"Considering," say the petitioners of Havre, "that it is indispensable to reduce immediately and to the lowest rate, the raw material, in order that manufacturing industry may give employment to our merchant vessels, which furnish its first and indispensable means of labor."
The manufacturers could not allow themselves to be behindhand in civilities towards the ship-owners, and accordingly the petition of Lyons demands the free introduction of raw material, "in order to prove," it remarks, "that the interests of manufacturing towns are not opposed to those of maritime cities."
This may be true enough; but it must be confessed that both, taken in the sense of the petitioners, are terribly adverse to the interest of agriculture and of consumers.
This, then, gentlemen, is the aim of all your subtle distinctions! You wish the law to oppose the maritime transportation of manufactured articles, in order that the much more expensive transportation of the raw material should, by its larger bulk, in its rough, dirty and unimproved condition, furnish a more extensive business to your merchant vessels. And this is what you call a wise system of political economy!
Why not also petition for a law requiring that fir-trees, imported from Russia, should not be admitted without their branches, bark, and roots; that Mexican gold should be imported in the state of ore, and Buenos Ayres leathers only allowed an entrance into our ports, while still hanging to the dead bones and putrefying bodies to which they belong?
The stockholders of railroads, if they can obtain a majority in the Chambers, will no doubt soon favor us with a law forbidding the manufacture, at Cognac, of the brandy used in Paris. For, surely, they would consider it a wise law, which would, by forcing the transportation of ten casks of wine instead of one of brandy, thus furnish to Parisian industry an indispensable encouragement to its labor, and, at the same time, give employment to railroad locomotives!
Until when will we persist in shutting our eyes upon the following simple truth?
Labor and industry, in their general object, have but one legitimate aim, and this is the public good. To create useless industrial pursuits, to favor superfluous transportation, to maintain a superfluous labor, not for the good of the public, but at the expense of the public, is to act upon a petitio principii. For it is the result of labor, and not labor itself, which is a desirable object. All labor, without a result, is clear loss. To pay sailors for transporting rough dirt and filthy refuse across the ocean, is about as reasonable as it would be to engage their services, and pay them for pelting the water with pebbles. Thus we arrive at the conclusion that political Sophisms, notwithstanding their infinite variety, have one point in common, which is the constant confounding of the means with the end, and the development of the former at the expense of the latter.