What do you say, and what say we? We say: "It is better to buy from others anything which would cost more to make ourselves." And on your part you say: "It is better to make things ourselves, even though it would cost less to purchase them from others." Now, gentlemen, laying aside theory, demonstration, argument, everything which appears to afflict you with nausea, which of these assertions has in its favor the sanction of _universal practice_? Visit the fields, work-rooms, manufactories, shops; look above, beneath, and around you; investigate what is going on in your own establishment; observe your own conduct at all times, and then say which is the principle that directs these labors, these workmen, these inventors, these merchants; say, too, which is your own individual practice. Does the farmer make his clothes? Does the tailor raise the wheat which he consumes? Does not your housekeeper cease making bread at home so soon as she finds it more economical to buy it from the baker? Do you give up the pen for the brush in order to avoid paying tribute to the shoe-black? Does not the whole economy of society depend on the separation of occupations, on the division of labor; in one word, on _exchange_? And is exchange anything else than the calculation which leads us to discontinue, as far as we can, direct production, when indirect acquisition spares us time and trouble? You are not, then, men of _practice_, since you cannot show a single man on the surface of the globe who acts in accordance with your principle. "But," you will say, "we have never heard our principle made the rule of individual relations. We comprehend perfectly that this would break the social bond, and force men to live, like snails, each one in his own shell. We limit ourselves to asserting that it governs _in fact_ the relations which are established among the agglomerations of the human family." But still, this assertion is erroneous. The family, the village, the town, the county, the state, are so many agglomerations, which all, without any exception, _practically_ reject your principle, and have never even thought of it. All of them procure, by means of exchange, that which would cost them more to procure by means of production. Nations would act in the same natural manner, if you did not prevent it _by force_.