Ταῦτὰ ἄρα ὄντα, τῷ μὲν ἐπισταμένῳ χρῆσθαι αὐτῶν ἑκάστοις χρήματά ἐστι, τῷ δὲ μὴ ἐπισταμένῳ, οὐ χρήματα· ὥσπέρ γε αὐλοὶ τῷ μὲν ἐπισταμένῳ ἀξὶως λόγου αὐλεῖν χρήματά εἰσι, τῷ δἐ μὴ ἐπισταμένῳ οὐδὲν μᾶλλον ἤ ἄχρηστοι λίθοι, εἰ μὴ ἀπσδιδοῖτό γε αὐτούς. * * * Μὴ πωλούμενοι μὲν γὰρ οὐ χρήματά εἰσιν οἱ αὐλοί· (οὐδὲν γὰρ χρήσιμοί εἰσι) πωλούμενοι δὲ χρήματα· Πρὸς ταῦτα δ’ ὁ Σωκράτης εἶπεν, ἢν ἐπίστηταί γε πωλεῖν. Εί δὲ πωλοίη αὗ πρὸς τοὖτον ὃς μὴ ἐπίστηται χρῆσθαι, οὐδὲ πωλούμενοι εἰσὶ χρήματα.
[72] The orifice being not merely of a receptant, but of a suctional character. Among the types of human virtue and vice presented grotesquely by the lower animals, perhaps none is more curiously definite that that of avarice in the Cephalopod, a creature which has a purse for a body; a hawk's beak for a mouth; suckers for feet and hands; and whose house is its own skeleton.
[73] It would be well if a somewhat dogged conviction could be enforced on nations as on individuals, that, with few exceptions, what they cannot at present pay for, they should not at present have.
[74] The reader is to include here in the idea of "Government," any branch of the Executive, or even any body of private persons, entrusted with the practical management of public interests unconnected directly with their own personal ones. In theoretical discussions of legislative interference with political economy, it is usually and of course unnecessarily, assumed that Government must be always of that form and force in which we have been accustomed to see it;—that its abuses can never be less, nor its wisdom greater, nor its powers more numerous. But, practically, the custom in most civilized countries is, for every man to deprecate the interference of Government as long as things tell for his personal advantage, and to call for it when they cease to do so. The request of the Manchester Economists to be supplied with cotton by the Government (the system of supply and demand having, for the time, fallen sorrowfully short of the expectations of scientific persons from it), is an interesting case in point. It were to be wished that less wide and bitter suffering (suffering, too, of the innocent) had been needed to force the nation, or some part of it, to ask itself why a body of men, already confessedly capable of managing matters both military and divine, should not be permitted, or even requested at need to provide in some wise for sustenance as well as for defence, and secure, if it might be (and it might, I think, even the rather be), purity of bodily ailment, as well as of religious conviction? Why, having made many roads for the passage of armies, they may not make a few for the conveyance of food; and after organizing, with applause, various schemes of spiritual instruction for the Public, organize, moreover, some methods of bodily nourishment for them? Or is the soul so much less trustworthy in its instincts than the stomach, that legislation is necessary for the one, but inconvenient to the other?
There is a strange fallacy running at this time through all talk about free trade. It is continually assumed that every kind of Government interference takes away liberty of trade. Whereas liberty is lost only when interference hinders, not when it helps. You do not take away a man's freedom by showing him his road—nor by making it smoother for him (not that it is always desirable to do so, but it may be); nor even by fencing it for him, if there is an open ditch at the side of it. The real mode in which protection interferes with liberty, and the real evil of it, is not in its "protecting" one person, but in its hindering another; a form of interference which invariably does most mischief to the person it is intended to serve, which the Northern Americans are about discomfortably to discover, unless they think better of it. There is also a ludicrous confusion in many persons' minds between protection and encouragement; they differ materially. "Protection" is saying to the commercial schoolboy, "Nobody shall hit you." "Encouragement," is saying to him, "That's the way to hit."
[75] The question of equivalence (namely, how much wine a man is to receive in return for so much corn, or how much coal in return for so much iron) is a quite separate one, which we will examine presently. For the time let it be assumed that this equivalence has been determined, and that the Government order in exchange for a fixed weight of any article (called, suppose, a), is either for the return of that weight of the article itself, or of another fixed weight of the article b, or another of the article c, and so on.
[76] The reader must be warned in advance that the conditions here supposed have nothing to do with the "interest" of money commonly so called.
[77] The aphorism, being hurried English for "labour is limited by want of capital," involves also awkward English in its denial, which cannot be helped.
[78] These are nearly all briefly represented by the image used for the force of money by Dante, of mast and sail,—
"Quali dal vento be gonfiate vele
Caggiono avvolte, poi chè l'alber fiacca
Tal cadde a terra la fiera crudele."
The image may be followed out, like all of Dante's, into as close detail as the reader chooses. Thus the stress of the sail must be proportioned to the strength of mast, and it is only in unforeseen danger that a skilful seaman ever carries all the canvas his spars will bear: states of mercantile languor are like the flap of the sail in a calm,—of mercantile precaution, like taking in reefs; and the mercantile ruin is instant on the breaking of the mast.