Now, as the good burgess, Jacques Bonhomme constitutes a fraction of society at large, we are forced to conclude that society, taken in the aggregate, and after all accounts of labour and enjoyment have been squared, has lost the value of the pane which has been broken. Whence, on generalizing, we arrive at this unexpected conclusion, that “Society loses the value of things uselessly destroyed;” and we arrive also at this aphorism, which will make the hair of the prohibitionists stand on end, that “to smash, break, [p025] and dissipate is not to encourage national industry;” or, more briefly, that “there is no profit in destruction.” The reader will take notice that there are not two persons only, but three, in the little drama to which we have called his attention. One of them—namely, Jacques Bonhomme—represents the consumer, reduced by destruction to one enjoyment in place of two. The glazier represents the producer, whose trade is encouraged by the accident. The third is the shoemaker (or some other tradesman), whose trade is discouraged to the same extent by the same cause. It is this third personage who is always kept in the shade, and who, as representing ‹what we don’t see›, is a necessary element in the problem. It is he who enables us to discover how absurd it is to try to find profit in destruction. It is he who will soon teach us that it is not less absurd to try to discover profit in restriction, which is, after all, only partial destruction. Go to the bottom of all the arguments which are urged in favour of restriction, and you will find only a paraphrase of the vulgar saying,—“‹If no windows were broken, what would the glaziers do?›” The distinction thus established between immediate effects and ultimate consequences, between surface appearances and substantial realities, between ‹what we see and what we don’t see›, the author proceeds, in the same happy vein, to apply to taxation, the proceeds of which are said to come back to the labour-market like refreshing showers,—to overgrown and unnecessary armaments, and extravagant public works, which are defended as affording employment to the working-classes,—to industrial and commercial restrictions, which are justified on the same ground,—to the questions of machinery, of credit, of colonization, of luxury and unproductive consumption, etc. The entire work does not extend to eighty pages, and in every one of its twelve short chapters Bastiat demolishes a specious fallacy or a pernicious error.