or the love
of us. It is to give themselves many comforts in exchange for their
products. They certainly desire to receive at least as much as they
give, and _they make at home the payment for that which they buy
elsewhere_. If then, they inundate us with their products, it is because
they expect to be inundated with ours. In this case, the best way to
have much for ourselves is to be free to choose between these two
methods of production: direct production or indirect production. All
the British Machiavelism cannot lead us to make a bad choice.

Let us then stop assimilating industrial competition with war; a false
assimilation, which is specious only when two rival branches of industry
are isolated, in order to judge of the effects of competition. As soon
as the effect produced on the general well-being is taken into
consideration, the analogy disappears.

In a battle, he who is killed is thoroughly killed, and the army is
weakened just that much. In manufactures, one manufactory succumbs only
so far as the total of national labor replaces what it produced, _with
an excess_. Imagine a state of affairs where for one man, stretched on
the plain, two spring up full of force and vigor. If there is a planet
where such things happen, it must be admitted that war is carried on
there under conditions so different from those which obtain here below,
that it does not even deserve that name.

Now, this is the distinguishing character of what they have so
inappropriately called an _industrial war_.

Let the Belgians and English reduce the price of their iron, if they
can, and keep on reducing it, until they bring it down to nothing. They
may thereby put out one of our furnaces--kill one of our soldiers; but I
defy them to hinder a thousand other industries, more profitable than
the disabled one, immediately, and, as a necessary consequence of this
very cheapness, resuscitating and developing themselves.

Let us decide that supremacy by labor is impossible and contradictory,
since all superiority which manifests itself among a people is converted
into cheapness, and results only in giving force to all others. Let us,
then, banish from political economy all these expressions borrowed from
the vocabulary of battles: _to struggle with equal arms, to conquer, to
crush out, to stifle, to be beaten, invasion, tribute_. What do these
words mean? Squeeze them, and nothing comes out of them. We are
mistaken; there come from them absur