. In one word, they
accuse us of damaging national labor.

Might they not as well reproach machines for accomplishing, by natural
agents, work which, without them, we could perform with our own arms,
and, in consequence, damaging human labor?

The foreign workman who is more favorably situated than the American
laborer, is, in respect to the latter, a veritable economic machine,
which injures him by competition. In the same manner, a machine which
executes a piece of work at a less price than can be done by a certain
number of arms, is, relatively to those arms, a true competing
foreigner, who paralyzes them by his rivalry.

If, then, it is needful to protect national labor against the
competition of foreign labor, it is not less so, to protect human
labor against the rivalry of mechanical labor.

So, he who adheres to the protective policy, if he has but a small
amount of logic in his brain, must not stop when he has prohibited
foreign products; he must farther proscribe the shuttle and the
plough.

And that is the reason why we prefer the logic of those men who,
declaiming against the invasion of exotic merchandise, have, at least,
the courage to declaim as well against the excess of production due to
the inventive power of the human mind.

Hear such a Conservative:--"One of the strongest arguments against
liberty of commerce, and the too great employment of machines, is,
that very many workmen are deprived of work, either by foreign
competition, which is destructive to their manufactures, or by
machines, which take the place of men in the workshops."

This gentleman perfectly sees the analogy, or rather, let us say, the
identity, existing between importations and machines; that is the
reason he proscribes both: and truly there is some pleasure in having
to do with reasonings, which, even in error, pursue an argument to the
end.

Let us look at the difficulty in the way of its soundness.

If it be true, _a priori_, that the domain of _invention_ and that of
labor cannot be extended, except at the expense of one or the other,
it is in the place where there are most machines, Lancaster or Lowell,
for example, that we shall meet with the fewest _workmen_. And if, on
the contrary, we prove _a fact_, that mechanical and hand work
co-exist in a greater degree among wealthy nations than among savages,
we must necessarily conclude that these two powers do not exclude each
other.

It is not easy to explain how a