This is droll enough!  If a country has made in the course of the year fifty millions of revenue in harvests and merchandise, she need but sell one-quarter to foreign nations, in order to make herself one-quarter richer than before!  If then she sold the half, she would increase her riches by one-half; and if the last hair of her wool, the last grain of her wheat, were to be changed for cash, she would thus raise her product to one hundred millions, where before it was but fifty!  A singular manner, certainly, of becoming rich.  Unlimited price produced by unlimited scarcity!

To sum up our judgment of the two systems, let us contemplate their different effects when pushed to the most exaggerated extreme.

According to the protectionist just quoted, the French would be quite as rich, that is to say, as well provided with everything, if they had but a thousandth part of their annual produce, because this part would then be worth a thousand times its natural value!  So much for looking at prices alone.

According to us, the French would be infinitely rich if their annual produce were infinitely abundant, and consequently bearing no value at all.

CHAPTER XII.

DOES PROTECTION RAISE THE RATE OF WAGES?

When we hear our beardless scribblers, romancers, reformers, our perfumed magazine writers, stuffed with ices and champagne, as they carefully place in their portfolios the sentimental scissorings which fill the current literature of the day, or cause to be decorated with gilded ornaments their tirades against the egotism and the individualism of the age; when we hear them declaiming against social abuses, and groaning over deficient wages and needy families; when we see them raising their eyes to heaven and weeping over the wretchedness of the laboring classes, while they never visit this wretchedness unless it be to draw lucrative sketches of its scenes of misery, we are tempted to say to them:  The sight of you is enough to make me sicken of attempting to teach the truth.

Affectation!  Affectation!  It is the nauseating disease of the day!  If a thinking man, a sincere philanthropist, takes into consideration the condition of the working classes and endeavors to lay bare their necessities, scarcely has his work made an impression before it is greedily seized upon by the crowd of reformers, who turn, twist, examine, quote, exaggerate it, until it becomes ridiculous; and then, as sole compensation, you are overwhelmed with such big words as:  Organization, Association; you are flattered and fawned upon until you become ashamed of publicly defending the cause of the working man; for how can it be possible to introduce sensible ideas in the midst of these sickening affectations?

But we must put aside this cowardly indifference, which the affectation that provokes it is not enough to justify.