world’s impoverishment, are the sole enduring trophies. The system which in the name of Free Trade is calculated to secure a monopoly of Production and Commerce in all but the ruder Arts and Manufactures to Great Britain, France and Germany, tends to tax the food-grower and the artisan half the value of their respective products for the cost of transporting them to and exchanging them with each other, and so keep them in perpetual vassalage and debt to the “merchant princes,” instead of rendering them neighbors and direct exchangers, and thus saving the heavy cost of reaching each other across an ocean and a continent. These convictions are not new to me, but they were strengthened by weeks of earnest observation in the Crystal Palace. More and more was I there convinced that Price is not an infallible measure of Cost, and that a foreign fabric is not proved cheaper than a home-made one because it is purchased in preference, nor even because it is sold at a lower price. If the whole Earth is ever to be truly Civilized, it must be by the diffusion of the Useful Arts and their Machinery rather than of their finished products. If Universal Labor is ever to be constantly employed and fairly rewarded, it must be through a more direct and intimate relation of laborer with laborer; not through the system of complexity, aggregation and needless expense wherein the grain-grower of Illinois hires, through half a dozen intermediates, his Iron made in Wales, and sends his grain thither to pay for the work, instead of having it done at the ore-bed in his township, with the coal which underlies the whole County. I know how strong is the current against this view of Labor’s true interest, but the world will refuse to be ruled by names and plausibilities for ever.