er with salt-fish.
Industrial pursuits will thus be destroyed."

Mr. G***** replies:

"If you prohibit these exchanges, the varied benefits which nature has
lavished on different climates will be, to you, as though they were
not. You will not participate in the mechanical skill of the English,
nor in the riches of the Nova-Scotian mines, in the abundance of
Canadian pasturage, in the cheapness of Spanish labor, in the fervor
of the Italian climate; and you will be obliged to ask through a
forced production that which you might by exchange have obtained
through a readier production."

Assuredly, one of the senators deceives himself. But which? It is well
worth while to ascertain; for we are not dealing with opinions only.
You stand at the entrance of two roads; you must choose; one of them
leads necessarily to _misery_.

To escape from this embarrassment it is said: There are no absolute
principles.

This axiom, so much in vogue in our day, not only serves laziness, it
is also in accord with ambition.

If the theory of prohibition should prevail, or again, if the doctrine
of liberty should triumph, a very small amount of law would suffice
for our economic code. In the first case it would stand--_All foreign
exchange is forbidden_; in the second, _All exchange with abroad is
free_, and many great personages would lose their importance.

But if exchange has not a nature proper to itself; if it is governed
by no natural law; if it is capriciously useful or injurious; if it
does not find its spring in the good it accomplishes, its limit when
it ceases to do good; if its effects cannot be appreciated by those
who execute them; in one word, if there are no absolute principles, we
are compelled to measure, weigh, regulate transactions, to equalize
the conditions of labor, to look for the level of profits--colossal
task, well suited to give great entertainments, and high influence to
those who undertake it.

Here in New York are a million of human beings who would all die
within a few days, if the abundant provisioning of nature were not
flowing towards this great metropolis.

Imagination takes fright in the effort to appreciate the immense
multiplicity of articles which must cross the Bay, the Hudson, the
Harlem, and the East rivers, to-morrow, if the lives of its
inhabitants are not to become the prey of famine, riot, and pillage.
Yet, as we write, all are sleeping; and their quiet slumbers are not
disturbed for a