t is not in the power of legislators to make or to modify the laws of
trade; it is their business to act in accordance with these laws.

Economic science is, then, but the systematizing, on the basis of a
few generally accepted principles, of the relations of men as regards
their labor and the results of their labor, namely, their property.
There is therefore an essential connection between the systems
governing all these relations, however varied they may be. Soundness
of thought in regard to one group of them leads to soundness of
thought about the others.

Interested as we are in the work of bringing the community to a sound
and logical standard of economic faith and practice, it is important
for us to recognize and to emphasize the essential relations
connecting as well the different _scientific_ positions as the various
sets of _fallacious_ assumptions. Further, we can hardly lay too much
stress upon the oft-repeated dictum that a system may be correct in
theory yet pernicious in practice, maintaining, as we do, that where
the application of a theory brings failure the result is due either to
the unsoundness of the theory or to some blundering in its
application.

We claim, also, that with reference to the rights of labor, property,
and capital, the free-trader is the true protectionist. It is the
free-trader who demands for the laborer the fullest, freest use of
the results of his labor, and for the capitalist the widest scope in
the employment of his capital; and it is he who asserts that the
paternal authority which restricts the workingman in the free exchange
of the products of his craft, which limits the directions and the
methods for the use of capital, appropriates--or, to speak more
strictly, destroys--a portion of the value of the labor and the
capital, and prevents the ownership from being real or complete.

Authors are laborers, and their works are, as fully as is the case
with any other class of laborers, the results of their own productive
faculties and energies.

Literary laborers lay claim, therefore, to the same protection for a
full and free enjoyment of the results of their labors as is demanded
by those who work with their hands and who are in the strict sense of
the term manufacturers. Such enjoyment would include the right to sell
their productions in the open market where they pleased and how they
pleased, and if this right to a free exchange is restricted within
political boundaries, i