We cannot wonder enough at the facility with which men resign themselves
to continue ignorant of what it is most important that they should know; and
we may be certain that such ignorance is incorrigible in those who venture to
proclaim this axiom: There are no absolute principles.
You enter the legislative precincts. The subject of debate is whether the
law should prohibit international exchanges, or proclaim freedom.
A deputy rises, and says,
If you tolerate these exchanges the foreigner will inundate you with his
products: England with her textile fabrics, Belgium with coals, Spain with
wools, Italy with silks, Switzerland with cattle, Sweden with iron, Prussia
with wheat; so that home industry will no longer be possible.
Another replies,
If you prohibit international exchanges, the various bounties which nature
has lavished on different climates will be for you as if they did not exist.
You cannot participate in the mechanical skill of the English, in the wealth
of the Belgian mines, in the fertility of the Polish soil, in the luxuriance
of the Swiss pastures, in the cheapness of Spanish labor, in the warmth of
the Italian climate; and you must obtain from an unprofitable and misdirected
production those commodities which, through exchange, would have been
furnished to you by an easy production.
Assuredly, one of these deputies must be wrong. But which? We must take
care to make no mistake on the subject, for this is not a matter of abstract
opinion merely. You have to choose between two roads, and one of them leads
necessarily to poverty.
To get rid of the dilemma we are told that there are no absolute
principles.
This axiom, which is so much in fashion nowadays, not only countenances
indolence, but ministers to ambition.
If the theory of prohibition comes to prevail, or if the doctrine of free
trade comes to triumph, one brief enactment will constitute our whole
economic code. In the first case, the law will proclaim that all exchanges
with foreign countries are prohibited; in the second, that all exchanges with
foreign countries are free; and many grand and distinguished personages will
thereby lose their importance.
But if exchange does not possess a character that is peculiar to it; if it
is not governed by any natural law; if, capriciously, it be sometimes useful
and sometimes detrimental; if it does not find its motive force in the good
it accomplishes, its limit in the good it ceases to accomplish; if its
consequences cannot be estimated by those who effect exchanges — in a word, if
there be no absolute principles, then we must proceed to weigh, balance, and
regulate transactions, we must equalize the conditions of labor, and try to
find out the average rate of profits — a colossal task, well deserving the
large emoluments and powerful influence awarded to those who undertake it.
On entering Paris, which I had come to visit, I said to myself — here are
a million human beings who would all die in a short time if provisions of
every kind ceased to flow toward this great metropolis. Imagination is
baffled when it tries to appreciate the vast multiplicity of commodities that
must enter tomorrow through the barriers in order to preserve the inhabitants
from falling a prey to the convulsions of famine, rebellion and pillage. And
yet all sleep at this moment, and their peaceful slumbers are not disturbed
for a single instant by the prospect of such a frightful catastrophe. On the
other hand, eighty departments have been laboring today, without concert,
without any mutual understanding, for the provisioning of Paris. How does
each succeeding day bring what is wanted, nothing more, nothing less, to so
gigantic a market?
What, then, is the ingenious and secret power that governs the astonishing
regularity of movements so complicated, a regularity in which everybody has
implicit faith, although happiness and life itself are at stake? That power
is an absolute principle, the principle of freedom in transactions. We have
faith in that inward light that Providence has placed in the heart of all
men, and to which he has confided the preservation and indefinite
amelioration of our species, namely, a regard to personal interest — since we
must give it its right name — a principle so active, so vigilant, so
foreseeing, when it is free in its action.
In what situation, I would ask, would the inhabitants of Paris be if a
minister should take it into his head to substitute for this power the
combinations of his own genius, however superior we might suppose them to be
— if he thought to subject to his supreme direction this prodigious
mechanism, to hold the springs of it in his hands, to decide by whom, or in
what manner, or on what conditions, everything needed should be produced,
transported, exchanged and consumed?
Truly, there may be much suffering within the walls of Paris — poverty,
despair, perhaps starvation, causing more tears to flow than ardent charity
is able to dry up; but I affirm that it is probable, nay, that it is certain,
that the arbitrary intervention of government would multiply infinitely those
sufferings, and spread over all our fellow citizens those evils which at
present affect only a small number of them.
This faith, then, which we repose in a principle, when the question
relates only to our home transactions, why should we not retain when the same
principle is applied to our international transactions, which are undoubtedly
less numerous, less delicate, and less complicated?
And if it is not necessary that the municipality should regulate our
Parisian industries, weigh our chances, balance our profits and losses, see
that our circulating medium is not exhausted, and equalize the conditions of
our home labor, why should it be necessary that the customhouse, departing
from its fiscal duties, should pretend to exercise a protective action over
our external commerce?
