* What M. Bastiat here asserts is unquestionably true. For it has often been shown, and may readily be shown, that the importation of foreign commodities, in the common course of traffic, never takes place except when it is, economically speaking, a national good, by causing the same amount of commodities to be obtained at a smaller cost of labour and capital to the country. To prohibit, therefore, this importation, or impose duties which prevent it, is to render the labour and capital of the country less efficient in production than they would otherwise be; and compel a waste of the difference between the labour and capital necessary for the home production of the commodity, and that which is required for producing the things with which it can be purchased from abroad. The amount of national loss thus occasioned is measured by the excess of the price at which the commodity is produced over that at which it could be imported. In the case of manufactured goods, the whole difference between the two prices is absorbed in indemnifying the producers for waste of labour, or of the capital which supports that labour. Those who are supposed to be benefited--namely, the makers of the protected article, (unless they form an exclusive company, and have a monopoly against their own countrymen, as well as against foreigners,) do not obtain higher profits than other people. All is sheer loss to the country as well as to the consumer. When the protected article is a product of agriculture--the waste of labour not being incurred on the whole produce, but only on what may be called the last instalment of it--the extra price is only in part an indemnity for waste, the remainder being a tax paid to the landlords.--J. S. Mill What causes public opinion to be led astray upon this point is this, that the profit produced by Protection is palpable--visible, as it were, to the naked eye, whilst of the two equal losses which it involves, one is distributed over the mass of society, and the existence of the other is only made apparent to the investigating and reflective mind. Without pretending to bring forward any proof of the matter here, I may be allowed, perhaps, to point out the basis on which it rests.