with a tenth less labor, nobody can say exactly what new satisfactions she would want to get with the labor left free. One person would want to be better dressed, another better fed, this one better educated, that one better entertained."

"Explain to me the mechanism and the effects of protection."

"That isn't easy. Before tackling the complicated case, we ought to study it in the simplest one."

"Take the simplest case you like."

"Do you remember how Robinson Crusoe went about making a plank when he had no saw?"

"Yes. He cut down a tree, and then, hacking at the trunk to the right and to the left with his ax, he brought it down to the thickness of a board."

"And that gave him a lot of work?"

"Fifteen whole days of it."

"And what did he live on in the meantime?"

"His provisions."

"And what happened to the ax?"

"It was blunted all over."

"Very good. But perhaps you don't know this: just as he was about to strike the first blow with his ax, Robinson caught sight of a plank thrown up on the shore by the waves."

"Oh, what luck! He ran to pick it up?"

"That was his first impulse; but he stopped, reasoning like this:

"'If I go and fetch that plank, it will cost me only the effort of carrying it, and the time it takes to go down the cliff and back up.

"'But if I make a plank with my ax, first I'll give myself work for fifteen days; next, I'll wear out my ax, which will give me the chance to repair it; and I'll eat up my provisions, a third source of work, since they'll have to be replaced. Now labor is wealth. It's clear that I would ruin myself by going to pick up the shipwrecked plank. It's important for me to protect my personal labor; and indeed, now that I think of it, I can create some additional work for myself by going and kicking that plank back into the sea!'"

"But that reasoning was absurd!"

"Granted. It's the reasoning, all the same, of every nation that protects itself by prohibition. It pushes away the plank it's offered in exchange for a little labor, so as to give itself more labor. It even sees a gain in the customs officer's labor. That is represented by the trouble Robinson took to give back to the waves the present they wanted to make him. Think of the nation as a collective being, and you won't find an atom of difference between its reasoning and Robinson's."

"Didn't Robinson see that he could devote the time he saved to doing something else?"

"What something else?"

"As long as you have needs and time before you, you always have something to do. I'm not obliged to specify the work he could have taken up."

"I can certainly specify the work he would have missed."

"And I maintain that Robinson, with incredible blindness, confused labor with its result, the end with the means, and I'll prove it to you..."

"I'll spare you the trouble. The fact remains that there you have the restrictive or prohibitive system in its simplest form. If it looks absurd to you in that form, it's because the two roles of producer and consumer are merged here in the same person."

"Then go on to a more complicated example."

"Gladly. Some time after that, Robinson met Friday; they became friends and began working together. In the morning they hunted for six hours and brought back four baskets of game. In the evening they gardened for six hours and got four baskets of vegetables.

"One day a canoe landed on the Island of Despair. A handsome stranger stepped out of it and was invited to the table of our two hermits. He tasted the produce of the garden and praised it highly, and before taking leave of his hosts he addressed them as follows:

"'Generous islanders, I live in a land much richer in game than this one, but where gardening is unknown. It will be easy for me to bring you four baskets of game every evening, if you will let me have just two baskets of vegetables.'

"At these words Robinson and Friday stepped aside to hold a council, and the debate they had is too interesting for me not to report it here in extenso."

Friday. Friend, what do you think?

Robinson. If we accept, we're ruined.

Friday. Is that quite certain? Let's work it out.

Robinson. It's all worked out. Crushed by competition, hunting is a lost industry for us.

Friday. What does that matter, if we have the game?

Robinson. Theory! It won't be the product of our labor.

Friday. But it will, confound it, since to get it we'll have to give vegetables!

Robinson. Then what will we gain?

Friday. The four baskets of game cost us six hours of labor. The stranger gives them to us for two baskets of vegetables, which take us only three hours. That leaves three hours at our disposal.

Robinson. Say, rather, three hours taken away from our activity. That's exactly our loss. Labor is wealth, and if we lose a quarter of our time, we'll be a quarter less rich.

Friday. Friend, you're making an enormous mistake. The same game, the same vegetables, and three free hours into the bargain: that's progress, or there's no such thing in this world.

Robinson. Generalities! What will we do with those three hours?

Friday. We'll do something else.

Robinson. Ah, now I've got you. You can't specify anything. Something else, something else: that's easily said.

Friday. We'll fish, we'll make our hut nicer, we'll read the Bible.

Robinson. Utopia! Is it really certain that we'll do this rather than that?

Friday. Well, if we run out of needs, we'll rest. Is rest nothing?

Robinson. But when you rest, you starve.

