“Is not, in fact, the consumer, such as the free-traders represent him to us, a strange creation? He is, as he has been wittily described, a fantastic being—a monster who has a mouth and a stomach to consume produce, but who has neither legs to move nor arms to work. We do not fear that the operative classes will suffer themselves to be seduced by those doctrines. We are aware that they have constantly rejected them through the organs of the press more especially charged with the defence of their interests; but it behoves them likewise that the Provisional Government should remain on its guard against principles which _would be still more disastrous under existing circumstances_. M. Bethmont, the minister of commerce, has declared, in a letter addressed by him to the association for the defence of national labour, that he would never grant facilities of which the consequences would be calculated to injure our manufacturers. We see by this declaration that the dispositions of the Provisional Government are good. The very inquiry which is now being held to devise means to ameliorate the moral and material condition of the operatives, ought to confirm the government in the necessity of maintaining the system _which protects industry_. Let us inquire what the consequence would be, in fact, if we were so imprudent as to suffer foreign produce to enter France free of duty. Political economy teaches us that wages find their balance in consequence of the competition existing between nations; but they find their equilibrium by falling, and not by rising. If that were not the case, there would be no possibility of maintaining the struggle. Now, if we opened our ports, this cruel necessity would become the more imperious for us, as, being placed opposite to England in conditions of inferiority, greater in respect to capital, to the means of transport, and to the price of matters of the first necessity, we could not redeem those disadvantages except by a reduction of wages. This, in fact, would be the annihilation of the operative.”—_Constitutionnel_, March 16, 1848. This is the inevitable result of republican and socialist triumph in the neighbouring kingdom, and the impulse given to liberal institutions, an inlet thereby opened to manufacturing jealousy all over the world. Debarred thus from all possibility of reciprocal advantages; shut out for ever from the smallest benefit in return, is it expedient for Great Britain to continue any longer her concessions to foreign industry, or incur the blasting imputation of a suicidal policy towards her own inhabitants in favour of ungrateful and selfish foreigners, who meet concessions with prohibition, and industrial teaching with savage expulsion from the instructed territory.