an among the Sioux and the Cherokees. If
such be the fact, I have gone upon a wrong track, although unconscious
at what point. I have wandered from my road, and I would commit high
treason against humanity, were I to introduce such an error into the
legislation of my country.

Or else the results of the inventions of mind limit manual labor, as
would appear to be proved from limited facts; for every day we see some
machine rendering unnecessary the labor of twenty, or perhaps a hundred
workmen. If this be the case, I am forced to acknowledge, as a fact,
the existence of a flagrant, eternal, and incurable antagonism between
the intellectual and the physical power of man; between his improvement
and his welfare. I cannot avoid feeling that the Creator should have
bestowed upon man either reason or bodily strength; moral force, or
brutal force; and that it has been a bitter mockery to confer upon him
faculties which must inevitably counteract and destroy one another.

This is an important difficulty, and how is it put aside? By this
singular apothegm:

"_In political economy there are no absolute principles._"

There are no principles! Why, what does this mean, but that there are no
facts? Principles are only formulas, which recapitulate a whole class of
well-proved facts.

Machinery and Importation must certainly have effects. These effects
must be either good or bad. Here there may be a difference of opinion as
to which is the correct conclusion, but whichever is adopted, it must be
capable of being submitted to the formula of one or other of these
principles, viz.: Machinery is a good, or, Machinery is an evil.
Importations are beneficial, or, Importations are injurious. Bat to say
_there are no principles_, is certainly the last degree of debasement to
which the human mind can lower itself, and I confess that I blush for my
country, when I hear so monstrous an absurdity uttered before, and
approved by, the French Chambers, the _elite_ of the nation, who thus
justify themselves for imposing upon the country laws, of the merits or
demerits of which they are perfectly ignorant.

But, it may be said to me, finish, then, by destroying the _Sophism_.
Prove to us that machines are not injurious to _human labor_, nor
importations to _national labor_.

In a work of this nature, such demonstrations cannot be very complete.
My aim is rather to point out than to explain difficulties, and to
excite reflection rather than to