Thirdly. If the tax which you vote repays to you, in roads, canals and safety, more than it costs you, you are not justified in driving away, at my expense, the competition of foreigners who do not pay the tax but who do not have the safety, roads and canals. It is the same as saying: I want a compensating duty, because I have fine clothes, stronger horses and better plows than the Russian laborer. Fourthly. If the tax does not repay what it costs, do not vote it. Fifthly. If, after you have voted a tax, it is your pleasure to escape its operation, invent a system which will throw it on foreigners. But the tariff only throws your proportion on me, when I already have enough of my own. --If they say to you: Freedom of commerce is necessary among the Russians _that they may exchange their products with advantage_ (opinion of M. Thiers, April, 1847)-- Reply: This freedom is necessary everywhere, and for the same reason. --If they say to you: Each country has its wants; it is according to that that _it must act_ (M. Thiers)-- Reply: It is according to that that _it acts of itself_ when no one hinders it. --If they say to you: Since we have no sheet iron, its admission must be allowed (M. Thiers)-- Reply: Thank you, kindly. --If they say to you: Our merchant marine must have freight; owing to the lack of return cargoes our vessels cannot compete with foreign ones-- Reply: When you want to do everything at home, you can have cargoes neither going nor coming. It is as absurd to wish for a navy under a prohibitory system as to wish for carts where all transportation is forbidden. --If they say to you: Supposing that protection is unjust, everything is founded on it; there are moneys invested, and rights acquired, and it cannot be abandoned without suffering-- Reply: Every injustice profits some one (except, perhaps, restriction, which in the long run profits no one), and to use as an argument the disturbance which the cessation of the injustice causes to the person profiting by it, is to say that an injustice, only because it has existed for a moment, should be eternal. XVI. THE RIGHT AND THE LEFT HAND. [_Report to the King._] SIRE--When we see these men of the _Libre Echange_ audaciously disseminating their doctrines, and maintaining that the right of buying and selling is implied by that of ownership (a piece of insolence that M. Billault has criticised like a true lawyer), we may be allowed to entertain serious fears as to the destiny of _national labor_; for what will Frenchmen do with their arms and intelligences when they are free? The Ministry which you have honored with your confidence has naturally paid great attention to so serious a subject, and has sought in its wisdom for a _protection_ which might be substituted for that which appears compromised. It proposes to you to forbid your faithful subjects the use of the right hand.