Friday. Friend, you're going around in a circle. I'm talking about a rest that takes nothing away from our game or our vegetables. You keep forgetting that, by means of our trade with the stranger, nine hours of labor will give us as much food as twelve do now.

Robinson. It's easy to see you weren't brought up in Europe. Perhaps you've never read the Moniteur industriel? It would have taught you this: "All time saved is a dead loss. What matters is not eating but working. Whatever we consume counts for nothing if it isn't the direct product of our labor. Do you want to know whether you are rich? Don't look at your satisfactions; look at your toil." That's what the Moniteur industriel would have taught you. For my part, since I'm no theorist, all I can see is the loss of our hunting.

Friday. What a strange way of turning ideas upside down! But...

Robinson. No buts. Besides, there are political reasons for rejecting the self-interested offers of the perfidious foreigner.

Friday. Political reasons!

Robinson. Yes. First of all, he's making us these offers only because they're to his advantage.

Friday. All the better, since they're to ours too.

Robinson. Next, by these swaps we'll put ourselves in his power.

Friday. And him in ours. We'll need his game, he'll need our vegetables, and we'll live as good friends.

Robinson. System! Do you want me to leave you speechless?

Friday. Go on; I'm still waiting for a good reason.

Robinson. Suppose the stranger learns to grow a garden, and his island is more fertile than ours. Do you see the consequence?

Friday. Yes. Our dealings with the stranger will stop. He won't take any more vegetables from us, since he'll have them at home with less trouble. He won't bring us any more game, since we'll have nothing to give him in exchange; and then we'll be exactly as you want us to be today.

Robinson. Improvident savage! Don't you see that after killing our hunting by flooding us with game, he'll kill our gardening by flooding us with vegetables?

Friday. But that will only ever happen as long as we give him something else; that is, as long as we find something else to produce with a saving of labor for ourselves.

Robinson. Something else, something else! You always come back to that. You're vague, friend Friday; there's nothing practical about your views.

The argument went on a long time and left each of them, as often happens, in his own conviction. But since Robinson had great influence over Friday, his opinion won the day, and when the stranger came for his answer, Robinson said to him:

"Stranger, for your proposal to be accepted, we would have to be quite sure of two things:

"The first, that your island is no richer in game than ours; for we only want to compete on equal terms.

"The second, that you will lose by the bargain. For since in every exchange there is necessarily a winner and a loser, we would be the dupes if you weren't. What have you to say?"

"Nothing," said the stranger. And bursting out laughing, he went back to his canoe.

"The tale wouldn't be bad, if Robinson weren't so absurd."

"He's no more absurd than the committee on the rue Hauteville."

"Oh, that's quite different. You suppose sometimes a man alone, sometimes, which comes to the same thing, two men living in common. That isn't our world. The division of occupations and the intervention of merchants and money change the question a good deal."

"They do complicate transactions, but they don't change their nature."

"What! You want to compare modern commerce to simple swaps?"

"Commerce is nothing but a multitude of swaps. The real nature of a swap is identical with the real nature of commerce, just as a small piece of work is of the same nature as a great one, and the gravitation that moves an atom is of the same nature as the gravitation that sweeps a world along."

"Then according to you, these arguments that are so false in Robinson's mouth are no less false in the mouths of our protectionists?"

"No less; only the error is better hidden under the complications of circumstance."

"Well, then, come to an example taken from the actual order of things."

"Very well. In France, given the demands of the climate and of our habits, cloth is a useful thing. Is the essential thing to make it or to have it?"

"What a question! To have it, you have to make it."

"That isn't indispensable. To have it, somebody has to make it, that much is certain; but it doesn't have to be the person or the country that consumes it who produces it. You didn't make the cloth that dresses you so well; France didn't grow the coffee she has for breakfast."

"But I bought my cloth, and France bought her coffee."

"Exactly. And with what?"

"With money."

"But you didn't make the money, and neither did France."

"We bought it."

"With what?"

"With our products, which went to Peru."

"Then in reality it's your labor that you exchange for cloth, and French labor that has been exchanged for coffee."

"Certainly."

"Then it isn't strictly necessary to make what you consume?"

"No, if you make something else that you give in exchange."

"In other words, France has two ways of getting a given quantity of cloth. The first is to make it; the second is to make something else and swap that something else abroad for cloth. Of these two ways, which is the better?"

"I'm not quite sure."

"Isn't it the one that, for a given amount of labor, yields a greater quantity of cloth?"

"It does seem so."

"And which is better for a nation: to have the choice between these two ways, or to have the law forbid it one of them, at the risk of hitting on precisely the better one?"

