There is a strange fallacy running at this time through all talk about free trade. It is continually assumed that every kind of Government interference takes away liberty of trade. Whereas liberty is lost only when interference hinders, not when it helps. You do not take away a man's freedom by showing him his road--nor by making it smoother for him (not that it is always desirable to do so, but it may be); nor even by fencing it for him, if there is an open ditch at the side of it. The real mode in which protection interferes with liberty, and the real evil of it, is not in its "protecting" one person, but in its hindering another; a form of interference which invariably does most mischief to the person it is intended to serve, which the Northern Americans are about discomfortably to discover, unless they think better of it. There is also a ludicrous confusion in many persons' minds between protection and encouragement; they differ materially. "Protection" is saying to the commercial schoolboy, "Nobody shall hit you." "Encouragement," is saying to him, "That's the way to hit." [75] The question of equivalence (namely, how much wine a man is to receive in return for so much corn, or how much coal in return for so much iron) is a quite separate one, which we will examine presently. For the time let it be assumed that this equivalence has been determined, and that the Government order in exchange for a fixed weight of any article (called, suppose, _a_), is either for the return of that weight of the article itself, or of another fixed weight of the article _b_, or another of the article _c_, and so on. We hitherto consider the Government itself as simply a conservative power, taking charge of the wealth entrusted to it. But a Government may be far other than a conservative power. It may be on the one hand constructive, on the other destructive. If a constructive, or improving power, using all the wealth entrusted to it to the best advantage, the nation is enriched in root and branch at once, and the Government is enabled for every order presented, to return a quantity of wealth greater than the order was written for, according to the fructification obtained in the interim.[76] [76] The reader must be warned in advance that the conditions here supposed have nothing to do with the "interest" of money commonly so called.