Conflict of Principles by Frederic Bastiat

There is one thing that confounds me, and it is this. Sincere publicists, studying the economy of society from the producer's point of view, have laid down this double formula:

1. "Governments should order the interests of consumers who are subject to their laws, in such a way as to be favorable to national industry."
2. "They should bring distant consumers under subjection to their laws, for the purpose of ordering their interests in a way favorable to national industry."

The first of these formulas gets the name of protection; the second we call outlets, or the creating of markets, or vents, for our produce.

Both are founded on what we call the balance of trade: "A nation is impoverished when it imports; enriched when it exports."

For if every purchase from a foreign country is a tribute paid and a national loss, it follows, of course, that it is right to restrain, and even prohibit, importations.

And if every sale to a foreign country is a tribute received, and a national profit, it is quite right and natural to create markets for our products even by force.

The system of protection and the colonial system are, then, only two aspects of one and the same theory. To hinder our fellow citizens from buying from foreigners, and to force foreigners to buy from our fellow citizens, are only two consequences of one and the same principle.

Now, it is impossible not to admit that this doctrine, if true, makes general utility to repose on monopoly or internal spoliation, and on conquest or external spoliation.

I enter a cottage on the French side of the Pyrenees.

The father of the family has received but slender wages. His half-naked children shiver in the icy north wind; the fire is extinguished, and there is nothing on the table. There are wool, firewood, and corn on the other side of the mountain; but these good things are forbidden to the poor day-laborer, for the other side of the mountain is not in France. Foreign firewood is not allowed to warm the cottage hearth; and the shepherd's children can never know the taste of Biscayan wheat,[1] and the wool of Navarre can never warm their benumbed limbs. General utility has so ordered it. Be it so; but let us agree that all this is in direct opposition to the first principles of justice. To dispose legislatively of the interests of consumers, and postpone them to the supposed interests of national industry, is to encroach upon their liberty — it is to prohibit an act; namely, the act of exchange, that has in it nothing contrary to good morals; in a word, it is to do them an act of injustice.

And yet this is necessary, we are told, unless we wish to see national labor at a standstill, and public prosperity sustain a fatal shock.

Writers of the protectionist school, then, have arrived at the melancholy conclusion that there is a radical incompatibility between justice and utility.

On the other hand, if it be the interest of each nation to sell, and not to buy, the natural state of their relations must consist in a violent action and reaction, for each will seek to impose its products on all, and all will endeavor to repel the products of each.

A sale, in fact, implies a purchase, and since, according to this doctrine, to sell is beneficial, and to buy is the reverse, every international transaction would imply the amelioration of one people and the deterioration of another.

But if men are, on the one hand, irresistibly impelled toward what is for their profit, and if, on the other, they resist instinctively what is hurtful, we are forced to conclude that each nation carries in its bosom a natural force of expansion, and a not less natural force of resistance, which forces are equally injurious to all other nations; or, in other words, that antagonism and war are the natural state of human society.

Thus the theory we are discussing may be summed up in these two axioms:

Utility is incompatible with justice at home.

Utility is incompatible with peace abroad.

Now, what astonishes and confounds me is that a publicist, a statesman, who sincerely holds an economical doctrine that runs so violently counter to other principles that are incontestable, should be able to enjoy one moment of calm or peace of mind.

For my own part, it seems to me that if I had entered the precincts of the science by the same gate, if I had failed to perceive clearly that liberty, utility, justice, peace, are things not only compatible, but strictly allied with each other, and, so to speak, identical, I should have endeavored to forget what I had learned, and I should have asked,

"How God could have willed that men should attain prosperity only through injustice and war? How He could have willed that they should be unable to avoid Injustice and War except by renouncing the possibility of attaining prosperity?

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"Dare I adopt, as the basis of the legislation of a great nation, a science that thus misleads me by false lights, that has conducted me to this horrible blasphemy, and landed me in so dreadful an alternative? And when a long train of illustrious philosophers have been conducted by this science, to which they have devoted their lives, to more consoling results — when they affirm that liberty and utility are perfectly reconcilable with justice and peace — that all these great principles run in infinitely extended parallels, and will do so to all eternity, without running counter to each other — I would ask, Have they not in their favor that presumption which results from all that we know of the goodness and wisdom of God, as manifested in the sublime harmony of the material creation? In the face of such a presumption, and of so many reliable authorities, ought I to believe lightly that God has been pleased to implant antagonism and dissonance in the laws of the moral world? No; before I should venture to conclude that the principles of social order run counter to and neutralize each other, and are in eternal and irreconcilable opposition — before I should venture to impose on my fellow citizens a system so impious as that to which my reasonings would appear to lead — I should set myself to re-examine the whole chain of these reasonings, and assure myself that at this stage of the journey I had not missed my way."

But if, after a candid and searching examination, 20 times repeated, I arrived always at this frightful conclusion, that we must choose between the right and the good, discouraged, I should reject the science, and bury myself in voluntary ignorance; above all, I should decline all participation in public affairs, leaving to men of another temper and constitution the burden and responsibility of a choice so painful.

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There Are No Absolute Principles by Frederic Bastiat

We cannot wonder enough at the facility with which men resign themselves to continue ignorant of what it is most important that they should know; and we may be certain that such ignorance is incorrigible in those who venture to proclaim this axiom: There are no absolute principles.

You enter the legislative precincts. The subject of debate is whether the law should prohibit international exchanges, or proclaim freedom.

A deputy rises, and says,

If you tolerate these exchanges the foreigner will inundate you with his products: England with her textile fabrics, Belgium with coals, Spain with wools, Italy with silks, Switzerland with cattle, Sweden with iron, Prussia with wheat; so that home industry will no longer be possible.

