A country might still be unhappy, although for a long time each man may have been unused to injustice through the continued resistance of an enlightened public. But such a country, it seems to me, would be well prepared to receive a system of teaching more pure and elevated. We get a considerable way on the road to good, when we become unused to evil. Men can never remain stationary. Diverted from the path of vice, feeling that it leads only to infamy, they would feel so much the more sensibly the attractions of virtue. Society must perhaps pass through this prosaic state of transition, in which men practise virtue from motives of prudence, in order to rise afterwards to that fairer and more poetic region where such calculating motives are no longer wanted. III. THE TWO HATCHETS. _Petition of Jacques Bonhomme, Carpenter, to M. Cunin-Gridaine, Minister of Commerce_. Monsieur le Fabricant-Ministre, I am a carpenter to trade, as was St Joseph of old; and I handle the hatchet and adze, for your benefit. Now, while engaged in hewing and chopping from morning to night upon the lands of our Lord the King, the idea has struck me that my labour may be regarded as _national_, as well as yours. And, in these circumstances, I cannot see why protection should not visit my woodyard as well as your workshop. For, sooth to say, if you make cloths I make roofs; and both, in their own way, shelter our customers from cold and from rain. And yet I run after customers; and customers run after you. You have found out the way of securing them by hindering them from supplying themselves elsewhere, while mine apply to whomsoever they think proper. What is astonishing in all this? Monsieur Cunin, the Minister of State, has not forgotten M. Cunin, the manufacturer--all quite natural. But, alas! my humble trade has not given a Minister to France, although practised, in Scripture times, by far more august personages. And in the immortal code which I find embodied in Scripture, I cannot discover the slightest expression which could be quoted by carpenters, as authorizing them to enrich themselves at the expense of other people. You see, then, how I am situated. I earn fifteen pence a day, when it is not Sunday or holiday. I offer you my services at the same time as a Flemish carpenter offers you his, and, because he abates a halfpenny, you give him the preference. But I desire to clothe myself; and if a Belgian weaver presents his cloth alongside of yours, you drive him and his cloth out of the country. So that, being forced to frequent your shop, although the dearest, my poor fifteen pence go no further in reality than fourteen. Nay, they are not worth more than thirteen! for in place of expelling the Belgian weaver at your own cost (which was the least you could do), you, for your own ends, make me pay for the people you set at his heels.