e the simplest you choose.

--Do you recollect how Robinson Crusoe, having no saw, set to work to
make a plank?

--Yes. He cut down a tree, and then with his ax hewed the trunk on both
sides until he got it down to the thickness of a board.

--And that gave him an abundance of work?

--Fifteen full days.

--What did he live on during this time?

--His provisions.

--What happened to the ax?

--It was all blunted.

--Very good; but there is one thing which, perhaps, you do not know. At
the moment that Robinson gave the first blow with his ax, he saw a plank
which the waves had cast up on the shore.

--Oh, the lucky accident! He ran to pick it up?

--It was his first impulse; but he checked himself, reasoning thus:

"If I go after this plank, it will cost me but the labor of carrying it
and the time spent in going to and returning from the shore.

"But if I make a plank with my ax, I shall in the first place obtain
work for fifteen days, then I shall wear out my ax, which will give me
an opportunity of repairing it, and I shall consume my provisions, which
will be a third source of labor, since they must be replaced. Now,
_labor is wealth_. It is plain that I will ruin myself if I pick up this
stranded board. It is important to protect my _personal labor_, and now
that I think of it, I can create myself additional labor by kicking this
board back into the sea."

--But this reasoning was absurd!

--Certainly. Nevertheless it is that adopted by every nation which
_protects_ itself by prohibition. It rejects the plank which is offered
it in exchange for a little labor, in order to give itself more labor.
It sees a gain even in the labor of the custom house officer. This
answers to the trouble which Robinson took to give back to the waves
the present they wished to make him. Consider the nation a collective
being, and you will not find an atom of difference between its reasoning
and that of Robinson.

--Did not Robinson see that he could use the time saved in doing
_something else_?

--What '_something else_'?

--So long as one has wants and time, one has always _something_ to do. I
am not bound to specify the labor that he could undertake.

--I can specify very easily that which he would have avoided.

--I assert, that Robinson, with incredible blindness, confounded labor
with its result, the end with the means, and I will prove it to you.

--It is not necessary. But this is the restrictive or proh