Another replies,

If you prohibit international exchanges, the various bounties which nature has lavished on different climates will be for you as if they did not exist. You cannot participate in the mechanical skill of the English, in the wealth of the Belgian mines, in the fertility of the Polish soil, in the luxuriance of the Swiss pastures, in the cheapness of Spanish labor, in the warmth of the Italian climate; and you must obtain from an unprofitable and misdirected production those commodities which, through exchange, would have been furnished to you by an easy production.

Assuredly, one of these deputies must be wrong. But which? We must take care to make no mistake on the subject, for this is not a matter of abstract opinion merely. You have to choose between two roads, and one of them leads necessarily to poverty.

To get rid of the dilemma we are told that there are no absolute principles.

This axiom, which is so much in fashion nowadays, not only countenances indolence, but ministers to ambition.

If the theory of prohibition comes to prevail, or if the doctrine of free trade comes to triumph, one brief enactment will constitute our whole economic code. In the first case, the law will proclaim that all exchanges with foreign countries are prohibited; in the second, that all exchanges with foreign countries are free; and many grand and distinguished personages will thereby lose their importance.

But if exchange does not possess a character that is peculiar to it; if it is not governed by any natural law; if, capriciously, it be sometimes useful and sometimes detrimental; if it does not find its motive force in the good it accomplishes, its limit in the good it ceases to accomplish; if its consequences cannot be estimated by those who effect exchanges — in a word, if there be no absolute principles, then we must proceed to weigh, balance, and regulate transactions, we must equalize the conditions of labor, and try to find out the average rate of profits — a colossal task, well deserving the large emoluments and powerful influence awarded to those who undertake it.

On entering Paris, which I had come to visit, I said to myself — here are a million human beings who would all die in a short time if provisions of every kind ceased to flow toward this great metropolis. Imagination is baffled when it tries to appreciate the vast multiplicity of commodities that must enter tomorrow through the barriers in order to preserve the inhabitants from falling a prey to the convulsions of famine, rebellion and pillage. And yet all sleep at this moment, and their peaceful slumbers are not disturbed for a single instant by the prospect of such a frightful catastrophe. On the other hand, eighty departments have been laboring today, without concert, without any mutual understanding, for the provisioning of Paris. How does each succeeding day bring what is wanted, nothing more, nothing less, to so gigantic a market?

What, then, is the ingenious and secret power that governs the astonishing regularity of movements so complicated, a regularity in which everybody has implicit faith, although happiness and life itself are at stake? That power is an absolute principle, the principle of freedom in transactions. We have faith in that inward light that Providence has placed in the heart of all men, and to which he has confided the preservation and indefinite amelioration of our species, namely, a regard to personal interest — since we must give it its right name — a principle so active, so vigilant, so foreseeing, when it is free in its action.

In what situation, I would ask, would the inhabitants of Paris be if a minister should take it into his head to substitute for this power the combinations of his own genius, however superior we might suppose them to be — if he thought to subject to his supreme direction this prodigious mechanism, to hold the springs of it in his hands, to decide by whom, or in what manner, or on what conditions, everything needed should be produced, transported, exchanged and consumed?

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Truly, there may be much suffering within the walls of Paris — poverty, despair, perhaps starvation, causing more tears to flow than ardent charity is able to dry up; but I affirm that it is probable, nay, that it is certain, that the arbitrary intervention of government would multiply infinitely those sufferings, and spread over all our fellow citizens those evils which at present affect only a small number of them.

This faith, then, which we repose in a principle, when the question relates only to our home transactions, why should we not retain when the same principle is applied to our international transactions, which are undoubtedly less numerous, less delicate, and less complicated?

And if it is not necessary that the municipality should regulate our Parisian industries, weigh our chances, balance our profits and losses, see that our circulating medium is not exhausted, and equalize the conditions of our home labor, why should it be necessary that the customhouse, departing from its fiscal duties, should pretend to exercise a protective action over our external commerce?

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Raw Materials by Frederic Bastiat

It is said that the most advantageous of all branches of trade is that which supplies manufactured commodities in exchange for raw materials. For these raw materials are the aliment and support of national labor.

Hence the conclusion is drawn that the best law of customs is that which gives the greatest possible facility to the importation of raw materials, and which throws most obstacles in the way of importing finished goods.

There is no fallacy in political economy more widely disseminated than this. It is cherished not only by the protectionist school but also, and above all, by the school that dubs itself Liberal; and it is unfortunate that it should be so, for what can be more injurious to a good cause than that it should be at the same time vigorously attacked and feebly defended?

Commercial liberty is likely to have the fate of liberty in general; it will only find a place in the statute book after it has taken possession of men's minds and convictions. But if it be true that a reform, in order to be solidly established, should be generally understood, it follows that nothing can so much retard reform as that which misleads public opinion. And what is more calculated to mislead public opinion than works that, in advocating freedom, invoke aid from the doctrines of monopoly?

Some years ago three of the great towns of France — Lyons, Bordeaux, and Havre — united in a movement against the restrictive regime. All Europe was stirred on seeing raised what they took for the banner of liberty. Alas! it proved to be also the banner of monopoly — of a monopoly a little more niggardly and much more absurd than that of which they seemed to desire the overthrow. By the aid of the fallacy that I have just endeavored to expose, the petitioners did nothing more than reproduce the doctrine of protection to national industry, tacking to it an additional inconsistency.

