uced 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.

I should certainly much prefer to state simply how things _are_, without
troubling myself to contemplate the