But again, you may say that the producer and consumer are identical.  If the manufacturer gain by protection, he will make the agriculturist also a gainer; and if agriculture prosper, it will open a vent to manufactures.  Very well:  if you confer upon us the monopoly of furnishing light during the day,—­first of all, we shall purchase quantities of tallow, coals, oils, resinous substances, wax, alcohol—­besides silver, iron, bronze, crystal—­to carry on our manufactures; and then we, and those who furnish us with such commodities, having become rich, will consume a great deal, and impart prosperity to all the other branches of our national industry.

If you urge that the light of the sun is a gratuitous gift of nature, and that to reject such gifts is to reject wealth itself under pretense of encouraging the means of acquiring it, we would caution you against giving a death-blow to your own policy.  Remember that hitherto you have always repelled foreign products, because they approximate more nearly than home products to the character of gratuitous gifts.  To comply with the exactions of other monopolists, you have only half a motive; and to repulse us simply because we stand on a stronger vantage-ground than others would be to adopt the equation, +X+=—­; in other words, it would be to heap absurdity upon absurdity.

Nature and human labor co-operate in various proportions (depending on countries and climates) in the production of commodities.  The part which nature executes is always gratuitous; it is the part executed by human labor which constitutes value, and is paid for.

If a Lisbon orange sells for half the price of a Paris orange, it is because natural and consequently gratuitous heat does for the one what artificial and therefore expensive heat must do for the other.

When an orange comes to us from Portugal, we may conclude that it is furnished in part gratuitously, in part for an onerous consideration; in other words, it comes to us at half-price as compared with those of Paris.

Now, it is precisely the gratuitous half (pardon the word) which we contend should be excluded.  You say, How can natural labor sustain competition with foreign labor, when the former has all the work to do, and the latter only does one-half, the sun supplying the remainder?  But if this half, being gratuitous, determines you to exclude competition, how should the whole, being gratuitous, induce you to admit competition?  If you were consistent, you would, while excluding as hurtful to native industry what is half gratuitous, exclude a fortiori and with double zeal that which is altogether gratuitous.