It was, in fact, nothing else than the system of prohibition. Just listen to Mr. de Saint-Cricq:

"Labor constitutes the wealth of a nation, because labor alone creates those material objects which our wants demand; and universal ease and comfort consist in the abundance of these things." So much for the principle.

"But this abundance must be produced by national labor. If it were the result of foreign labor, national labor would be immediately brought to a stand." Here lies the error. (See the preceding chapter.)

"What course should an agricultural and manufacturing country take under such circumstances? Reserve its markets for the products of its own soil and of its own industry." Such is the end and design.

"And for that purpose restrain by duties, and, if necessary, prohibit importation of the products of the soil and industry of other nations." Such are the means.

Let us compare this system with that which the Bordeaux petition advocates.

Commodities are there divided into three classes:

"The first includes provisions, and raw materials upon which no human labor has been bestowed. In principle, a wise economy would demand that this class should be free of duties." Here we have no labor, no protection.

"The second consists of products that have, to some extent, been prepared. This preparation warrants such products being charged with a certain amount of duty." Here protection begins, because here, according to the petitioners, begins national labor.

"The third comprises goods and products in their finished and perfect state. These contribute nothing to national labor, and we regard this class as the most taxable." Here labor, and protection along with it, reach their maximum.

We thus see that the petitioners profess their belief in the doctrine that foreign labor is injurious to national labor; and this is the error of the prohibitive system.

They demand that the home market should be reserved for home industry. That is the design of the system of prohibition.

They demand that foreign labor should be subjected to restrictions and taxes. These are the means employed by the system of prohibition. What difference, then, can we possibly discover between the Bordeaux petitioners and the Corypheus of restriction? One difference, and one only: the greater or less extension given to the word labor.

Mr. de Saint-Cricq extends it to everything, and so he wishes to protect all.

"Labor constitutes all the wealth of a people," he says; "to protect agricultural industry, and all agricultural industry; to protect manufacturing industry, and all manufacturing industry, is the cry which should never cease to be heard in this Chamber."

The Bordeaux petitioners take no labor into account but that of the manufacturers; and for that reason they would admit them to the benefits of protection.

"Raw materials are commodities upon which no human labor has been bestowed. In principle, we should not tax them. Manufactured products can no longer serve the cause of national industry, and we regard them as the best subjects for taxation."

It is not our business in this place to inquire whether protection to national industry is reasonable. Mr. de Saint-Cricq and the Bordeaux gentlemen are at one upon this point, and, as we have shown in the preceding chapters, we on this subject differ from both.

Our present business is to discover whether it is by Mr. de Saint-Cricq, or by the Bordeaux petitioners, that the word labor is used in a correct sense.

Now, in this view of the question, we think that Mr. de Saint-Cricq has very much the best of it; and to prove this we may suppose them to hold some such dialogue as the following:

MR. DE SAINT-CRICQ: You grant that national labor should be protected. You grant that the products of no foreign labor can be introduced into our market without superseding a corresponding amount of our national labor. Only you contend that there are a multiplicity of products possessed of value (for they sell), but upon which no human labor has been bestowed (virgin material). And you enumerate, among other things, wheat, flour, meat, cattle, tallow, salt, iron, copper, lead, coal, wool, hides, seeds, etc.

If you will only prove to me that the value of these things is not due to labor, I will grant that it is useless to protect them.

But, on the other hand, if I demonstrate to you that there is as much labor worked up in 100 francs worth of wool as in 100 francs worth of textile fabrics, you will allow that the one is as worthy of protection as the other.

Now, why is this sack of wool worth 100 francs? Is it not because that is its cost price? And what does its cost price represent but the aggregate wages of all the labor and profits of all the capital which have contributed to the production of the commodity?

THE BORDEAUX PETITIONERS: Well, perhaps as regards wool you may be right. But take the case of a sack of corn, a bar of iron, a hundredweight of coal — are these commodities produced by labor? Are they not created by nature?

MR. DE SAINT-CRICQ: Undoubtedly nature creates the elements of all these things, but it is labor that produces the value. I was wrong myself in saying that labor created material objects, and that unfortunate form of expression has led me into other errors. It does not belong to man to create, to make anything out of nothing, be he agriculturist or manufacturer; and if by production is meant creation, all our labor must be marked down as unproductive, and yours, as merchants, more unproductive than all others, excepting perhaps my own.

The agriculturist, then, cannot pretend to have created wheat but he has created value; I mean to say, he has, by his labor and that of his servants, laborers, reapers, etc., transformed into wheat substances which had no resemblance to it whatever. The miller who converts the wheat into flour, the baker who converts the flour into bread, do the same thing.

In order that man may be enabled to clothe himself a multitude of operations are necessary. Prior to all intervention of human labor the true raw materials of cloth are the air, the water, the heat, the gases, the light, the salts, that enter into its composition. These are the raw materials upon which, strictly speaking, no human labor has been employed. They are virgin materials; and since they have no value, I should never dream of protecting them. But the first application of labor converts these substances into grass and fodder, a second into wool, a third into yarn, a fourth into a woven fabric, a fifth into clothing. Who can assert that the whole of these operations, from the first furrow laid open by the plough to the last stitch of the tailor's needle, do not resolve themselves into labor?

And it is because these operations are spread over several branches of industry, in order to accelerate and facilitate the accomplishment of the ultimate object, which is to furnish clothing to those who have need of it, that you desire, by an arbitrary distinction, to rank the importance of such works in the order in which they succeed each other, so that the first of the series shall not merit even the name of labor, and that the last, being labor par excellence, shall be worthy of the favors of protection?

