"Gentlemen, if you will be pleased to reflect, you cannot fail to be convinced that there is perhaps not one American, from the opulent stockholder of Pit-Hole, down to the poorest vender of matches, who is not interested in the success of our petition.
"We foresee your objections, gentlemen; but there is not one that you can oppose to us which you will not be obliged to gather from the works of the partisans of free trade. We dare challenge you to pronounce one word against our petition, which is not equally opposed to your own practice and the principle which guides your policy.
"If you tell us that, though we may gain by this protection, the United States will not gain, because the consumer must pay the price of it, we answer you:
"You have no longer any right to cite the interest of the consumer. For whenever this has been found to compete with that of the producer, you have invariably sacrificed the first. You have done this to encourage labor, to increase the demand for labor. The same reason should now induce you to act in the same manner.
"You have yourselves already answered the objection. When you were told: The consumer is interested in the free introduction of iron, coal, corn, wheat, cloths, &c., your answer was: Yes, but the producer is interested in their exclusion. Thus, also, if the consumer is interested in the admission of light, we, the producers, pray for its interdiction.
"You have also said the producer and the consumer are one. If the manufacturer gains by protection, he will cause the agriculturist to gain also; if agriculture prospers, it opens a market for manufactured goods. Thus we, if you confer upon us the monopoly of furnishing light during the day, will as a first consequence buy large quantities of tallow, coal, oil, resin, kerosene, wax, alcohol, silver, iron, bronze, crystal, for the supply of our business; and then we and our numerous contractors having become rich, our consumption will be great, and will become a means of contributing to the comfort and competency of the workers in every branch of national labor.
"Will you say that the light of the sun is a gratuitous gift, and that to repulse gratuitous gifts is to repulse riches under pretence of encouraging the means of obtaining them?
"Take care—you carry the death-blow to your own policy. Remember that hitherto you have always repulsed foreign produce, because it was an approach to a gratuitous gift, and the more in proportion as this approach was more close. You have, in obeying the wishes of other monopolists, acted only from a half-motive; to grant our petition there is a much fuller inducement. To repulse us, precisely for the reason that our case is a more complete one than any which have preceded it, would be to lay down the following equation: + × + = - ; in other words, it would be to accumulate absurdity upon absurdity.
"Labor and Nature concur in different proportions, according to country and climate, in every article of production. The portion of Nature is always gratuitous; that of labor alone regulates the price.
"If a Lisbon orange can be sold at one hundredth the price of a New York one, it is because a natural and gratuitous heat does for the one, what the other only obtains from an artificial and consequently expensive one.