the condition of the community; in which case the seeming gift would prove to be a gigantic evil, somewhat analogous to the fortune with which a fond father paralyzes the powers and prevents the development of his children. It is to be hoped that political economy will not always be incompetent to solve such problems; but it certainly will be as long as it remains innocent of all knowledge of their existence; so long as, with M. Bastiat and Mr. J. S. Mill, it supposes that displaced labor and capital always find "something else" to do.

The writer feels guilty for having mentioned so upright and serious a writer as Mr. J. S. Mill in the same sentence as M. Bastiat; but they agreed in supporting the same doctrine as to capital and its effects upon industry, and in the deductions from that doctrine; in all else they are very wide apart. In reviewing Mr. Mill, one would be spared the disagreeable task of combating the arts of the rhetorical sophist, the appeals to prejudice, to anger, to pity, to greed, to superstition, to misguided or affected philanthropy. He would meet with some very important errors in reasoning, strange as this is in an unquestionably pre-eminent logician; but everything is honest, straightforward, and such as the spirit of the great reasoner, looking back upon life, need not blush to have written. M. Bastiat closes his "Sophisms of Protection" as follows:

"Let us decide that supremacy by labor is impossible and contradictory, since all superiority which manifests itself among a people is converted into cheapness, and results only in giving force to all others. Let us, then, banish from political economy all those expressions borrowed from the vocabulary of battles: to struggle with equal arms, to conquer, to crush out, to stifle, to be beaten, invasion, tribute. What do these words mean? Squeeze them, and nothing comes out of them. We are mistaken; there come from them absurd errors and fatal prejudices. These are the words which stop the blending of peoples, their peaceful, universal, indissoluble alliance, and the progress of humanity."

So writes M. Bastiat. Now compare with his words those of Horace Greeley. Speaking of some strictures upon the effects of reckless competition, he says:

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"The justice of these strictures I have at least twice seen realized on a gigantic scale, in the general prostration of the manufacturing industry of my countrymen under the pressure of European, mainly of English, competition. That industry was thus crushed out after the peace of 1815, when the eminent Henry Brougham (afterwards Lord Brougham) remarked (when Great Britain was pouring out the goods that crushed our then infant manufactures) that England can afford to incur some loss for the purpose of destroying foreign manufactures in their cradle;' and the noted economist and free-trader, Joseph Hume, made a similar remark in 1828. Our tariff enacted in that year rendered all efforts to cripple and prostrate our manufacturing industry temporarily fruitless; but it was otherwise after the compromise tariff of 1833 began to take full effect, in the reduction of the duties to a (presumptively) revenue standard which culminated in the collapse alike of industry and revenue in 1840-42.

"A report on strikes made to the British Parliament in 1854 significantly said:

"Authentic instances are well known of (British) employers having in such times (of depressed prices), carried on their works at a loss amounting to three or four hundred thousand pounds in the course of three or four years. If the efforts of those who encourage the combination to restrict the amount of labor, and to produce strikes, were to be successful for any length of time, the great accumulations of capital could no longer be made which enable a few of the most wealthy capitalists to overwhelm all foreign competition in times of great depression, and thus to clear the way for the whole trade to step in when prices revive, and to carry on a great business before foreign capital can again accumulate to establish a competition in prices, with any chance of success. The great capitals of this country are the great instruments of warfare against the competing capitals of other countries, and are the most essential instruments now remaining, by which our manufacturing supremacy can be maintained; the other elements, cheap labor, abundance of raw materials, means of communication, and skilled labor being rapidly in progress of being equalized.'"

It will be seen that Mr. Greeley bears witness to our industries having been twice prostrated by their English competitors in his time, and it is matter of general knowledge also that the same thing happened to the Portuguese industries after the treaty of Methuen, and to the Irish industries after the union, and so with Turkey and India.

The reader can then form his own opinion about the hardihood of M. Bastiat when he attempted to prove that such things cannot happen, by a process of false logic which has been the somewhat disagreeable task of the writer to expose. The rest of his book is made up chiefly of rhetorical sophisms, in which taxes and obstacles which do increase the productive power of the community are classed with the taxes and obstacles which do not increase it; of appeals to our pity that the "poor workman," after getting his wages from his fellowcitizens, should not be allowed to spend them among foreigners, and in appeals to class prejudices by abuse of every description poured out upon everybody who is protected from the English manufacturer. They are cheats, swindlers, robbers, monopolists, oppressors, thieves!

