CHAPTER XV.
RECIPROCITY AGAIN.
The protectionists ask, "Are we sure that the foreigner will purchase as much from us, as he will sell to us?
What reason have we to think that the English producer will come to us rather than to any other nation on the globe to look for the productions he may need; and for productions equivalent in value to his own exportations to this country ?" We are surprised that men who call themselves peculiarly _practical_, reason independent of all practice.
In practice, is there one exchange in a hundred, in a thousand, in ten thousand perhaps, where there is a direct barter of product for product?
Since there has been money in the world, has any cultivator ever said, "I wish to buy shoes, hats, advice, instruction, from that shoemaker, hatter, lawyer, and professor only, who will purchase from me just wheat enough to make an equivalent value ?" And why should nations impose such a restraint upon themselves?
How is the matter managed?
Suppose a nation deprived of exterior relations.

A man has produced wheat.

He throws it into the widest national circulation he can find for it, and receives in exchange, what?
Some dollars; that is to say bills, bonds, infinitely divisible, by means of which it becomes lawful for him to withdraw from national circulation, whenever he thinks it advisable, and by just agreement, such articles as he may need or wish.

In fine, at the end of the operation he will have withdrawn from the mass the exact equivalent of what he threw into it, and in value his consumption will precisely equal his production.
If the foreign exchanges of that nation are free, it is no longer into _national_, but into _general_ circulation that each one throws his products, and from which he draws his returns.

He has not to inquire whether what he delivers up for general circulation is purchased by a fellow-countryman or a foreigner; whether the goods he receives came to him from a Frenchman or an Englishman; whether the objects for which, in accordance with his needs, he, in the end, exchanges his bills, are made on this or that side of the Atlantic or the St.
Lawrence.