Part 36

If you wish to prosper, allow your customers to thrive. This is a lesson which you have* been very long in learning. When it is thoroughly learnt, each man will seek his own interest in the general good; and then jealousies between man and man, town and town, province and province, nation and nation, will no longer trouble the world.

VI. TO ARTISANS AND WORKMEN.

Many journals have attacked me in your presence and hearing. Perhaps you will not object to read my defence?

I am not suspicious. When a man writes or speaks, I take for granted that he believes what he says.

And yet, after reading and re-reading the journals to which I now reply, I seem unable to discover any other than melancholy tendencies.

Our present business is to inquire which is more favourable to your interests,--liberty or restriction.

I believe that it is liberty,--they believe that it is restriction. It is for each party to prove his own thesis.

Was it necessary to insinuate that we free-traders are the agents of England, of the south of France, of the government?

On this point, you see how easy recrimination would be.

We are the agents of England, they say, because some of us employ the words meeting and free-trader!

And do they not make use of the words drawback and budget?

We, it would seem, imitate Cobden and the English democracy!

And do they not parody Lord George Bentinck and the British aristocracy?

We borrow from perfidious Albion the doctrine of liberty!

And do they not borrow from the same source the quibbles of protection?

We follow the lead of Bordeaux and the south!

And do they not avail themselves of the cupidity of Lille and the north?

We favour the secret designs of the ministry, whose object is to divert public attention from their real policy!

And do they not act in the interest of the civil list, which profits most of all from the policy of protection?

You see, then, very clearly, that if we did not despise this war of disparagement, arms would not be wanting to carry it on. But this is beside the question.

The question, and we must never lose sight of it, is this: Whether is it better for the working classes to be free, or not to be free to purchase foreign commodities?

Workmen! they tell you that "If you are free to purchase from the foreigner those things which you now produce yourselves, you will cease to produce them; you will be without employment, without wages, and without bread; it is therefore for your own good to restrain your liberty."

This objection returns upon us under two forms:--They say, for example, "If we clothe ourselves with English cloth; if we make our ploughs of English iron; if we cut our bread with English knives; if we wipe our hands with English towels,--what will become of French workmen, what will become of national labour?"

Tell me, workmen! if a man should stand on the quay at Boulogne, and say to every Englishman who landed, "If you will give me these English boots, I will give you this French hat;" or, "If you will give me that English horse, I will give you this French tilbury;" or ask him, "Will you exchange that machine made at Birmingham, for this clock made at Paris?" or, again, "Can you arrange to barter this Newcastle coal against this champagne wine?" Tell me whether, assuming this man to make his proposals with discernment, any one would be justified in saying that our national labour, taken in the aggregate, would suffer in consequence?

Nor would it make the slightest difference in this respect were we to suppose twenty such offers to be made in place of one, or a million such barters to be effected in place of four; nor would it in any respect alter the case were we to assume the intervention of merchants and money, whereby such transactions would be greatly facilitated and multiplied.

Now, when one country buys from another wholesale, to sell again in retail, or buys in retail, to sell again in the lump, if we trace the transaction to its ultimate results, we shall always find that commerce resolves itself into barter, products for products, services for services. If, then, barter does no injury to national labour, since it implies as much national labour given as foreign labour received, it follows that a hundred thousand millions of such acts of barter would do as little injury as one.

But who would profit? you will ask. The profit consists in turning to most account the resources of each country, so that the same amount of labour shall yield everywhere a greater amount of satisfactions and enjoyments.

There are some who in your case have recourse to a singular system of tactics. They begin by admitting the superiority of the free to the prohibitive system, in order, doubtless, not to have the battle to fight on this ground.