CHAPTER XX.
HUMAN LABOR--NATIONAL LABOR.
To break machines, to reject foreign merchandise--are two acts proceeding from the same doctrine.
We see men who clap their hands when a great invention is made known to the world, who nevertheless adhere to the protective system.

Such men are highly inconsistent.
With what do they upbraid freedom of commerce?
With getting foreigners more skilful or better situated than ourselves to produce articles, which, but for them, we should produce ourselves.

In one word, they accuse us of damaging national labor.
Might they not as well reproach machines for accomplishing, by natural agents, work which, without them, we could perform with our own arms, and, in consequence, damaging human labor?
The foreign workman who is more favorably situated than the American laborer, is, in respect to the latter, a veritable economic machine, which injures him by competition.

In the same manner, a machine which executes a piece of work at a less price than can be done by a certain number of arms, is, relatively to those arms, a true competing foreigner, who paralyzes them by his rivalry.
If, then, it is needful to protect national labor against the competition of foreign labor, it is not less so, to protect human labor against the rivalry of mechanical labor.
So, he who adheres to the protective policy, if he has but a small amount of logic in his brain, must not stop when he has prohibited foreign products; he must farther proscribe the shuttle and the plough.
And that is the reason why we prefer the logic of those men who, declaiming against the invasion of exotic merchandise, have, at least, the courage to declaim as well against the excess of production due to the inventive power of the human mind.
Hear such a Conservative:--"One of the strongest arguments against liberty of commerce, and the too great employment of machines, is, that very many workmen are deprived of work, either by foreign competition, which is destructive to their manufactures, or by machines, which take the place of men in the workshops." This gentleman perfectly sees the analogy, or rather, let us say, the identity, existing between importations and machines; that is the reason he proscribes both: and truly there is some pleasure in having to do with reasonings, which, even in error, pursue an argument to the end.
Let us look at the difficulty in the way of its soundness.
If it be true, _a priori_, that the domain of _invention_ and that of labor cannot be extended, except at the expense of one or the other, it is in the place where there are most machines, Lancaster or Lowell, for example, that we shall meet with the fewest _workmen_.

And if, on the contrary, we prove _a fact_, that mechanical and hand work co-exist in a greater degree among wealthy nations than among savages, we must necessarily conclude that these two powers do not exclude each other.
It is not easy to explain how a thinking being can taste repose in presence of this dilemma: Either--"The inventions of man do not injure labor, as general facts attest, since there are more of both among the English and Americans than among the Hottentots and Cherokees.