"It seems to me better for it to have the choice, especially since in these matters it always chooses well."

"The law that prohibits foreign cloth decides, then, that if France wants cloth she must make it in kind, and that she is forbidden to make the something else with which she could buy foreign cloth?"

"That's true."

"And since it forces her to make the cloth and forbids her to make the something else precisely because that something else would take less labor (otherwise the law wouldn't need to meddle), it in effect decrees that, for a given amount of labor, France shall have only one meter of cloth by making it, when for the same labor she would have had two meters by making the something else."

"But for heaven's sake, what something else?"

"Why, for heaven's sake, what does it matter? Having the choice, she will make something else only so long as there is some something else to make."

"That's possible; but I keep worrying that the foreigner will send us cloth and not take the something else from us, in which case we'd be well and truly caught. In any case, here's the objection, even from your point of view. You agree that France will make this something else, to exchange for cloth, with less labor than if she had made the cloth herself."

"No doubt."

"Then a certain quantity of her labor will be struck idle."

"Yes, but without her being any less well clothed: a small detail that makes the whole mistake. Robinson lost sight of it; our protectionists don't see it, or hide it. The shipwrecked plank also struck Robinson's labor idle for fifteen days, insofar as it would have gone into making a plank, but without depriving him of the plank. Distinguish, then, between these two kinds of reduction in labor: the one whose effect is privation and the one whose cause is satisfaction. These two things are very different, and if you treat them as the same, you're reasoning like Robinson. In the most complicated cases, as in the simplest, the sophism consists in this: Judging the utility of labor by its duration and its intensity, and not by its results; which leads to this economic policy: Reduce the results of labor in order to increase its duration and its intensity."

Chapter 15: The Free Trader's Little Arsenal

If they tell you: There are no absolute principles. Prohibition may be bad and restriction good.

Answer: Restriction prohibits everything it keeps from coming in.

If they tell you: Agriculture is the nursing mother of the country.

Answer: What feeds the country isn't agriculture, strictly speaking, but wheat.

If they tell you: The basis of the people's food is agriculture.

Answer: The basis of the people's food is wheat. That's why a law that gets two hectoliters of wheat out of agricultural labor, at the cost of the four hectoliters the same labor would have got in industry without the law, far from being a law of nourishment, is a law of starvation.

If they tell you: Restricting the entry of foreign wheat leads to more farming and therefore to more home production.

Answer: It leads to sowing on mountain rocks and seaside sands. Milking a cow and milking on and on gives more milk; for who can say at what moment you'll stop getting even a drop? But the drop comes dear.

If they tell you: Let bread be dear, and the farmer, grown rich, will make the manufacturer rich.

Answer: Bread is dear when there's little of it, which can only make poor people, or, if you prefer, starving rich people.

If they insist and say: When bread goes up, wages rise.

Answer by pointing, in April 1847, to five sixths of the workers living on charity.

If they tell you: Workers' earnings must keep pace with the dearness of food.

Answer: That comes down to saying that on a ship without provisions everybody has just as much biscuit whether there is any or not.

If they tell you: The man who sells wheat must be assured a good wage.

Answer: Very well; but then the man who buys it must be assured a good wage too.

If they tell you: The landowners, who make the law, have raised the price of bread without bothering about wages, because they know that when bread goes up, wages rise quite naturally.

Answer: On that principle, when the workers make the law, don't blame them if they fix a good rate of wages without bothering to protect wheat, for they know that if wages are high, food goes up quite naturally.

If they tell you: What should be done, then?

Answer: Be fair to everybody.

If they tell you: It's essential for a great country to have an iron industry.

Answer: What's more essential is for that great country to have iron.

If they tell you: It's indispensable for a great country to have a cloth industry.

Answer: What's more indispensable is for the citizens of that great country to have cloth.

If they tell you: Labor is wealth.

Answer: That's false.

And, by way of elaboration, add: Bloodletting isn't health; and the proof that it isn't health is that its purpose is to restore it.

If they tell you: Forcing men to plow rocks and to get an ounce of iron out of a quintal of ore is increasing their labor and therefore their wealth.

Answer: Forcing men to dig wells while forbidding them the water of the river is increasing their useless labor, but not their wealth.

If they tell you: The sun gives its heat and its light without payment.

Answer: So much the better for me; it costs me nothing to see.

And if they retort: Industry in general loses what you would have paid for lighting.

Hit back: No; for since I've paid the sun nothing, what it saves me goes to pay for clothes, furniture, and candles.

In the same way, if they tell you: Those rascally English have capital that's already paid off.

