And as a great number of your co-legislators, with whom you are on a marvellously good footing, take each a halfpenny or a penny, under pretext of protecting iron, or coal, or oil, or corn, I find, when everything is taken into account, that of my fifteen pence, I have only been able to save seven pence or eight pence from pillage. You will no doubt tell me that these small halfpence, which pass in this way from my pocket to yours, maintain workpeople who reside around your castle, and enable you to live in a style of magnificence. To which I will only reply, that if the pence had been left with me, the person who earned them, they would have maintained workpeople in my neighbourhood. Be this as it may, Monsieur le Ministre-fabricant, knowing that I should be but ill received by you, I have not come to require you, as I had good right to do, to withdraw the restriction which you impose on your customers. I prefer following the ordinary course, and I approach you to solicit a little bit of protection for myself. Here, of course, you will interpose a difficulty. "My good friend," you will say, "I would protect you and your fellow-workmen with all my heart; but how can I confer customhouse favours on carpenter-work? What use would it be to prohibit the importation of houses by sea or by land?" That would be a good joke, to be sure; but, by dint of thinking, I have discovered another mode of favouring the children of St Joseph; which you will welcome the more willingly, I hope, as it differs in nothing from that which constitutes the privilege which you vote year after year in your own favour. The means of favouring us, which I have thus marvellously discovered, is to prohibit the use of sharp axes in this country. I maintain that such a restriction would not be in the least more illogical or more arbitrary than the one to which you subject us in the case of your cloth. Why do you drive away the Belgians? Because they sell cheaper than you. And why do they sell cheaper than you? Because they have a certain degree of superiority over you as manufacturers. Between you and a Belgian, therefore, there is exactly the same difference as in my trade there would be between a blunt and a sharp axe. And you force me, as a tradesman, to purchase from you the product of the blunt hatchet? Regard the country at large as a workman who desires, by his labour, to procure all things he has want of, and, among others, cloth. There are two means of effecting this. The first is to spin and weave the wool. The second is to produce other articles, as, for example, French clocks, paper-hangings, or wines, and exchange them with the Belgians for the cloth wanted. Of these two processes, the one which gives the best result may be represented by the sharp axe, and the other by the blunt one.