Protective System; Colonial System._--These are only two aspects of the
same theory. To _prevent_ our citizens from buying from foreigners, and
to _force_ foreigners to buy from our citizens. Two consequences of one
identical principle.

It is impossible not to perceive that according to this doctrine, if it
be true, the welfare of a country depends upon _monopoly_ or domestic
spoliation, and upon _conquest_ or foreign spoliation.

Let us take a glance into one of these huts, perched upon the side of
our Pyrenean range.

The father of a family has received the little wages of his labor; but
his half-naked children are shivering before a biting northern blast,
beside a fireless hearth, and an empty table. There is wool, and wood,
and corn, on the other side of the mountain, but these are forbidden to
them; for the other side of the mountain is not France. Foreign wood
must not warm the hearth of the poor shepherd; his children must not
taste the bread of Biscay, nor cover their numbed limbs with the wool of
Navarre. It is thus that the general good requires!

The disposing by law of consumers, forcing them to the support of home
industry, is an encroachment upon their liberty, the forbidding of an
action (mutual exchange) which is in no way opposed to morality! In a
word, it is an act of _injustice_.

But this, it is said, is necessary, or else home labor will be arrested,
and a severe blow will be given to public prosperity.

Thus then we must come to the melancholy conclusion, that there is a
radical incompatibility between the Just and the Useful.

Again, if each people is interested in _selling_, and not in _buying_, a
violent action and reaction must form the natural state of their mutual
relations; for each will seek to force its productions upon all, and all
will seek to repulse the productions of each.

A sale in fact implies a purchase, and since, according to this
doctrine, to sell is beneficial, and to buy injurious, every
international transaction must imply the benefiting of one people by the
injuring of another.

But men are invincibly inclined to what they feel to be advantageous to
themselves, while they also, instinctively resist that which is
injurious. From hence then we must infer that each nation bears within
itself a natural force of expansion, and a not less natural force of
resistance, which are equally injurious to all others. In other words,
antagonism and war are the _natural_ state o