Answer: So much the better for us; they won't make us pay interest on it.

If they tell you: Those perfidious English find iron and coal in the same seam.

Answer: So much the better for us; they won't charge us anything for bringing them together.

If they tell you: The Swiss have rich pastures that cost little.

Answer: The advantage is ours, for they'll ask a smaller quantity of labor from us to supply draft animals for our agriculture and food for our stomachs.

If they tell you: The lands of the Crimea have no value and pay no taxes.

Answer: The profit is ours, since we buy wheat free of those charges.

If they tell you: The serfs of Poland work without wages.

Answer: The misfortune is theirs and the profit ours, since their labor is deducted from the price of the wheat their masters sell us.

Finally, if they tell you: Other nations have a host of advantages over us.

Answer: Through exchange, they're forced to let us share in them.

If they tell you: With freedom, we're going to be flooded with bread, pot roast, coal, and overcoats.

Answer: We'll be neither hungry nor cold.

If they tell you: What will we pay with?

Answer: Don't let that worry you. If we're flooded, it's because we've been able to pay; and if we can't pay, we won't be flooded.

If they tell you: I'd accept free trade if the foreigner, when he brought us one product, took another from us; but he'll carry off our cash.

Answer: Cash no more grows in the fields of the Beauce, or comes out of the mills of Elbeuf, than coffee does. For us, paying the foreigner in cash is like paying him in coffee.

If they tell you: Eat meat.

Answer: Let it in.

If they tell you, as La Presse does: When you can't afford to buy bread, you should buy beef.

Answer: Advice as sound as the landlord Monsieur Vulture's to his tenant:

	When you haven't the money to pay your rent,
	You ought to have a house of your own.

If they tell you, as La Presse does: The State must teach the people why and how they ought to eat beef.

Answer: Let the State just let the beef in; as for eating it, the most civilized people in the world is a big enough boy to learn that without a teacher.

If they tell you: The State must know everything and foresee everything in order to guide the people, and the people need only let themselves be guided.

Answer: Is there a State outside the people, or a human foresight outside humanity? Archimedes could have repeated every day of his life, "With a lever and a fulcrum I will move the world," and he wouldn't have moved it for all that, for want of a fulcrum and a lever. The State's fulcrum is the nation; and nothing is more senseless than to pin so many hopes on the State, that is, to assume collective knowledge and foresight after taking individual imbecility and lack of foresight as an established fact.

If they tell you: Good heavens! I'm not asking for a favor, only a duty on wheat and meat to make up for the heavy taxes France is subjected to; just a little duty equal to what those taxes add to the cost price of my wheat.

Answer: I beg a thousand pardons, but I pay taxes too. If, then, the protection you vote yourself has the effect of loading your wheat, for me, with exactly your share of the taxes, your honeyed request aims at nothing less than setting up between us this arrangement, in your own words: "Whereas the public burdens are heavy, I, the seller of wheat, will pay nothing at all, and you, my neighbor the buyer, will pay two shares, namely yours and mine." Wheat merchant, my neighbor, you may have force on your side; but you certainly don't have reason.

If they tell you: Still, it's very hard for me, who pay taxes, to compete in my own market with the foreigner who pays none.

Answer:

First, it isn't your market, it's our market. I, who live on wheat and pay for it, ought to count for something.

Second, few foreigners, these days, are free of taxes.

Third, if the tax you vote gives you back more than it costs you, in roads, canals, security, and so on, you have no right to keep out, at my expense, the competition of foreigners who don't pay the tax but don't have the security, the roads, or the canals either. You might as well say: I demand a compensating duty because I have finer clothes, stronger horses, and better plows than the Russian peasant.

Fourth, if the tax doesn't give back what it costs, don't vote for it.

Fifth, and in the end: having voted the tax, do you want to get out of paying it? Then think up a system that shifts it onto the foreigner. But the tariff shifts your share onto me, and I already have quite enough with my own.

If they tell you: For the Russians, freedom of trade is necessary in order to exchange their products to advantage. (Monsieur Thiers's opinion in the committee rooms of the Chamber, April 1847.)

Answer: Freedom is necessary everywhere, and for the same reason.

If they tell you: Every country has its needs. It is in the light of them that one must act. (Monsieur Thiers.)

Answer: It is in the light of them that every country acts by itself, when nobody stops it.

If they tell you: Since we have no sheet iron, its import must be allowed. (Monsieur Thiers.)

Answer: Thank you very much.

If they tell you: The merchant marine needs freight. The lack of cargo on the return voyage is why our shipping can't compete with foreign shipping. (Monsieur Thiers.)

