Yet what analogy is there between an exchange and an invasion?  What resemblance can possibly be established between a vessel of war, which comes to pour fire, shot, and devastation into our cities, and a merchant ship, which comes to offer to barter with us freely, voluntarily, commodity for commodity?

As much may be said of the word inundation.  This word is generally taken in bad part, because inundations often ravage fields and crops.  If, however, they deposit upon the soil a greater value than that which they take from it; as is the case in the inundations of the Nile, we might bless and deify them as the Egyptians do.  Well! before declaiming against the inundation of foreign produces, before opposing to them restraining and costly obstacles, let us inquire if they are the inundations which ravage or those which fertilize?  What should we think of Mehemet Ali, if, instead of building, at great expense, dams across the Nile for the purpose of extending its field of inundation, he should expend his money in digging for it a deeper bed, so that Egypt should not be defiled by this foreign slime, brought down from the Mountains of the Moon?  We exhibit precisely the same amount of reason, when we wish, by the expenditure of millions, to preserve our country—­From what?  The advantages with which Nature has endowed other climates.

Among the metaphors which conceal an injurious theory, none is more common than that embodied in the words tribute, tributary.

These words are so much used that they have become synonymous with the words purchase, purchaser, and one is used indifferently for the other.

Yet a tribute or tax differs as much from purchase as a theft from an exchange, and we should like quite as well to hear it said, “Dick Turpin has broken open my safe, and has purchased out of it a thousand dollars,” as we do to have it remarked by our sage representatives, “We have paid to England the tribute for a thousand gross of knives which she has sold to us.”

For the reason why Turpin’s act is not a purchase is, that he has not paid into my safe, with my consent, value equivalent to what he has taken from it, and the reason why the payment of five hundred thousand dollars, which we have made to England, is not a tribute, is simply because she has not received them gratuitously, but in exchange for the delivery to us of a thousand gross of knives, which we ourselves have judged worth five hundred thousand dollars.

But is it necessary to take up seriously such abuses of language?  Why not, when they are seriously paraded in newspapers and in books?

Do not imagine that they escape from writers who are ignorant of their language; for one who abstains from them, we could point you to ten who employ them, and they persons of consideration—­that is to say, men whose words are laws, and whose most shocking sophisms serve as the basis of administration for the country.