THE PETITIONERS: Yes, we begin to see that wheat, like wool, is not exactly a product of which it can be said that no human labor has been bestowed upon it; but the agriculturist has not, at least, like the manufacturer, done everything himself or by means of his workmen; nature has assisted him, and if there is labor worked up in wheat it is not the simple product of labor.

MR. DE SAINT-CRICQ: But its value resolves itself exclusively into labor. I am happy that nature concurs in the material formation of grain. I could even wish that it were entirely her work; but you must allow that I have constrained this assistance of nature by my labor, and when I sell you my wheat you will remark this: That it is not for the labor of nature that I ask you to pay, but for my own.

But, as you state the case, manufactured commodities are no longer the exclusive products of labor. Is the manufacturer not beholden to nature in his processes? Does he not avail himself of the assistance of the steam-engine, of the pressure of the atmosphere, just as, with the assistance of the plough, I avail myself of its humidity? Has he created the laws of gravitation, of the transmission of forces, of affinity?

THE PETITIONERS: Well, this is the case of the wool over again; but coal is assuredly the work, the exclusive work, of nature. It is indeed a product upon which no human labor has ever been bestowed.

MR. DE SAINT-CRICQ: Yes, nature has undoubtedly created the coal, but labor has imparted value to it. For the millions of years during which it was buried 100 fathoms under ground, unknown to everybody, it was destitute of value. It was necessary to search for it — that is labor; it was necessary to send it to market — that is additional labor. Then the price you pay for it in the market is nothing else than the remuneration of the labor of mining and transport.[1]

Thus far we see that Mr. de Saint-Cricq has the best of the argument; that the value of raw materials, like that of manufactured commodities, represents the cost of production, that is to say, the labor worked up in them; that it is not possible to conceive of a product possessing value, that has had no human labor bestowed on it; that the distinction made by the petitioners is futile in theory; that, as the basis of an unequal distribution of favors, it would be iniquitous in practice, since the result would be that one-third of our countrymen, who happened to be engaged in manufactures, would obtain the advantages of monopoly, on the alleged ground that they produce by labor, while the other two-thirds — namely, the agricultural population — would be abandoned to competition under the pretext that they produce without labor.

The rejoinder to this, I am quite sure, will be that a nation derives more advantages from importing what are called raw materials, whether produced by labor or not, and exporting manufactured commodities. This will be repeated and insisted on, and it is an opinion very widely accredited.

"The more abundant raw materials are," says the Bordeaux petition, "the more are manufactures promoted and multiplied."

"Raw materials," says the same document in another place, "open up an unlimited field of work for the inhabitants of the countries into which they are imported."

"Raw materials," says the Havre petition, "constituting as they do the elements of labor, must be submitted to a different treatment, and be gradually admitted at the lowest rate of duty."

The same petition expresses a wish that manufactured products should be admitted, not gradually, but after an indefinite lapse of time, not at the lowest rate of duty, but at a duty of 20 percent.

"Among other articles, the low price and abundance of which are a necessity," says the Lyons petition, "manufacturers include all raw materials."

All this is founded on an illusion.

We have seen that all value represents labor. Now, it is quite true that manufacturing labor increases tenfold, sometimes a hundredfold, the value of the raw material; that is to say, it yields ten times, a hundred times, more profit to the nation. Hence men are led to reason thus: The production of a hundredweight of iron brings in a gain of only 15 shillings to workmen of all classes. The conversion of this hundredweight of iron into the mainsprings of watches raises their earnings to £500; and will anyone venture to say that a nation has not a greater interest to secure for its labor a gain of £500 than a gain of 15 shillings? We do not exchange a hundredweight of un-wrought iron for a hundredweight of watchsprings, nor a hundredweight of unwashed wool for a hundredweight of cashmere shawls; but we exchange a certain value of one of these materials for an equal value of another. Now, to exchange equal value for equal value is to exchange equal labor for equal labor. It is not true, then, that a nation that sells five pounds' worth of wrought fabrics or watch-springs gains more than a nation that sells five pounds' worth of wool or iron.

In a country where no law can be voted, where no tax can be imposed, but with the consent of those whose dealings the law is to regulate, and whose pockets the tax is to affect, the public cannot be robbed without first being imposed on and misled. Our ignorance is the raw material of every extortion from which we suffer, and we may be certain beforehand that every fallacy is the precursor of an act of plunder. My good friends! when you detect a fallacy in a petition, button up your wallet-pocket, for you may be sure that this is the mark aimed at. Let us see, then, what is the real object secretly aimed at by the shipowners of Bordeaux and Havre, and the manufacturers of Lyons, and which is concealed under the distinction they attempt to draw between agricultural and manufactured commodities.

"It is principally this first class (that which comprises raw materials, upon which no human labor has been bestowed) which affords," say the Bordeaux petitioners, "the principal support to our merchant shipping.… In principle, a wise economy would not tax this class.… The second (commodities partly wrought up) may be taxed to a certain extent. The third (commodities which call for no more exertion of labor) we regard as the fittest subjects of taxation."

The Havre petitioners "consider that it is indispensable to reduce gradually the duty on raw materials to the lowest rate, in order that our manufacturers may gradually find employment for the shipping interest, which furnishes them with the first and indispensable materials of labor."

The manufacturers could not remain behindhand in politeness toward the shipowners. So the Lyons petition asks for the free introduction of raw materials, "in order to prove," as they express it, "that the interests of the manufacturing are not always opposed to those of the maritime towns."

No; but then the interests of both, understood as the petitioners understand them, are in direct opposition to the interests of agriculture and of consumers.