Answer: When you want to make everything at home, you can't have freight going out or coming back. It's as absurd to want a merchant marine under the prohibitive system as it would be to want carts where all transport had been forbidden.

If they tell you: Even supposing protection is unjust, everything has been arranged around it; capital has been invested, rights have been acquired; there's no getting out of it without suffering.

Answer: Every injustice profits someone (except perhaps restriction, which in the long run profits nobody). To argue from the disruption that ending an injustice causes the man who profits from it is to say that an injustice, merely because it has existed for a moment, must last forever.

Chapter 16: The Right Hand and the Left

(Report to the King.)

Sire,

When we see these men of Free Trade boldly spreading their doctrine, maintaining that the right to buy and sell is implied in the right of property (an insolence that Monsieur Billault, a lawyer to his fingertips, has duly pounced upon), we may be permitted to feel serious alarm for the fate of national labor; for what will the French do with their arms and their minds once they are free?

The administration you have honored with your confidence has felt bound to concern itself with so grave a situation, and to seek in its wisdom a protection that may be put in place of the one that appears to be in danger. It proposes that you forbid your loyal subjects the use of the right hand.

Sire, do not do us the injury of thinking that we have lightly adopted a measure which, at first sight, may seem peculiar. Close study of the protective system has revealed to us this syllogism, on which it rests entirely:

The more one works, the richer one is;

The more difficulties one has to overcome, the more one works;

Ergo, the more difficulties one has to overcome, the richer one is.

What, indeed, is protection, if not an ingenious application of this formal argument, so tightly reasoned that it would withstand the subtlety of Monsieur Billault himself?

Let us personify the country. Let us consider it as a collective being with thirty million mouths and, as a natural consequence, sixty million arms. Here it is making a clock, which it proposes to swap in Belgium for ten quintals of iron. But we say to it: Make the iron yourself. I can't, it answers; it would take me too long; I couldn't make five quintals of it in the time it takes me to make a clock. Utopian! we reply. That is the very reason we forbid you to make the clock and order you to make the iron. Don't you see that we are creating work for you?

Sire, it will not have escaped your sagacity that this is exactly as if we said to the country: Work with your left hand and not with your right.

To create obstacles so as to give labor the opportunity to expand: such is the principle of the restriction that is dying. It is also the principle of the restriction that is about to be born. Sire, to regulate in this way is not to innovate; it is to persevere.

As for the effectiveness of the measure, it is beyond dispute. It is difficult, much more difficult than people think, to do with the left hand what one was accustomed to do with the right. You will be convinced of it, Sire, if you deign to condescend to try our system on some act familiar to you, such as, for instance, shuffling cards. We may therefore flatter ourselves that we are opening an unlimited career to labor.

Once workers of every kind are reduced to their left hands, let us picture, Sire, the immense number of them that will be needed to meet the whole of present consumption, supposing it to stay the same, as we always do when we compare opposing systems of production. So prodigious a demand for labor cannot fail to bring about a considerable rise in wages, and pauperism will vanish from the country as if by magic.

Sire, your fatherly heart will rejoice to think that the blessings of the ordinance will extend also to that interesting portion of the great family whose fate stirs all your solicitude. What is the lot of women in France? The bolder sex, the one more hardened to fatigue, is gradually driving them out of every occupation.

They used to have the resource of the lottery offices. These have been closed by a pitiless philanthropy, and on what pretext? "To save," it said, "the poor man's penny." Alas! Did the poor man ever get from a coin pleasures as sweet and as innocent as those the mysterious urn of fortune held for him? Weaned from every sweetness of life, when he put a day's wages, once a fortnight, on a straight four, how many delicious hours did he not bring into the bosom of his family? Hope always had its place by the fireside. The garret filled with dreams: the wife promised herself to outshine her neighbors with the splendor of her dress, the son saw himself a drum major, the daughter felt herself led to the altar on the arm of her betrothed.

	It's something still, to dream a lovely dream!

Oh, the lottery was the poetry of the poor, and we let it slip away!

With the lottery dead, what means have we of providing for our protégées? Tobacco and the post.

Tobacco, by all means: it makes progress, thank heaven, and thanks to the distinguished habits that august examples have very skillfully made prevail among our elegant youth.

But the post!... We will say nothing of it; it will be the subject of a special report.

Apart from tobacco, then, what is left to your female subjects? Nothing but embroidery, knitting, and sewing, sorry resources that a barbarous science, mechanics, keeps narrowing more and more.

