e petition asks, that the protection of manufactured articles
should be reduced, not _immediately_, but at some indeterminate time,
not to the _lowest rate_ of entrance, but to twenty per cent.

"Among other articles," says the petition of Lyons, "of which the low
price and the abundance are necessary, the manufacturers name all _raw
material_."

All this is based upon error.

All _value_ is, we have seen, the representative of labor. Now it is
undoubtedly true that manufacturing labor increases ten-fold, a
hundred-fold, the value of raw material, thus dispensing ten, a
hundred-fold increased profits throughout the nation; and from this fact
is deduced the following argument: The production of a hundred weight of
iron, is the gain of only fifteen francs to the various workers therein
engaged. This hundred weight of iron, converted into watch-springs, is
increased in value by this process, ten thousand francs. Who can pretend
that the nation is not more interested in securing the ten thousand
francs, than the fifteen francs worth of labor?

In this reasoning it is forgotten, that international exchanges are, no
more than individual exchanges, effected through weight and measure. The
exchange is not between a hundred weight of unmanufactured iron, and a
hundred weight of watch-springs, nor between a pound of wool just shorn,
and a pound of wool just manufactured into cashmere, but between a fixed
value in one of these articles, and a fixed equal value in another. To
exchange equal value with equal value, is to exchange equal labor with
equal labor, and it is therefore not true that the nation which sells
its hundred francs worth of cloth or of watch-springs, gains more than
the one which furnishes its hundred francs worth of wool or of iron.

In a country where no law can be passed, no contribution imposed without
the consent of the governed, the public can be robbed, only after it has
first been cheated. Our own ignorance is the primary, the _raw material_
of every act of extortion to which we are subjected, and it may safely
be predicted of every _Sophism_, that it is the forerunner of an act of
Spoliation. Good Public, whenever therefore you detect a Sophism in a
petition, let me advise you, put your hand upon your pocket, for be
assured, it is that which is particularly the point of attack.

Let us then examine what is the secret design which the ship-owners of
Bordeaux and Havre, and the manufacturers of Lyons,