wishers for wheat discover a new convenience, or a new service for which others have a desire, and the satisfaction of the new desire will give wheat to those who before were sighing in vain for it. More still; the sale of an additional quantity of wheat will enable the grower of wheat to satisfy perhaps some before unsatisfied desire. The newly discovered or invented want is seized upon by labor and by capital (both of which are normally in excess in a community where diversified employments exist), and the field of employment is permanently enlarged. The community as a whole produces more than before, and so there is more to divide. Wages, profits, rents, all rise together. Not so when the people, seduced by witless manipulators of words, adopt the free-trade pana"Let us buy in the cheapest market," say they. "Let us get our cotton and metal fabrics from England, our woollen goods from Germany, our coal from Nova Scotia, our sugar from the West Indies, our hemp and tallow from Russia, our lumber from Canada, our wool from Australia." Here are industries which respond to what now (1881) amount to, say, over twelve hundred millions of dollars of annual wants in the United States, the satisfaction of which supports a population whose demand for the productions of other industries creates a market to an equal amount. cea. Transferring these industries to foreign nations would reduce the purchasing power of the United States by twelve hundred millions of dollars, would diminish the gross annual product, the fund out of which all wages, all profits, all rents are paid by that amount, which means by one sixth part. But this is not the worst. The foreign markets, oppressed with an additional twelve hundred millions of our products, would refuse them, except at a greatly reduced price, and we should find that many of the remaining unscalped industries would gradually die out for want of a market. The over-anxious manufacturer, clutching after a foreign market, would find himself bereft of a market ten times greater at home; the clergyman, lawyer, physician, who coveted cheap clothes with ample incomes, would find the people too poor to pay the ample incomes. The carpenter, blacksmith, mason, painter, paperer, etc., who had been told that "houses were never imported," would find out, to their cost, that houses were built in proportion to the means of the community. The owner of railroad stock, bank stock, manufacturing stock, of houses, of stores, of forges, of farms, would find out at last that they were in the same boat as the day laborer, and that they could not thrive while he starved. Chapter V.,-"Dearness - Cheapness." Here is only a repetition of the old fallacy which teaches an individual who has work for only four days out of six, that he will become rich faster by spending a portion of his four days' earnings to buy than he will by keeping all his earnings and doing for himself during the unemployed two days that which he requires to have done; and which teaches a nation that it will become rich by buying at a cheap price what its unemployed labor and capital can make for nothing. Here also is a repetition of inveracious assumption, as follows: "Therefore the question, the eternal question, is not whether protection favors this or that special branch of industry, but whether, all things considered, restriction is, in its nature, more profitable than freedom. "Now no person can maintain that proposition. And just this explains the admission which our opponents continually make to us : 'You are right, on principle." As before observed, some protectionists, feeling themselves unable to unravel all the innumerable Protean, "Achilles and Tortoise" puzzles which men like Bastiat propound, may have found refuge in the absurdity of saying, "So and so may be good in theory, but is not good in practice;" but it is not the refuge of any protectionist who has the time and patience to follow up and refute a hundred times over the parroted fallacies of free trade. There is nothing new in Chapter V. It is only a repetition of positions and assumptions already over and over again refuted. Chapter VI.,-"To Artisans and Laborers." Here is more repetition. Tariff duties are a tax, therefore ހ they are of the same nature as all other taxes. This is like the syllogism with four terms which runs thus: Files are instruments made of steel. A regiment marching in regular order is composed of files. Therefore a regiment marching in regular order is composed of instruments made of steel. Some taxes take money from the people and give nothing in return. Tariff duties are taxes. Therefore tariff duties take money from the people and give nothing in return. Such is free-trade logic! Professors who write books upon political economy would do well to have their manuscripts examined by their fellow-professors who teach the science of logic, before they stereotype their productions. Again M. Bastiat says: "I believe that we can call that the natural rate of wages which would establish itself naturally, if there were freedom of trade. Then, when they tell you that restriction is for your benefit, it is as if they told you that it added a surplus to your natural wages. Now, an extra natural surplus of