But as soon as your ordinance has appeared, as soon as right hands are cut off or tied down, everything will change. Twenty times, thirty times as many embroiderers, smoothers and ironers, linen maids, seamstresses, and shirtmakers will not be enough for the consumption (honi soit qui mal y pense) of the kingdom; still supposing it to stay the same, according to our way of reasoning.

It is true that this supposition may be disputed by cold theorists, for dresses will be dearer, and shirts too. They say as much of the iron France extracts from our mines, compared with the iron she could harvest from our vineyards. This argument, then, is no more admissible against gaucherie than against protection; for that very dearness is the result and the sign of the surplus of effort and labor which is precisely the foundation on which, in the one case as in the other, we claim to build the prosperity of the working class.

Yes, we paint ourselves a touching picture of the prosperity of the dressmaking industry. What movement! What activity! What life! Every dress will keep a hundred fingers busy instead of ten. There will no longer be a single idle girl, and we need not, Sire, point out to your perspicacity the moral consequences of this great revolution. Not only will more girls be employed, but each of them will earn more, for they will not be able to keep up with the demand; and if competition still shows itself, it will no longer be among the working girls who make the dresses, but among the fine ladies who wear them.

You see, Sire, that our proposal is not only in keeping with the economic traditions of the government; it is also essentially moral and democratic.

To appreciate its effects, let us suppose it carried out; let us transport ourselves in thought into the future, and imagine the system in operation for twenty years. Idleness has been banished from the country; ease and concord, contentment and morality have come into every family along with work; no more poverty, no more prostitution. The left hand being thoroughly gauche at its work, there is work in abundance and the pay is satisfactory. Everything has been arranged around it; the workshops have filled up accordingly. Is it not true, Sire, that if utopians suddenly came along demanding freedom for the right hand, they would spread alarm through the country? Is it not true that this so-called reform would overturn every livelihood? Therefore our system is good, since it could not be destroyed without pain.

And yet we have the sad foreboding that one day (so great is human perversity!) an association will be formed for the freedom of right hands.

We seem already to hear the free-dexterists holding forth in the Salle Montesquieu:

"People, you think yourselves richer because you have been deprived of the use of one hand; you see only the extra work that comes to you from it. But look also at the dearness that results from it, the forced shrinking of everything you consume. This measure has not made the source of wages, capital, any more abundant. The waters that flow from that great reservoir are directed into other channels; their volume has not increased; and the final result, for the nation as a whole, is a loss of well-being equal to everything that millions of right hands can produce over and above an equal number of left hands. Therefore let us band together and, at the price of some unavoidable disruption, win the right to work with both hands."

Fortunately, Sire, an association for the defense of left-handed labor will be formed, and the Sinistrists will have no trouble reducing to nothing all these generalities and idealities, suppositions and abstractions, fancies and utopias. They need only dig up the Moniteur industriel of 1846: they will find there, against freedom of trade, ready-made arguments that so wonderfully pulverize freedom of the right hand that they will need only to substitute one word for the other.

"The Paris league for freedom of trade had no doubt of the workers' support. But the workers are no longer men who can be led by the nose. Their eyes are open, and they know political economy better than our licensed professors... Freedom of trade, they replied, would take away our work, and work is our real, great, sovereign property: with work, with plenty of work, the price of goods is never out of reach. But without work, even if bread cost only a sou a pound, the worker is forced to die of hunger. Now your doctrines, instead of increasing the present amount of work in France, will reduce it; that is, you will reduce us to poverty." (Issue of October 13, 1846.)

"When there are too many goods for sale, their price does indeed fall; but since wages go down when goods lose value, the result is that instead of being able to buy, we can no longer buy anything at all. It is therefore when goods are dirt cheap that the worker is most miserable." (Gauthier de Rumilly, Moniteur industriel of November 17.)

It will do no harm for the Sinistrists to mix a few threats in with their fine theories. Here is the model:

"What! To want to replace the labor of the left hand with that of the right, and so bring about the forced lowering, if not the annihilation, of wages, the sole resource of nearly the whole nation!

"And this at a moment when poor harvests are already imposing painful sacrifices on the worker, making him anxious about his future, more open to bad advice, and ready to abandon the very sensible conduct he has kept to until now!"

We are confident, Sire, that thanks to reasoning so learned, if the struggle begins, the left hand will come out of it victorious.

Perhaps an association will also be formed to inquire whether the right hand and the left are not both wrong, and whether there is not a third hand between them, to reconcile everything.

