The disposing by law of consumers, forcing them to the support of home industry, is an encroachment upon their liberty, the forbidding of an action (mutual exchange) which is in no way opposed to morality! In a word, it is an act of injustice.
But this, it is said, is necessary, or else home labor will be arrested, and a severe blow will be given to public prosperity.
Thus then we must come to the melancholy conclusion, that there is a radical incompatibility between the Just and the Useful.
Again, if each people is interested in selling, and not in buying, a violent action and reaction must form the natural state of their mutual relations; for each will seek to force its productions upon all, and all will seek to repulse the productions of each.
A sale in fact implies a purchase, and since, according to this doctrine, to sell is beneficial, and to buy injurious, every international transaction must imply the benefiting of one people by the injuring of another.
But men are invincibly inclined to what they feel to be advantageous to themselves, while they also, instinctively resist that which is injurious. From hence then we must infer that each nation bears within itself a natural force of expansion, and a not less natural force of resistance, which are equally injurious to all others. In other words, antagonism and war are the natural state of human society.
Thus then the theory in discussion resolves itself into the two following axioms. In the affairs of a nation,
Utility is incompatible with the internal administration of justice.
Utility is incompatible with the maintenance of external peace.
Well, what embarrasses and confounds me is, to explain how any writer upon public rights, any statesman who has sincerely adopted a doctrine of which the leading principle is so antagonistic to other incontestable principles, can enjoy one moment's repose or peace of mind.