Happily, Sire, there will be organized an association for the defense of left-handed labor, and the Sinistrists will have no trouble in reducing to nothing all these generalities and realities, suppositions and abstractions, reveries and Utopias. They need only to exhume the Moniteur Industriel of 1846, and they will find, ready-made, arguments against free trade, which destroy so admirably this liberty of the right hand, that all that is required is to substitute one word for another.
"The Parisian Free Trade League never doubted but that it would have the assistance of the workingmen. But the workingmen can no longer be led by the nose. They have their eyes open, and they know political economy better than our diplomaed professors. Free trade, they replied, will take from us our labor, and labor is our real, great, sovereign property; with labor, with much labor, the price of articles of merchandise is never beyond reach. But without labor, even if bread should cost but a penny a pound, the workingman is compelled to die of hunger. Now, your doctrines, instead of increasing the amount of labor in France, diminish it; that is to say, you reduce us to misery." (Number of October 13, 1846.)
"It is true, that when there are too many manufactured articles to sell, their price falls; but as wages decrease when these articles sink in value, the result is, that, instead of being able to buy them, we can buy nothing. Thus, when they are cheapest, the workingman is most unhappy." (Gauthier de Rumilly, Moniteur Industriel of November 17.)
It would not be ill for the Sinistrists to mingle some threats with their beautiful theories. This is a sample:
"What! to desire to substitute the labor of the right hand for that of the left, and thus to cause a forced reduction, if not an annihilation of wages, the sole resource of almost the entire nation!
"And this at the moment when poor harvests already impose painful sacrifices on the workingman, disquiet him as to his future, and make him more accessible to bad counsels and ready to abandon the wise course of conduct he had hitherto adhered to!"
We are confident, Sire, that thanks to such wise reasonings, if a struggle takes place, the left hand will come out of it victorious.
Perhaps, also, an association will be formed in order to ascertain whether the right and the left hand are not both wrong, and if there is not a third hand between them, in order to conciliate all.
After having described the Dexterists as seduced by the apparent liberality of a principle, the correctness of which has not yet been verified by experience, and the Sinistrists as encamping in the positions they have gained, it will say:
"And yet they deny that there is a third course to pursue in the midst of the conflict; and they do not see that the working classes have to defend themselves, at the same moment, against those who wish to change nothing in the present situation, because they find their advantage in it, and against those who dream of an economic revolution of which they have calculated neither the extent nor the significance." (National of October 16.)