It is as absurd to wish for a navy under a prohibitory system as to wish for carts where all transportation is forbidden.
-- If they say to you: Supposing that protection is unjust, everything is founded on it; there are moneys invested, and rights acquired, and it cannot be abandoned without suffering-- Reply: Every injustice profits some one (except, perhaps, restriction, which in the long run profits no one), and to use as an argument the disturbance which the cessation of the injustice causes to the person profiting by it, is to say that an injustice, only because it has existed for a moment, should be eternal.
XVI.
THE RIGHT AND THE LEFT HAND.
[_Report to the King._] SIRE--When we see these men of the _Libre Echange_ audaciously disseminating their doctrines, and maintaining that the right of buying and selling is implied by that of ownership (a piece of insolence that M.Billault has criticised like a true lawyer), we may be allowed to entertain serious fears as to the destiny of _national labor_; for what will Frenchmen do with their arms and intelligences when they are free?
The Ministry which you have honored with your confidence has naturally paid great attention to so serious a subject, and has sought in its wisdom for a _protection_ which might be substituted for that which appears compromised.

It proposes to you to forbid your faithful subjects the use of the right hand.
Sire, do not wrong us so far as to think that we lightly adopted a measure which, at the first glance, may appear odd.

Deep study of the _protective system_ has revealed to us this syllogism, on which it entirely rests: The more one labors, the richer one is.
The more difficulties one has to conquer, the more one labors.
_Ergo_, the more difficulties one has to conquer, the richer one is.
What is _protection_, really, but an ingenious application of this formal reasoning, which is so compact that it would resist the subtlety of M.Billault himself?
Let us personify the country.

Let us look on it as a collective being, with thirty million mouths, and, consequently, sixty million arms.

This being makes a clock, which he proposes to exchange in Belgium for ten quintals of iron.