Well, gentlemen, we have come at length to see what you are aiming at, and the object of your subtle economical distinctions. You desire that the law should restrain the transport of finished goods across the ocean, in order that the more costly conveyance of raw and rough materials, bulky, and mixed up with refuse, should afford greater scope for your merchant shipping, and more largely employ your marine resources. This is what you call a wise economy.

On the same principle, why do you not ask that the pines of Russia should be brought to you with their branches, bark, and roots; the silver of Mexico in its mineral state; the hides of Buenos Aires sticking to the bones of the putrefying carcasses from which they have been torn?

I expect that railway shareholders, the moment they are in a majority in the Chambers, will proceed to make a law forbidding the manufacture of the brandy that is consumed in Paris. And why not? Would not a law enforcing the conveyance of ten casks of wine for every cask of brandy afford Parisian industry the indispensable materials of its labor, and give employment to our locomotive resources?

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

Manufactures, shipping, labor — all have for end the general, the public good; to create useless industries, to favor superfluous conveyances, to support a greater amount of labor than is necessary, not for the good of the public, but at the expense of the public — is to realize a true petitio principii. It is not labor that is desirable for its own sake; it is consumption. All labor without a commensurate result is a loss. You may as well pay sailors for skipping pebbles on the surface of the water as pay them for transporting useless refuse. Thus, we arrive at the result to which all economic fallacies, numerous as they are, conduct us, namely, confounding the means with the end, and developing the one at the expense of the other.

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God Protect Us from Metaphors by Frederic Bastiat

A fallacy sometimes expands, and runs through the whole texture of a long and elaborate theory. More frequently, it shrinks and contracts, assumes the guise of a principle, and lurks in a word or a phrase.

"May God protect us from the devil and from metaphors!" was the exclamation of Paul-Louis.[1] And it is difficult to say which of them has done most mischief in this world of ours. The devil, you will say; for he has put the spirit of plunder into all our hearts. True, but he has left free the means of repressing abuses by the resistance of those who suffer from them. It is the fallacy that paralyzes this resistance. The sword that malice puts into the hands of assailants would be powerless, did sophistry not break the buckler that should shield the party assailed. It was with reason, therefore, that Malebranche inscribed on the title-page of his work this sentence: L'erreur est la cause de la misere des hommes (Error is the cause of mankind's misery).

Let us see in what way this takes place. Ambitious men are often actuated by sinister and wicked intentions; their design, for example, may be to implant in the public mind the germ of international hatred. This fatal germ may develop itself, light up a general conflagration, arrest civilization, cause torrents of blood to be shed, and bring upon the country the most terrible of all scourges, invasion. At any rate, and apart from this, such sentiments of hatred lower us in the estimation of other nations, and force Frenchmen who retain any sense of justice to blush for their country. These are undoubtedly most serious evils; and to guard the public against the underhand practices of those who would expose the country to such hazard, it is only necessary to see clearly into their designs. How do they manage to conceal them? By the use of metaphors. They twist, distort, and pervert the meaning of three or four words, and the thing is done.

The word invasion itself is a good illustration of this. A French ironmaster exclaims: Preserve us from the invasion of English iron. An English landowner exclaims in return: Preserve us from the invasion of French wheat. And then they proceed to interpose barriers between the two countries. These barriers create isolation, isolation gives rise to hatred, hatred to war, war to invasion. What does it signify? cry the two sophists; is it not better to expose ourselves to a possible invasion than accept an invasion that is certain? And the people believe them, and the barriers are kept up.

And yet what analogy is there between an exchange and an invasion? What possible similarity can be imagined between a ship of war that comes to vomit fire and devastation on our towns, and a merchant ship that comes to offer a free voluntary exchange of commodities for commodities?

The same thing holds of the use made of the word inundation. This word is ordinarily used in a bad sense, for we often see our fields injured, and our harvests carried away by floods. If, however, they leave on our soil something of greater value than what they carry away, like the inundations of the Nile, we should be thankful for them, as the Egyptians are. Before we declaim, then, against the inundations of foreign products — before proceeding to restrain them by irksome and costly obstacles — we should inquire to what class they belong, and whether they ravage or fertilize. What should we think of Mehemet Ali, if, instead of raising at great cost, dams across the Nile, to extend wider its inundations, he were to spend his money in digging a deeper channel to prevent Egypt being soiled by the foreign slime that descends upon her from the Mountains of the Moon? We display exactly the same degree of wisdom and sense, when we desire, at the cost of millions, to defend our country — From what? From the benefits that nature has bestowed on other climates.

Among the metaphors that conceal a pernicious theory, there is none more in use than that presented by the words tribute and tributary.

These words have now become so common that they are used as synonymous with purchase and purchaser, and are employed indiscriminately.

And yet a tribute is as different from a purchase as a theft is from an exchange; and I should like quite as well to hear it said, Cartouche has broken into my strong-box and purchased a thousand pounds, as to hear one of our deputies repeat, We have paid Germany tribute for a thousand horses that she has sold us.

For what distinguishes the act of Cartouche from a purchase is that he has not put into my strong-box, and with my consent, a value equivalent to what he has taken out of it.

And what distinguishes our remittance of £20,000 that we have made to Germany from a tribute paid to her is this, that she has not received the money gratuitously, but has given us in exchange a thousand horses, which we have judged to be worth the £20,000.

Is it worthwhile exposing seriously such an abuse of language? Yes; for these terms are used seriously both in newspapers and in books.

Do not let it be supposed that these are instances of a mere lapsus linguae on the part of certain ignorant writers! For one writer who abstains from so using them, I will point you out ten who admit them, and among the rest, the D'Argouts, the Dupins, the Villeles — peers, deputies, ministers of state — men, in short, whose words are laws, and whose fallacies, even the most transparent, serve as a basis for the government of the country.

