Once more, when products such as coal, iron, corn, or textile fabrics are sent us from abroad, and we can acquire them with less labor than if we made them ourselves, the difference is a free gift conferred upon us.  The gift is more or less considerable in proportion as the difference is more or less great.  It amounts to a quarter, a half, or three-quarters of the value of the product, when the foreigner only asks us for three-fourths, a half, or a quarter of the price we should otherwise pay.  It is as perfect and complete as it can be, when the donor (like the sun in furnishing us with light) asks us for nothing.  The question, and we ask it formally, is this, Do you desire for our country the benefit of gratuitous consumption, or the pretended advantages of onerous production?  Make your choice, but be logical; for as long as you exclude, as you do, coal, iron, corn, foreign fabrics, in proportion as their price approximates to zero, what inconsistency would it be to admit the light of the sun, the price of which is already at zero during the entire day!

STULTA AND PUERA

There were, no matter where, two towns called Fooltown and Babytown.  They completed at great cost a highway from the one town to the other.  When this was done, Fooltown said to herself, “See how Babytown inundates us with her products; we must see to it.”  In consequence, they created and paid a body of obstructives, so called because their business was to place obstacles in the way of traffic coming from Babytown.  Soon afterwards Babytown did the same.

At the end of some centuries, knowledge having in the interim made great progress, the common sense of Babytown enabled her to see that such reciprocal obstacles could only be reciprocally hurtful.  She therefore sent a diplomatist to Fooltown, who, laying aside official phraseology, spoke to this effect: 

“We have made a highway, and now we throw obstacles in the way of using it.  This is absurd.  It would have been better to have left things as they were.  We should not, in that case, have had to pay for making the road in the first place, nor afterwards have incurred the expense of maintaining obstructives.  In the name of Babytown, I come to propose to you, not to give up opposing each other all at once,—­that would be to act upon a principle, and we despise principles as much as you do,—­but to lessen somewhat the present obstacles, taking care to estimate equitably the respective sacrifices we make for this purpose.”