applied to everything
without being applicable to anything--commenced writing on political
economy. There existed, however, a system of political economy, not
written, but practised by governments. It is said that Colbert was its
inventor, and it was the rule of all the States of Europe. What is
more singular, it has remained so till lately, despite anathemas and
contempt, and despite the discoveries of the modern school. This
system, which our writers have called the _mercantile system_,
consists in opposing, by prohibitions and duties, such foreign
productions as might ruin our manufacturers by their competition. This
system has been pronounced futile, absurd, capable of ruining any
country, by economical writers of all schools. It has been banished
from all books, reduced to take refuge in the practice of every
people; and we do not understand why, in regard to the wealth of
nations, governments should not have yielded themselves to wise
authors rather than to _the old experience_ of a system. Above all, we
cannot conceive why, in political economy, the American government
should persist in resisting the progress of light, and in preserving,
in its practice, those old errors which all our economists of the pen
have designated. But we have said too much about this mercantile
system, which has in its favor _facts_ alone, though sustained by
scarcely a single writer of the day."

Would not one say, who listened only to this language, that we
political economists, in merely claiming for every one _the free
disposition of his own property_, had, like the Fourierists, conjured
up from our brains a new social order, chimerical and strange; a sort
of phalanstery, without precedent in the annals of the human race,
instead of merely talking plain _meum_ and _tuum_ It seems to us that
if there is in all this anything utopian, anything problematical, it
is not free trade, but protection; it is not the right to exchange,
but tariff after tariff applied to overturning the natural order of
commerce.

But it is not the point to compare and judge of these two systems by
the light of reason; the question for the moment is, to know which of
the two is founded upon experience.

So, Messrs. Monopolists, you pretend that the facts are on your side;
that we have, on our side, theories only.

You even flatter yourselves that this long series of public acts, this
old experience of the world, which you invoke, has appeared imposing
to u