wages must be taken from somewhere: it does not fall from the moon; it must be taken from those who pay it. "You are then brought to this conclusion, that, according to your pretended friends, the protective system has been created and brought into the world in order that capitalists might be sacrificed to laborers. "Tell me, is that probable?" That is to say, M. Bastiat, whose work has been translated from the French by the Free Trade League in order "to educate public opinion; to convince the people of the United States of the folly and wrongfulness of the protective system," - this M. Bastiat did not know that a fully occupied people and capital would produce a greater mass of commodities than they would produce if a third or a half of them were unemployed. He did not know that a large annual product gave much to be divided between wages, profits, and rent; and he did not know that the portions falling to profits and rent were nearly all distributed again to labor. He did not know that not only the recipients of profits and rent, but still more the recipients of wages, were supremely interested that the gross annual product should be the greatest possible, and that this desirable result was not to be obtained by sitting idle and buying cheap goods of other nations. But in spite of this ignorance, M. Bastiat was selected as the best teacher of political economy which the League could find for the people of the United States. One can imagine the grim humor with which the clearheaded workmen of the United States no doubt contemplate. the condescension of the League. Chapter VII., "A Chinese Story." The free-traders discovered that obstacles, many of them, were the cause of expense, or that their existence increased the cost of commodities, without in any way increasing the gross product, or means of payment. They then discovered that a duty upon imported articles increased sometimes the price of similar articles produced in the country. We say sometimes, for Bastiat himself admits that they do not always do so; and the fact is notorious that they do not do so for any considerable length of time, to nearly the amount of the duty, and that they often, by stimulating home skill and competition, cause a lower price than existed before. Never mind! they are an obstacle to importation, so they are obstacles; and by simply calling them obstacles, pure and simple, it is made to appear that they are not only obstacles to importation, but also obstacles to opulence. They are obstacles; so also are fens, mountains, stormy seas, distance, obstructed canals, bad tools, etc., etc. The last being seen to be really obstacles to opulence, the free-traders jump you to the conclusion that everything called an obstacle is an obstacle to opulence. Several phenomena called obstacles being seen to be really obstacles to opulence, inasmuch as they raise the price without augmenting the national product, everything called by the same name is inferred to be of the same effect. Those obstacles increase the cost in labor, say, 25 per cent; this obstacle - the duty also (we will suppose for the sake of argument), raises the cost in labor 25 per cent. They are, then, exactly alike! and so they are, thus far, or rather in these particulars; but in the important particular they are exactly opposite. Those obstacles increase the cost in labor of everything, — of that which it is desirable to import as well as of that which it is not desirable to import. This obstacle does not lay a finger upon the importation of tropical products which our climate cannot produce, does not prevent or render more difficult immigration, travel, the personal inspection of foreign arts ́and sciences and social organization; but it does prevent that industrial competition which makes it impossible for us to acquire such arts as we are perfectly able to acquire, and which both during the process of acquisition and thenceforth, forever, will add to the gross annual product of the nation, which is the same thing precisely as the aggregate net individual income. This obstacle also discriminates and shuts out those products in which foreign nations excel only by reason of the lower rate of wages and by the introduction of which our own existing system of civilization (based as it is, upon a high scale of remuneration to labor of every sort) would be impaired if not entirely overthrown. The duty is a discriminating obstacle in which all that is good in the natural obstacles is retained, and all that is bad is discarded; this opposes baneful intercourse; those oppose alike every kind of intercourse, the benignant as well and as much as the baneful; this is an obstacle reared by human intelligence for a definite purpose; those are obstacles arising out of the constitution of the world. A mind may be presumed to have been given to man to enable him to discriminate between different things, even when called by the same name. Even a free-trader can perceive that there is a difference between a file of soldiers and a file of a carpenter; by and by perhaps they may develop sufficiently to see that there is a difference between a tax which simply takes a dollar, and a tax which, where it takes a dollar, gives five; and they may grow to |