have freight; owing to
the lack of return cargoes our vessels cannot compete with foreign
ones--

Reply: When you want to do everything at home, you can have cargoes
neither going nor coming. It is as absurd to wish for a navy under a
prohibitory system as to wish for carts where all transportation is
forbidden.

--If they say to you: Supposing that protection is unjust, everything is
founded on it; there are moneys invested, and rights acquired, and it
cannot be abandoned without suffering--

Reply: Every injustice profits some one (except, perhaps, restriction,
which in the long run profits no one), and to use as an argument the
disturbance which the cessation of the injustice causes to the person
profiting by it, is to say that an injustice, only because it has
existed for a moment, should be eternal.

XVI.

THE RIGHT AND THE LEFT HAND.

[_Report to the King._]

SIRE--When we see these men of the _Libre Echange_ audaciously
disseminating their doctrines, and maintaining that the right of buying
and selling is implied by that of ownership (a piece of insolence that
M. Billault has criticised like a true lawyer), we may be allowed to
entertain serious fears as to the destiny of _national labor_; for what
will Frenchmen do with their arms and intelligences when they are free?

The Ministry which you have honored with your confidence has naturally
paid great attention to so serious a subject, and has sought in its
wisdom for a _protection_ which might be substituted for that which
appears compromised. It proposes to you to forbid your faithful subjects
the use of the right hand.

Sire, do not wrong us so far as to think that we lightly adopted a
measure which, at the first glance, may appear odd. Deep study of the
_protective system_ has revealed to us this syllogism, on which it
entirely rests:

The more one labors, the richer one is.

The more difficulties one has to conquer, the more one labors.

_Ergo_, the more difficulties one has to conquer, the richer one is.

What is _protection_, really, but an ingenious application of this
formal reasoning, which is so compact that it would resist the subtlety
of M. Billault himself?

Let us personify the country. Let us look on it as a collective being,
with thirty million mouths, and, consequently, sixty million arms. This
being makes a clock, which he proposes to exchange in Belgium for ten
quintals of iron. "But," we say to him, "make the iron y