A celebrated modern philosopher has added to the categories of Aristotle the fallacy that consists in employing a phrase that includes a petitio principii. He gives many examples of it; and he should have added the word tributary to his list. The business, in fact, is to discover whether purchases made from foreigners are useful or hurtful. They are hurtful, you say. And why? Because they render us tributaries to the foreigner. This is just to use a word that implies the very thing to be proved.

It may be asked how this abuse of words first came to be introduced into the rhetoric of the monopolists?

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Money leaves the country to satisfy the rapacity of a victorious enemy. Money also leaves the country to pay for commodities. An analogy is established between the two cases by taking into account only the points in which they resemble each other, and keeping out of view the points in which they differ.

Yet this circumstance — that is to say, the non-reimbursement in the first case, and the reimbursement voluntarily agreed upon in the second — establishes between them such a difference that it is really impossible to class them in the same category. To hand over a hundred pounds by force to a man who has caught you by the throat, or to hand them over voluntarily to a man who furnishes you with what you want, are things as different as light and darkness. You might as well assert that it is a matter of indifference whether you throw your bread into the river or eat it, for in both cases the bread is destroyed. The vice of this reasoning, like that applied to the word tribute, consists in asserting an entire similitude between two cases, looking only at their points of resemblance, and keeping out of sight the points in which they differ.

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Two Systems of Morals

I imagine I hear the reader say, "Well, now, was I wrong in accusing political economists of being dry and cold? What a picture of humanity! Spoliation is a fatal power, almost normal, assuming every form, practiced under every pretext, against law and according to law, abusing the most sacred things, alternately playing upon the feebleness and the credulity of the masses, and ever growing by what it feeds on. Could a more mournful picture of the world be imagined than this?"

The problem is, not to find whether the picture is mournful, but whether it is true. And for that we have the testimony of history.

It is singular that those who decry political economy, because it investigates men and the world as it finds them, are more gloomy than political economy itself, at least as regards the past and the present. Look into their books and their journals. What do you find? Bitterness and hatred of society. They have even come to curse liberty, so little confidence have they in the development of the human race, the result of its natural organization. Liberty, according to them, is something that will bring humanity nearer and nearer to destruction.

It is true that they are optimists as regards the future. For although humanity, in itself incapable, for 6,000 years has gone astray, a revelation has come, which has pointed out to men the way of safety and, if the flock is docile and obedient to the shepherd's call, will lead them to the promised land, where well-being may be attained without effort, where order, security and prosperity are the easy reward of improvidence.

To this end humanity, as Rousseau said, has only to allow these reformers to change the physical and moral constitution of man.

Political economy has not taken upon itself the mission of finding out the probable condition of society had it pleased God to make men different from what they are. It may be unfortunate that Providence, at the beginning, neglected to call to his counsels a few of our modern reformers. And, as the celestial mechanism would have been entirely different had the Creator consulted Alphonso the Wise, society, also, had he not neglected the advice of Fourier, would have been very different from that in which we are compelled to live, and move, and breathe. But, since we are here, our duty is to study and to understand His laws, especially if the amelioration of our condition essentially depends upon such knowledge.

We cannot prevent the existence of unsatisfied desires in the hearts of men.

We cannot satisfy these desires except by labor.

We cannot deny the fact that man has as much repugnance for labor as he has satisfaction with its results.

Since man has such characteristics, we cannot prevent the existence of a constant tendency among men to obtain their part of the enjoyments of life while throwing upon others, by force or by trickery, the burdens of labor. It is not for us to belie universal history, to silence the voice of the past, which attests that this has been the condition of things since the beginning of the world. We cannot deny that war, slavery, superstition, the abuses of government, privileges, frauds of every nature, and monopolies, have been incontestable and terrible manifestations of these two sentiments united in the heart of man: desire for enjoyment; repugnance to labor.

"In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread!" But everyone wants as much bread and as little sweat as possible. This is the conclusion of history.

Thank heaven, history also teaches that the division of blessings and burdens tends to a more exact equality among men. Unless one is prepared to deny the light of the sun, it must be admitted that, in this respect at least, society has made some progress.

If this be true, there exists in society a natural and providential force, a law that causes iniquity gradually to cease, and makes justice more and more a reality.

We say that this force exists in society, and that God has placed it there. If it did not exist we should be compelled, with the socialists, to search for it in those artificial means, in those arrangements which require a fundamental change in the physical and moral constitution of man, or rather we should consider that search idle and vain, for the reason that we could not comprehend the action of a lever without a place of support.

Let us, then, endeavor to indicate that beneficent force that tends progressively to overcome the maleficent force to which we have given the name spoliation, and the existence of which is only too well explained by reason and proved by experience.

Every maleficent act necessarily has two terms — the point of beginning and the point of ending; the man who performs the act and the man upon whom it is performed; or, in the language of the schools, the active and the passive agent. There are, then, two means by which the maleficent act can be prevented: by the voluntary absence of the active, or by the resistance of the passive agent. Whence two systems of morals arise, not antagonistic but concurrent; religious or philosophical morality, and the morality to which I permit myself to apply the name economical (utilitarian).

Religious morality, to abolish and extirpate the maleficent act, appeals to its author, to man in his capacity of active agent. It says to him: "Reform yourself; purify yourself; cease to do evil; learn to do well; conquer your passions; sacrifice your interests; do not oppress your neighbor, to succor and relieve whom is your duty; be first just, then generous." This morality will always be the most beautiful, the most touching, that which will exhibit the human race in all its majesty; which will the best lend itself to the offices of eloquence, and will most excite the sympathy and admiration of mankind.

