asks of wine instead of one of brandy, thus furnish to Parisian
industry an _indispensable encouragement to its labor_, and, at the same
time, give employment to railroad locomotives!

Until when will we persist in shutting our eyes upon the following
simple truth?

Labor and industry, in their general object, have but one legitimate
aim, and this is the public good. To create useless industrial pursuits,
to favor superfluous transportation, to maintain a superfluous labor,
not for the good of the public, but at the expense of the public, is to
act upon a _petitio principii_. For it is the result of labor, and not
labor itself, which is a desirable object. All labor, without a result,
is clear loss. To pay sailors for transporting rough dirt and filthy
refuse across the ocean, is about as reasonable as it would be to
engage their services, and pay them for pelting the water with pebbles.
Thus we arrive at the conclusion that _political Sophisms_,
notwithstanding their infinite variety, have one point in common, which
is the constant confounding of the _means_ with the _end_, and the
development of the former at the expense of the latter.

XXII.

METAPHORS.

A Sophism will sometimes expand and extend itself through the whole
tissue of a long and tedious theory. Oftener it contracts into a
principle, and hides itself in one word.

"Heaven preserve us," said Paul Louis, "from the Devil and from the
spirit of metaphor!" And, truly, it might be difficult to determine
which of the two sheds the most noxious influence over our planet. The
Devil, you will say, because it is he who implants in our hearts the
spirit of spoliation. Aye; but he leaves the capacity for checking
abuses, by the resistance of those who suffer. It is the genius of
Sophism which paralyzes this resistance. The sword which the spirit of
evil places in the hands of the aggressor, would fall powerless, if the
shield of him who is attacked were not shattered in his grasp by the
spirit of Sophism. Malbranche has, with great truth, inscribed upon the
frontispiece of his book this sentence: _Error is the cause of human
misery_.

Let us notice what passes in the world. Ambitious hypocrites may take a
sinister interest in spreading, for instance, the germ of national
enmities. The noxious seed may, in its developments, lead to a general
conflagration, check civilization, spill torrents of blood, and draw
upon the country that most terrible of scou