Hence we may see the enormous absurdity of the consuming country, which rejects produce precisely because it is cheap. It is as though we should say: "We will have nothing of that which Nature gives you. You ask of us an effort equal to two, in order to furnish ourselves with articles only attainable at home by an effort equal to four. You can do it because with you Nature does half the work. But we will have nothing to do with it; we will wait till your climate, becoming more inclement, forces you to ask of us a labor equal to four, and then we can treat with you _upon an equal footing_." A is a favored country; B is maltreated by Nature. Mutual traffic then is advantageous to both, but principally to B, because the exchange is not between _utility_ and _utility_, but between _value_ and _value_. Now A furnishes a greater _utility in a similar value_, because the _utility_ of any article includes at once what Nature and what labor have done; whereas the _value_ of it only corresponds to the portion accomplished by labor. B then makes an entirely advantageous bargain; for by simply paying the producer from A for his labor, it receives in return not only the results of that labor, but in addition there is thrown in whatever may have accrued from the superior bounty of Nature. We will lay down the general rule. Traffic is an exchange of _values_; and as value is reduced by competition to the simple representation of labor, traffic is the exchange of equal labors. Whatever Nature has done towards the production of the articles exchanged, is given on both sides _gratuitously_; from whence it necessarily follows, that the most advantageous commerce is transacted with those countries which are the most favored by Nature. * * * * * The theory of which I have attempted, in this chapter, to trace the outlines, would require great developments. But perhaps the attentive reader will have perceived in it the fruitful seed which is destined in its future growth to smother Protection, at once with Fourierism, Saint Simonism, Commonism, and the various other schools whose object is to exclude the law of COMPETITION from the government of the world. Competition, no doubt, considering man as producer, must often interfere with his individual and _immediate_ interests. But if we consider the great object of all labor, the universal good, in a word, _Consumption_, we cannot fail to find that Competition is to the moral world what the law of equilibrium is to the material one. It is the foundation of true Commonism, of true Socialism, of the equality of comforts and condition, so much sought after in our day; and if so many sincere reformers, so many earnest friends to the public rights, seek to reach their end by commercial _legislation_, it is only because they do not yet understand _commercial freedom_. V. OUR PRODUCTIONS ARE OVERLOADED WITH TAXES.