Now, then, be consistent, if you will not be just, and treat the poor carpenters as well as you treat yourself. Make a law which shall read: "It is forbidden to use beams or shingles which have not been fashioned by dull hatchets." And you will immediately perceive the result. Where we now strike an hundred blows with the ax, we shall be obliged to give three hundred. What a powerful encouragement to industry! Apprentices, journeymen and masters, we should suffer no more. We should be greatly sought after, and go away well paid. Whoever wishes to enjoy a roof must leave us to make his tariff, just as buyers of cloth are now obliged to submit to you. As for those free trade theorists, should they ever venture to call the utility of this system in question we should know where to go for an unanswerable argument. Your investigation of 1834 is at our service. We should fight them with that, for there you have admirably pleaded the cause of prohibition, and of dull hatchets, which are both the same. IV. INFERIOR COUNCIL OF LABOR. "What! You have the assurance to demand for every citizen the right to buy, sell, trade, exchange, and to render service for service according to his own discretion, on the sole condition that he will conduct himself honestly, and not defraud the revenue? Would you rob the workingman of his labor, his wages and his bread?" This is what is said to us. I know what the general opinion is; but I have desired to know what the laborers themselves think. I have had an excellent opportunity of finding out. It was not one of those _Superior Councils of Industry_ (Committee on the Revision of the Tariff), where large manufacturers, who style themselves laborers, influential ship-builders who imagine themselves seamen, and wealthy bondholders who think themselves workmen, meet and legislate in behalf of that philanthropy with whose nature we are so well acquainted. No, they were workmen "to the manor born," real, practical laborers, such as joiners, carpenters, masons, tailors, shoemakers, blacksmiths, grocers, etc., etc., who had established in my village a _Mutual Aid Society_. Upon my own private authority I transformed it into an _Inferior Council of Labor_ (People's Committee for Revising the Tariff), and I obtained a report which is as good as any other, although unencumbered by figures, and not distended to the proportions of a quarto volume and printed at the expense of the State. The subject of my inquiry was the real or supposed influence of the protective system upon these poor people. The President, indeed, informed me that the institution of such an inquiry was somewhat in contravention of the principles of the society. For, in France, the land of liberty, those who desire to form associations must renounce political discussions--that is to say, the discussion of their common interests. However, after much hesitation, he made the question the order of the day.