It is the same thing in real life, and on the stage of the world. Tell me what Cæsar did, and I will tell you what the character was of the Romans of his time. Tell me what modern diplomacy accomplishes, and I will tell you what is the moral condition of the nations among whom it is exercised. We should not be paying nearly two milliards [£80,000,000 sterling] of taxes, if we did not empower those who live upon them to vote them. We should not have been landed in all the difficulties and charges to which the African question has given rise, had we had our eyes open to the fact that _two and two make four, in political economy, as well as in arithmetic_. M. Guizot would not have felt himself authorized to say that _France is rich enough to pay for her glory_, if France had never been smitten with the love of false glory. The same statesman would never have ventured to say that liberty is too precious a thing for France to stand higgling about its price, had France only reflected that a _heavy budget and liberty are incompatible_. It is not by monopolists, but by their victims, that monopolies are maintained. In the matter of elections, it is not because there are parties who offer bribes that there are parties open to receive them, but the contrary; and the proof of this is, that it is the parties who receive the bribes who, in the long run, defray the cost of corruption. Is it not their business to put an end to the practice? Let the religious principle of morality, if it can, touch the hearts of the Tartuffes, the Cæsars, the planters of colonies, the sinecurists, the monopolists, etc. The clear duty of political economy is to enlighten their dupes. Of these two processes, which exercises the more efficacious influence on social progress? I feel it almost unnecessary to say, that I believe it is the second; and I fear we can never exempt mankind from the necessity of learning first of all _defensive morality_. After all I have heard and read and observed, I have never yet met with an instance of an abuse which had been in operation on a somewhat extensive scale, put an end to by the voluntary renunciation of those who profit by it. On the other hand, I have seen many abuses put down by the determined resistance of those who suffered from them. To expose the effects of abuses, then, is the surest means of putting an end to them. And this holds especially true of abuses like the policy of restriction, which, whilst inflicting real evils on the masses, are productive of nothing to those who imagine they profit by them but illusion and deception!