Now it has been held by every respectable economist, from Adam Smith down, that it is impossible for any industry to long obtain a profit above that usual in the community; and it would seem, therefore, that all this abuse is as unjust as it is unseemly; but if there be in any case reason to fear that manufacturers may combine to exact a higher profit, our own are within reach of control. Let the fact be proved, and nothing is easier than to bring them to reason, by simply reducing the duty to what will give them an adequate and not an excessive protection. We should have no such power over the foreigners. When they have once ruined our own industries they can, if they combine, charge us whatever they please.

If, then, there be any foundation for the cry of monopoly, the possibility of such a combination is the best of all reasons for standing by our own and not the alien manufacturers. These can be ruled. The others cannot.

PART III.," Spoliation and Law."

This supremely sophistical chapter endeavors to connect, in the mind of the reader, the totally different matters of protection and communism. At the time it was written, society in France was alarmed at the pretensions of communism, and the endeavor to make out some similarity between it and

protection was as shrewd as anything can be which is absolutely dishonest. The same attempt has been made by the unscrupulous upon this side of the Atlantic.

Civilized men everywhere recognize, either consciously or unconsciously, the fact that, without the aid of tools, machines, improved farms, mills, forges, railroads, stores of food, materials, and shelter, etc., without, in short, the aid of instruments of production, the gross annual product of labor would be incomparably less than it is; they recognize, also, that these instruments of production cannot come into existence nor be kept in repair, except through abstinence, which is, therefore, entitled to such portion of the increased product as demand and supply determine to be the just value of their use; they recognize, also, that to allow individuals to possess these instruments and enjoy said portion of their fruits is the most economical and efficient method for bringing them into existence and keeping them in repair, utility being here completely at one with justice; they recognize even that those proprietors who do nothing except to live within their income do, nevertheless, thereby render a most essential service to society, for living within their income is nothing less than keeping in repair the "instruments" which furnish them with incomes; and in recognizing, consciously or unconsciously, these facts, all men of common sense perceive the rights of property to be based upon the all-sufficient foundation of the greatest good to the whole society, — not the greatest good only for to-day, or this year, but for all time. But the common sense of mankind also recognizes that, while the greatest good of the whole is the foundation of the rights of property, it also puts limits to those rights. As they are founded and justified by the good of the whole, they must logically be restricted to that which in the long run is beneficial to all. No man is allowed to use his property to found a college for teaching what the community generally accounts to be vice, nor to run gambling-houses or lotteries, nor to erect unsafe houses, nor to sail ships which have become unseaworthy, nor to establish anything which is a nuisance or a source of disease, nor to run a bank except

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under conditions protecting public interests, etc., ad infinitum. Property is not weakened by these necessary and proper restraints, but only prevented from weakening its own just and legitimate claims, and becoming in some respects a nuisance, instead of a great blessing to the community. Indeed, he is no friend of property, but its dangerous enemy, who maintains that each single possessor has the indefeasible right to veto the decisions of the whole society, and that, too, in the cause of a pseudo-theory composed of a vast mass of bad logic and of totally irrelevant rhetoric. The argument that "the highest right of property is the right to exchange it for other property;" that, therefore, any restraint or regulation of this right, in short, the forbidding of any exchange, however detrimental, — is an unwarrantable invasion of the rights of property, and therefore akin to communism, this argument can only be used by one who has the incredible folly to suppose that the American people are a nation of unmitigated noodles.

In the first place, the right to exchange it is not the highest right of property. A higher right still is the right to an unmolested enjoyment either of the property itself or of the income thereof. Second, another higher right is the right to protection against foreign attacks, whether civil or military. Third, if even it were the highest right, this, like every other right of property, must give way before the vastly higher and more important rights of the whole community. Compensation is given where the case requires it; compensation is not given where the interference produces no damage, but a great benefit, as when protective laws are passed.

"But," exclaim the free-traders, "protective laws are not a benefit, but an injury."

Ah, gentlemen, you undertook to bolster the doctrine of free trade by an argument from the rights of property; but we now find that the argument about the rights of property breaks down unless we first assume the free-trade doctrine to be correct. You are attempting to make two doctrines hold each other up, when neither the one nor the other can stand alone. If the free-trade doctrine were sound, the interference with foreign exchanges would be unwise, but by no means beyond