A celebrated modern Philosopher has added to the categories of Aristotle the Sophism which consists in expressing in one word a _petitio principii_. He cites several examples, and might have added the word _tributary_ to his nomenclature. For instance, the question is to determine whether foreign purchases are useful or hurtful. You answer, hurtful. And why? Because they render us _tributary_ to foreigners. Truly here is a word, which begs the question at once. How has this delusive figure of speech introduced itself into the rhetoric of monopolists? Money is _withdrawn from the country_ to satisfy the rapacity of a victorious enemy: money is also _withdrawn from the country_ to pay for merchandise. The analogy is established between the two cases, calculating only the point of resemblance and abstracting that by which they differ. And yet it is certainly true, that the non-reimbursement in the first case, and the reimbursement freely agreed upon in the second, establishes between them so decided a difference, as to render it impossible to class them under the same category. To be obliged, with a dagger at your throat, to give a hundred francs, or to give them willingly in order to obtain a desired object,--truly these are cases in which we can perceive little similarity. It might just as correctly be said, that it is a matter of indifference whether we eat our bread, or have it thrown into the water, because in both cases it is destroyed. We here draw a false conclusion, as in the case of the word _tribute_, by a vicious manner of reasoning, which supposes an entire similitude between two cases, their resemblance only being noticed and their difference suppressed. CONCLUSION. All the Sophisms which I have so far combated, relate to the restrictive policy; and some even on this subject, and those of the most remarkable, I have, in pity to the reader, passed over: _acquired rights_; _unsuitableness_; _exhaustion of money_, _etc._, _etc._ But Social economy is not confined within this narrow circle. Fourierism, Saint Simonism, Commonism, agrarianism, anti-rentism, mysticism, sentimentalism, false philanthropy, affected aspirations for a chimerical equality and fraternity; questions relative to luxury, wages, machinery; to the pretended tyranny of capital; to colonies, outlets, population; to emigration, association, imposts, and loans, have encumbered the field of Science with a crowd of parasitical arguments,--_Sophisms_, whose rank growth calls for the spade and the weeding-hoe. I am perfectly sensible of the defect of my plan, or rather absence of plan. By attacking as I do, one by one, so many incoherent Sophisms, which clash, and then again often mingle with each other, I am conscious that I condemn myself to a disorderly and capricious struggle, and am exposed to perpetual repetitions.