Utilitarian morality works to the same end, but especially addresses itself to man in his capacity of passive agent. It points out to him the consequences of human actions, and, by this simple exhibition, stimulates him to struggle against those who injure, and to honor those who are useful to him. It aims to extend among the oppressed masses enough good sense, enlightenment and just defiance, to render oppression both difficult and dangerous.

It may also be remarked that utilitarian morality is not without its influence upon the oppressor. An act of spoliation causes good and evil — evil for him who suffers it, good for him in whose favor it is exercised — else the act would not have been performed. But the good by no means compensates the evil. The evil always, and necessarily, predominates over the good, because the very fact of oppression occasions a loss of force, creates dangers, provokes reprisals, and requires costly precautions. The simple exhibition of these effects is not then limited to retaliation of the oppressed; it places all whose hearts are not perverted, on the side of justice, and alarms the security of the oppressors themselves.

But it is easy to understand that this morality, which is simply a scientific demonstration, and would even lose its efficiency if it changed its character; which addresses itself not to the heart but to the intelligence; which seeks not to persuade but to convince; which gives proofs not counsels; whose mission is not to move but to enlighten, and which obtains over vice no other victory than to deprive it of its spoils — it is easy to understand, I say, how this morality has been accused of being dry and prosaic. The reproach is true without being just. It is equivalent to saying that political economy is not everything, does not comprehend everything, is not the universal solvent. But who has ever made such an exorbitant pretension in its name? The accusation would not be well founded unless political economy presented its processes as final, and denied to philosophy and religion the use of their direct and proper means of elevating humanity. Look at the concurrent action of morality, properly so called, and of political economy — the one inveighing against spoliation by an exposure of its moral ugliness, the other bringing it into discredit in our judgment, by showing its evil consequences. Concede that the triumph of the religious moralist, when realized, is more beautiful, more consoling and more radical; at the same time it is not easy to deny that the triumph of economical science is more facile and more certain.

In a few lines more valuable than many volumes, J.B. Say has already remarked that there are two ways of removing the disorder introduced by hypocrisy into an honorable family; to reform Tartuffe, or sharpen the wits of Orgon. Moliere, that great painter of human life, seems constantly to have had in view the second process as the more efficient.

Such is the case on the world's stage. Tell me what Caesar did, and I will tell you what were the Romans of his day.

Tell me what modern diplomacy has accomplished, and I will describe the moral condition of the nations.

We should not pay such staggering sums of taxes if we did not appoint those who consume them to vote them.

We should not have so much trouble, difficulty and expense with the African question if we were as well convinced that two and two make four in political economy as in arithmetic.

Mr. Guizot would never have had occasion to say: "France is rich enough to pay for her glory," if France had never conceived a false idea of glory.

The same statesman never would have said: "Liberty is too precious for France to traffic in it," if France had well understood that liberty and a large budget are incompatible.

Let religious morality then, if it can, touch the heart of the Tartuffes, the Caesars, the conquerors of Algeria, the sinecurists, the monopolists, etc. The mission of political economy is to enlighten their dupes. Of these two processes, which is the more efficient aid to social progress? I believe it is the second. I believe that humanity cannot escape the necessity of first learning a defensive morality. I have read, observed, and made diligent inquiry, and have been unable to find any abuse, practiced to any considerable extent, that has perished by voluntary renunciation on the part of those who profited by it. On the other hand, I have seen many that have yielded to the manly resistance of those who suffered by them.

To describe the consequences of abuses, is the most efficient way of destroying the abuses themselves. And this is true particularly in regard to abuses that, like the protective system, while inflicting real evil upon the masses, are to those who seem to profit by them only an illusion and a deception.

Well, then, does this species of morality realize all the social perfection that the sympathetic nature of the human heart and its noblest faculties cause us to hope for? This I by no means pretend. Admit the general diffusion of this defensive morality — which, after all, is only a knowledge that the best-understood interests are in accord with general utility and justice. A society, although very well regulated, might not be very attractive, where there were no knaves, only because there were no fools; where vice, always latent, and, so to speak, overcome by famine, would only need available plunder in order to be restored to vigor; where the prudence of the individual would be guarded by the vigilance of the mass and, finally, where reforms, regulating external acts, would not have penetrated to the consciences of men. Such a state of society we sometimes see typified in one of those exact, rigorous and just men who is ever ready to resent the slightest infringement of his rights, and shrewd in avoiding impositions. You esteem him — possibly you admire him. You may make him your deputy, but you would not necessarily choose him for a friend.

Let, then, the two moral systems, instead of blaming each other, act in concert, and attack vice at its opposite poles. While the economists perform their task in uprooting prejudice, stimulating just and necessary opposition, studying and exposing the real nature of actions and things, let the religious moralist, on his part, perform his more attractive, but more difficult, labor; let him attack the very body of iniquity, follow it to its most vital parts, paint the charms of beneficence, self-denial and devotion, open the fountains of virtue where we can only choke the sources of vice — this is his duty. It is noble and beautiful. But why does he dispute the utility of that which belongs to us?

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In a society that, though not superlatively virtuous, should nevertheless be regulated by the influences of economical morality (which is the knowledge of the economy of society), would there not be a field for the progress of religious morality?

