nally concerns
themselves, they act, like everybody else, upon the principle of
obtaining from their labor the greatest possible quantity of useful
results.

It may be supposed that I exaggerate, and that there are no true
Sisyphists.

I grant that in practice the principle is not pushed to its extreme
consequences. And this must always be the case when one starts upon a
wrong principle, because the absurd and injurious results to which it
leads, cannot but check it in its progress. For this reason, practical
industry never can admit of Sisyphism. The error is too quickly
followed by its punishment to remain concealed. But in the speculative
industry of theorists and statesmen, a false principle may be for a
long time followed up, before the complication of its consequences,
only half understood, can prove its falsity; and even when all is
revealed, the opposite principle is acted upon, self is contradicted,
and justification sought, in the incomparably absurd modern axiom,
that in political economy there is no principle universally true.

Let us see, then, if the two opposite principles I have laid down do
not predominate, each in its turn; the one in practical industry, the
other in industrial legislation. When a man prefers a good plough to a
bad one; when he improves the quality of his manures; when, to loosen
his soil, he substitutes as much as possible the action of the
atmosphere for that of the hoe or the harrow; when he calls to his aid
every improvement that science and experience have revealed, he has,
and can have, but one object, viz., to _diminish the proportion of the
effort to the result_. We have indeed no other means of judging of
the success of an agriculturist or of the merits of his system, but by
observing how far he has succeeded in lessening the one, while he
increases the other; and as all the farmers in the world act upon this
principle, we may say that all mankind are seeking, no doubt for their
own advantage, to obtain at the lowest price, bread, or whatever other
article of produce they may need, always diminishing the effort
necessary for obtaining any given quantity thereof.

This incontestable tendency of human nature, once proved, would, one
might suppose, be sufficient to point out the true principle to the
legislator, and to show him how he ought to assist industry (if indeed
it is any part of his business to assist it at all), for it would be
absurd to say that the laws of men sh