Is there any portion of gratuitous Utility which we can replace by onerous Utility; for example, by prohibiting the use of a tool or a machine? We must not fail to do so; for it is very evident, he says, that if machinery augments the ‹wealth of enjoyment›, it diminishes the ‹wealth of value›. “‹Let us bless the obstacles› which the dearness and scarcity of fuel in this country has opposed to the multiplication of steam-engines.”[40] Has nature favoured us in any particular respect? It is our misfortune; for, by that means, we are deprived of the opportunity of exerting ourselves. “I avow that I could desire to see manufactured by manual labour, forced exertion, and the sweat of the brow, things that are now produced without trouble and spontaneously.”[41] What a misfortune, then, is it for us that we are not obliged to manufacture the water which we drink! It would have been a fine opportunity of producing the ‹wealth of value›. Happily we take our revenge upon wine. “Discover the secret of drawing wine from springs in the earth as abundantly as you draw water, and you will soon see that this fine order of things will ruin a fourth part of France.”[42] According to the ideas which this Economist sets forth with such ‹naïveté›, there are many methods, and very simple methods too, of obliging men to create what he terms the ‹wealth of value›. The first is to deprive them of what they have. “If taxation [p186] lays held of money where it is plentiful, to distribute it where it is scarce, it is useful, and far from being a loss, ‹it is a gain›, to the state.”[43] The second is to dissipate what you take. “Luxury and prodigality, which are so hurtful to individual fortunes, ‹benefit› public wealth. You teach me a fine moral lesson, it may be said—I have no such pretension—my business is with Political Economy, and not with morals. You seek the means of rendering nations richer, and I preach up luxury.”[44] A more prompt method still is to destroy the wealth which you take from the tax-payer by good sweeping wars. “If you grant me that the expenditure of prodigals is as productive as any other, and that the expenditure of governments is equally productive, . . . you will no longer be astonished at the wealth of England after so expensive a war.”[45] But, as tending to promote the creation of this ‹Wealth of value›, all these means—taxes, luxury, wars—must hide their diminished heads before an expedient infinitely more efficacious—namely, ‹conflagration›.