After depicting the Dexterists as seduced by the apparent liberality of a principle whose correctness experience has not yet verified, and the Sinistrists as entrenched in positions already won, it will say:

"And people deny that there is a third course to take in the midst of the conflict! And they fail to see that the workers have to defend themselves at once against those who want to change nothing in the present situation, because they find it to their advantage, and against those who dream of an economic upheaval whose extent and consequences they have not calculated!" (Le National of October 16.)

We do not wish, however, to hide from Your Majesty, Sire, that our plan has one vulnerable side. People may say to us: In twenty years every left hand will be as skillful as right hands are now, and you will no longer be able to count on clumsiness to increase national labor.

To this we reply that, according to learned physicians, the left side of the human body has a natural weakness that is altogether reassuring for the future of labor.

And after all, Sire, consent to sign the ordinance, and a great principle will have prevailed: All wealth comes from the intensity of labor. It will be easy for us to extend and vary its applications. We will decree, for example, that it shall no longer be permitted to work except with the foot. That is no more impossible (since it has been seen) than extracting iron from the mud of the Seine. Men have even been seen writing with their backs. You see, Sire, that we shall not lack means of increasing national labor. As a last resort, we would still have the unlimited resource of amputations.

Finally, Sire, if this report were not intended for publication, we would draw your attention to the great influence that all systems like the one we submit to you are apt to give to the men in power. But that is a matter we reserve the right to treat in privy council.

Chapter 17: Domination by Labor

"Just as in time of war one achieves domination through superiority of arms, can one, in time of peace, achieve domination through superiority of labor?"

This question is of the highest interest at a time when nobody seems to doubt that in the field of industry, as on the field of battle, the stronger crushes the weaker.

For that to be so, people must have discovered a sad and discouraging analogy between labor, which acts on things, and violence, which acts on men; for how could these two kinds of action be identical in their effects if they were opposed in their nature?

And if it's true that in industry, as in war, domination is the necessary result of superiority, why should we bother about progress, or about social economy, since we live in a world arranged by Providence in such a way that one and the same effect, oppression, comes inevitably out of the most opposite principles?

Concerning the brand-new policy into which free trade is carrying England, many people raise an objection which, I admit, troubles the most sincere minds: "Is England doing anything but pursuing the same aim by a different means? Isn't she still aiming at universal supremacy? Sure of the superiority of her capital and her labor, isn't she calling for free competition in order to stifle the industry of the Continent, reign as sovereign, and win the privilege of feeding and clothing the ruined peoples?"

It would be easy for me to show that these fears are fanciful; that our supposed inferiority is greatly exaggerated; that there isn't one of our great industries that doesn't hold its own, and indeed grow, under foreign competition; and that the unfailing effect of that competition is to bring an increase in general consumption large enough to absorb both the products from abroad and those from at home.

Today I mean to attack the objection head-on, leaving it all its strength and all the advantage of the ground it has chosen. Setting aside the English and the French, I shall ask, in general terms, whether, even when one people, through its superiority in some branch of industry, comes to stifle the same industry in another people, the first has taken a step toward domination and the second toward dependence; in other words, whether both don't gain by the operation, and whether it isn't the vanquished who gains the more.

If you see in a product nothing but an occasion for labor, the protectionists' fears are certainly well founded. Looking at iron, for example, only in its relation to the ironmasters, one might fear that the competition of a country where it was a free gift of nature would put out the blast furnaces in another country where ore and fuel were scarce.

But is that a complete view of the subject? Is iron related only to those who make it? Has it nothing to do with those who use it? Is its final and only purpose to be produced? And if it is useful not because of the labor it occasions but because of the qualities it has, because of the many services its hardness and malleability fit it for, doesn't it follow that the foreigner can't lower its price, even to the point of stopping its production at home, without doing us more good in this second respect than he does us harm in the first?

Please consider that there are a host of things which foreigners, because of the natural advantages they enjoy, prevent us from producing directly, and in regard to which we are in reality in the hypothetical position we are examining for iron. We produce at home neither tea, nor coffee, nor gold, nor silver. Does that mean our labor as a whole is reduced by it? No; it's only that to create the countervalue of these things, to acquire them by exchange, we set aside from our general labor a smaller portion than it would take to produce them ourselves. We have more left over to devote to other satisfactions. We are that much richer and stronger. All that foreign rivalry has been able to do, even in the cases where it forbids us a particular form of labor outright, is to save us that labor and increase our productive power. Is that, for the foreigner, the road to domination?

If a gold mine were found in France, it wouldn't follow that it would be in our interest to work it. It's even certain that the venture ought to be passed over if every ounce of gold took more of our labor than an ounce of gold bought in Mexico with cloth. In that case we'd do better to go on finding our mines in our looms. What is true of gold is true of iron.