Habit, it has been said, is a second nature. A country where the individual had become unaccustomed to injustice simply by the force of an enlightened public opinion might, indeed, be pitiable; but it seems to me it would be well prepared to receive an education more elevated and more pure. To be disaccustomed to evil is a great step toward becoming good. Men cannot remain stationary. Turned aside from the paths of vice that would lead only to infamy, they appreciate better the attractions of virtue. Possibly it may be necessary for society to pass through this prosaic state, where men practice virtue by calculation, to be thence elevated to that more poetic region where they will no longer have need of such an exercise.

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The Two Hatchets by Frederic Bastiat

Petition of Jacques Bonhomme, Carpenter, to Mr. Cuningridaine, Minister of Commerce

Mr. Manufacturer Minister,

I am a carpenter by trade, as was St. Joseph of old, and I handle the hatchet and adze for your benefit.

Now, while engaged in hewing and chopping from morning to night upon the lands of our Lord the King, the idea has struck me that my labor may be regarded as national, as well as yours.

And, in these circumstances, I cannot see why protection should not visit my woodyard as well as your workshop.

For, sooth to say, if you make cloths I make roofs; and both, in their own way, shelter our customers from cold and from rain.

And yet I run after customers, and customers run after you. You have found out the way of securing them by hindering them from supplying themselves elsewhere, while mine apply to whomsoever they think proper.

What is astonishing in all this? Mr. Cunin, the minister of state, has not forgotten Mr. Cunin, the manufacturer — all quite natural. But alas! My humble trade has not given a minister to France, although practiced in Biblical times by far more august personages.

And in the immortal code which I find embodied in scripture I cannot discover the slightest expression that could be quoted by carpenters as authorizing them to enrich themselves at the expense of other people.

You see, then, how I am situated. I earn 15 pence a day, when it is not Sunday or holiday. I offer you my services at the same time as a Flemish carpenter offers you his, and, because he abates a halfpenny, you give him the preference.

But I desire to clothe myself; and if a Belgian weaver presents his cloth alongside of yours, you drive him and his cloth out of the country. So that, being forced to frequent your shop, although the dearest, my poor 15 pence go no further in reality than 14.

Nay, they are not worth more than 13! For in place of expelling the Belgian weaver, at your own cost (which was the least you could do), you, for your own ends, make me pay for the people you set at his heels.

And as a great number of your co-legislators, with whom you are on a marvelously good footing, take each a halfpenny or a penny, under pretext of protecting iron, or coal, or oil, or corn, I find, when everything is taken into account, that of my 15 pence I have only been able to save sevenpence or eightpence from pillage.

You will no doubt tell me that these small halfpence, which pass in this way from my pocket to yours, maintain workpeople who reside around your castle, and enable you to live in a style of magnificence. To which I will only reply that, if the pence had been left with me, the person who earned them, they would have maintained workpeople in my neighborhood.

Be this as it may, Mr. Minister Manufacturer, knowing that I should be but ill received by you, I have not come to require you, as I had good right to do, to withdraw the restriction which you impose on your customers. I prefer following the ordinary course, and I approach you to solicit a little bit of protection for myself.

Here, of course, you will interpose a difficulty. "My good friend," you will say, "I would protect you and your fellow workmen with all my heart; but how can I confer custom-house favors on carpenter work? What use would it be to prohibit the importation of houses by sea or by land?"

That would be a good joke, to be sure; but, by dint of thinking, I have discovered another mode of favoring the children of St. Joseph, which you will welcome the more willingly, I hope, as it differs in nothing from that which constitutes the privilege you vote year after year in your own favor.

The means of favoring us that I have thus marvelously discovered is to prohibit the use of sharp axes in this country.

I maintain that such a restriction would not be in the least more illogical or more arbitrary than the one to which you subject us in the case of your cloth.

Why do you drive away the Belgians? Because they sell cheaper than you. And why do they sell cheaper than you? Because they have a certain degree of superiority over you as manufacturers.

Between you and a Belgian, therefore, there is exactly the same difference as in my trade there would be between a blunt and a sharp axe.

And you force me, as a tradesman, to purchase from you the product of the blunt hatchet!

Regard the country at large as a workman who desires, by his labor, to procure all things he has want of, and, among others, cloth.

There are two means of effecting this.

The first is to spin and weave the wool.

The second is to produce other articles, as, for example, French clocks, paper-hangings, or wines, and exchange them with the Belgians for the cloth wanted.

Of these two processes the one that gives the best result may be represented by the sharp axe, and the other by the blunt one.

You do not deny that at present, in France, we obtain a piece of cloth by the work of our own looms (that is the blunt axe) with more labor than by producing and exchanging wines (that is the sharp axe). So far are you from denying this that it is precisely because of this excess of labor (in which you say wealth consists) that you recommend, nay, that you compel the employment of the worse of the two hatchets.

Now, only be consistent, be impartial, and if you mean to be just, treat the poor carpenters as you treat yourselves.

Pass a law to this effect: "No one shall henceforth be permitted to employ any beams or rafters but such as are produced and fashioned by blunt hatchets," and see what will immediately happen.

Whereas at present we give 100 blows of the axe we shall then give 300. The work we now do in an hour will then require three hours. What a powerful encouragement will thus be given to labor! Masters, journeymen, apprentices, our sufferings are now at an end! We shall be in demand; and, therefore, well paid. Whoever shall henceforth desire to have a roof to cover him must comply with our exactions, just as at present whoever desires clothes to his back must comply with yours.

And should the theoretical advocates of free trade ever dare to call in question the utility of the measure we know well where to seek for reasons to confute them. Your inquiry of 1834 is still to be had. With that weapon we shall conquer; for you have there admirably pleaded the cause of restriction and of blunt axes, which are in reality the same thing.

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