to extend our establishments, and falls like refreshing dew upon
the laboring classes."

Such is your language, and what I most lament is the circumstance that
your miserable sophisms have so perverted public opinion that they are
appealed to in support of all forms of legalized spoliation. The
suffering classes also say. "Let us by act of the Legislature help
ourselves to the goods of others. We shall be in easier circumstances as
the result of it; we shall buy more wheat, more meat, more cloth, and
more iron; and that which we receive from the public taxes will return
in a beneficent shower to the capitalists and landed proprietors."

But, as I have already said, I will not to-day discuss the economical
effects of legal spoliation. Whenever the protectionists desire, they
will find me ready to examine the _sophisms of the ricochets_, which,
indeed, may be invoked in support of all species of robbery and fraud.

We will confine ourselves to the political and moral effects of exchange
legally deprived of liberty.

I have said: The time has come to know what the law is, and what it
ought to be.

If you make the law for all citizens a palladium of liberty and of
property; if it is only the organization of the individual law of
self-defense, you will establish, upon the foundation of justice, a
government rational, simple, economical, comprehended by all, loved by
all, useful to all, supported by all, entrusted with a responsibility
perfectly defined and carefully restricted, and endowed with
imperishable strength. If, on the other hand, in the interests of
individuals or of classes, you make the law an instrument of robbery,
every one will wish to make laws, and to make them to his own advantage.
There will be a riotous crowd at the doors of the legislative halls,
there will be a bitter conflict within; minds will be in anarchy, morals
will be shipwrecked; there will be violence in party organs, heated
elections, accusations, recriminations, jealousies, inextinguishable
hates, the public forces placed at the service of rapacity instead of
repressing it, the ability to distinguish the true from the false
effaced from all minds, as the notion of justice and injustice will be
obliterated from all consciences, the government responsible for
everything and bending under the burden of its responsibilities,
political convulsions, revolutions without end, ruins over which all
forms of socialism and communism attempt to estab