The illusion comes from failing to see one thing. It is that foreign superiority never prevents national labor except in one particular form, and makes it superfluous in that form only by putting at our disposal the very result of the labor thus done away with. If men lived in diving bells under a layer of water and had to get their air by working a pump, there would be an immense source of labor in that. To strike at this labor while leaving men in that condition would be to do them frightful harm. But if the labor stops only because the need for it is gone, because men are placed in another setting where air reaches their lungs without effort, then the loss of that labor is nothing to regret, except in the eyes of those who insist on valuing nothing in labor but the labor itself.

That is precisely the kind of labor that machines, free trade, and progress of every kind are gradually doing away with: not useful labor, but labor that has become superfluous, surplus, pointless, without result. Protection, on the other hand, puts it back to work; it puts us back under the layer of water so as to give us the chance to pump; it forces us to ask for gold from the inaccessible national mine rather than from our national looms. Its whole effect is in these words: wasted strength.

You'll understand that I'm speaking here of general effects, not of the temporary bruises caused by passing from a bad system to a good one. A momentary disturbance necessarily goes with every step of progress. That may be a reason to ease the transition; it's no reason to forbid all progress on principle, still less to fail to recognize it.

Industry is pictured to us as a struggle. That isn't true, or it's true only if we confine ourselves to looking at each industry in its effects on another industry of the same kind, isolating them both, in our minds, from the rest of humanity. But there is something else: there are the effects on consumption, on general well-being.

That's why it isn't permissible to liken labor to war, as people do.

In war, the stronger overwhelms the weaker.

In labor, the stronger passes on strength to the weaker. That destroys the analogy at the root.

The English may be as strong and as skillful as you like, may have enormous capital, and capital already paid off, and may command the two great powers of production, iron and fire: all of it comes out as cheapness in the product. And who gains by the cheapness of the product? The man who buys it.

It isn't in their power to wipe out any portion of our labor altogether. All they can do is make it superfluous for a result already obtained, supply the air at the same time as they take away the pump, increase our available strength in this way, and (remarkably) make their supposed domination all the more impossible the more undeniable their superiority.

We arrive, then, by a rigorous and comforting demonstration, at this conclusion: that labor and violence, so opposed in their nature, are no less opposed, whatever protectionists and socialists may say, in their effects.

All it took was to distinguish between labor destroyed and labor saved.

To have less iron because you work less, or to have more iron although you work less: these are more than different things; they are opposites. The protectionists confuse them; we don't. That's all.

Get one thing firmly into your head. If the English put a great deal of activity, labor, capital, intelligence, and natural forces to work, it isn't for our pretty faces. It's to give themselves a great many satisfactions in exchange for their products. They certainly want to receive at least as much as they give, and they make at home the payment for what they buy elsewhere. If, then, they flood us with their products, it's because they mean to be flooded with ours. That being so, the best way to have plenty for ourselves is to be free to choose, in acquiring things, between these two methods: direct production and indirect production. All the Machiavellism of Britain won't make us choose badly.

Let's stop, then, childishly likening industrial competition to war: a false likeness that gets all its plausibility from isolating two rival industries in order to judge the effects of competition. As soon as you take into account the effect on general well-being, the analogy vanishes.

In a battle, the man who is killed is well and truly killed, and the army is that much weaker. In industry, a factory goes under only when the nation's labor as a whole replaces what it produced, with something to spare. Imagine a state of things in which, for every man left dead on the field, two rise up again full of strength and vigor. If there is a planet where things happen like that, we have to admit that war is waged there under conditions so different from what we see here below that it doesn't even deserve the name.

Now that is the distinguishing mark of what has been so mistakenly called industrial warfare.

Let the Belgians and the English lower the price of their iron, if they can; let them lower it again and again, until it's nothing at all. By doing so they may well put out one of our blast furnaces, kill one of our soldiers; but I defy them to prevent a thousand other industries from springing up at once, as a necessary consequence of that very cheapness, and growing, more profitable than the industry put out of action.

Let us conclude that domination by labor is impossible and self-contradictory, since every superiority that shows itself in one people turns into cheapness and ends only by passing on strength to all the others. Let us banish from political economy all these expressions borrowed from the vocabulary of battle: to fight on equal terms, to conquer, to crush, to stifle, to be beaten, invasion, tribute. What do these phrases mean? Squeeze them, and nothing comes out... I'm wrong: out come absurd errors and fatal prejudices. It is these words that hold back the fusion of peoples, their peaceful, universal, indissoluble alliance, and the progress of humanity!