ng the Adirondacks. The father of
the family has received for his work only a slender salary. The icy
northern blast makes his half naked children shiver, the fire is
extinguished, and the table bare. There are wool, and wood, and coal,
just over the St. Lawrence; but these commodities are forbidden to the
family of the poor day-laborer, for the other side of the river is no
longer the United States. The foreign pine-logs may not gladden the
hearth of his cabin; his children may not know the taste of Canadian
bread, the wool of Upper Canada will not bring back warmth to their
benumbed limbs. General utility wills it so. All very well! but
acknowledge that here it contradicts justice. To dispose by
legislation of consumers, to limit them to the products of national
labor, is to encroach upon their liberty, to forbid them a resource
(exchange) in which there is nothing contrary to morality; in one
word, it is to do them injustice.

"Yet this is necessary," it is said, "under the penalty of seeing
national labor stopped, under the penalty of striking a fatal blow at
public prosperity."

The writers of the protectionist school arrive then at this sad
conclusion; that there is a radical incompatibility between justice
and utility.

On the other side, if nations are interested in selling, and not in
buying, violent action and reaction are the natural condition of
their relations, for each will seek to impose its products on all, and
all will do their utmost endeavor to reject the products of each.

As a sale, in effect, implies a purchase, and since, according to this
doctrine, to sell is to benefit, as to buy is to injure, every
international transaction implies the amelioration of one people, and
the deterioration of another.

But, on one side, men are fatally impelled towards that which profits
them: on the contrary, they resist instinctively whatever injures
them; whence we must conclude that every people bears within itself a
natural force of expansion, and a not less natural power of
resistance, which are equally prejudicial to all the others; or, in
other terms, that antagonism and war are the natural constitution of
human society!

So that the theory which we are discussing may be summed up in these
two axioms:

"Utility is incompatible with justice at home,"

"Utility is incompatible with peace abroad."

Now that which astonishes us, which confounds us, is, that a
publicist, a statesman, who has sincerel