Be convinced of one thing. If the English bring into play much activity, labor, capital, intelligence, and natural force, it is not for the love of us. It is to give themselves many comforts in exchange for their products. They certainly desire to receive at least as much as they give, and they make at home the payment for that which they buy elsewhere. If then, they inundate us with their products, it is because they expect to be inundated with ours. In this case, the best way to have much for ourselves is to be free to choose between these two methods of production: direct production or indirect production. All the British Machiavelism cannot lead us to make a bad choice.

Let us then stop assimilating industrial competition with war; a false assimilation, which is specious only when two rival branches of industry are isolated, in order to judge of the effects of competition. As soon as the effect produced on the general well-being is taken into consideration, the analogy disappears.

In a battle, he who is killed is thoroughly killed, and the army is weakened just that much. In manufactures, one manufactory succumbs only so far as the total of national labor replaces what it produced, with an excess. Imagine a state of affairs where for one man, stretched on the plain, two spring up full of force and vigor. If there is a planet where such things happen, it must be admitted that war is carried on there under conditions so different from those which obtain here below, that it does not even deserve that name.

Now, this is the distinguishing character of what they have so inappropriately called an industrial war.

Let the Belgians and English reduce the price of their iron, if they can, and keep on reducing it, until they bring it down to nothing. They may thereby put out one of our furnaces—kill one of our soldiers; but I defy them to hinder a thousand other industries, more profitable than the disabled one, immediately, and, as a necessary consequence of this very cheapness, resuscitating and developing themselves.

Let us decide that supremacy by labor is impossible and contradictory, since all superiority which manifests itself among a people is converted into cheapness, and results only in giving force to all others. Let us, then, banish from political economy all these expressions borrowed from the vocabulary of battles: to struggle with equal arms, to conquer, to crush out, to stifle, to be beaten, invasion, tribute. What do these words mean? Squeeze them, and nothing comes out of them. We are mistaken; there come from them absurd errors and fatal prejudices. These are the words which stop the blending of peoples, their peaceful, universal, indissoluble alliance, and the progress of humanity.

PART III.

SPOLIATION AND LAW.[16]

To the Protectionists of the General Council of Manufactures: