ask for a lesser
quantity of our labor to furnish our farmers oxen and our stomachs food.

--If they say to you: The lands in the Crimea are worth nothing, and pay
no taxes--

Reply: The gain is on our side, since we buy grain free from those
charges.

--If they say to you: The serfs of Poland work without wages--

Reply: The loss is theirs and the gain is ours, since their labor is
deducted from the price of the grain which their masters sell us.

--Then, if they say to you: Other nations have many advantages over us--

Reply: By exchange, they are forced to let us share in them.

--If they say to you: With liberty we shall be swamped with bread, beef
_a la mode_, coal, and coats--

Reply: We shall be neither cold nor hungry.

--If they say to you: With what shall we pay?

Reply: Do not be troubled about that. If we are to be inundated, it will
be because we are able to pay. If we cannot pay we will not be
inundated.

--If they say to you: I would allow free trade, if a stranger, in
bringing us one thing, took away another; but he will carry off our
specie--

Reply: Neither specie nor coffee grow in the fields of Beauce or come
out of the manufactories of Elbeuf. For us to pay a foreigner with
specie is like paying him with coffee.

--If they say to you: Eat meat--

Reply: Let it come in.

--If they say to you, like the _Presse_: When you have not the money to
buy bread with, buy beef--

Reply: This advice is as wise as that of Vautour to his tenant, "If a
person has not money to pay his rent with, he ought to have a house of
his own."

--If they say to you, like the _Presse_: The State ought to teach the
people why and how it should eat meat--

Reply: Only let the State allow the meat free entrance, and the most
civilized people in the world are old enough to learn to eat it without
any teacher.

--If they say to you: The State ought to know everything, and foresee
everything, to guide the people, and the people have only to let
themselves be guided--

Reply: Is there a State outside of the people, and a human foresight
outside of humanity? Archimedes might have repeated all the days of his
life, "With a lever and a fulcrum I will move the world," but he could
not have moved it, for want of those two things. The fulcrum of the
State is the nation, and nothing is madder than to build so many hopes
on the State; that is to say, to assume a collective science and
foresight, after having estab