thinking being can taste repose in
presence of this dilemma:

Either--"The inventions of man do not injure labor, as general facts
attest, since there are more of both among the English and Americans
than among the Hottentots and Cherokees. In that case I have made a
false reckoning, though I know neither where nor when I got astray. I
should commit the crime of treason to humanity if I should introduce
my error into the legislation of my country."

Or else--"The discoveries of the mind limit the work of the arms, as
some particular facts seem to indicate; for I see daily a machine do
the labor of from twenty to a hundred workmen, and thus I am forced to
prove a flagrant, eternal, incurable antithesis between the
intellectual and physical ability of man; between his progress and his
comfort; and I cannot forbear saying that the Creator of man ought to
have given him either reason or arms, moral force, or brutal force,
but that he has played with him in conferring upon him opposing
faculties which destroy one another."

The difficulty is pressing. Do you know how they get rid of it? By
this singular apothegm:

"In political economy there are no absolute principles."

In intelligible and vulgar language, that means: "I do not know where
is the true nor the false; I am ignorant of what constitutes general
good or evil; I give myself no trouble about it. The only law which I
consent to recognize, is the immediate effect of each measure upon my
personal comfort."

No absolute principles! You might as well say, there are no absolute
facts; for principles are only the summing up of well proven facts.

Machines, importations, have certainly consequences. These
consequences are good or bad. On this point there may be difference of
opinion. But whichever of these we adopt, we express it in one of
these two _principles_: "machines are a benefit," or "machines are an
evil." "Importations are favorable," or "importations are injurious."
But to say "there are no principles," is the lowest degree of
abasement to which the human mind can descend; and we confess we blush
for our country when we hear so monstrous a heresy uttered in the
presence of the American people, with their consent; that is to say,
in the presence and with the consent of the greater part of our
fellow-citizens, in order to justify Congress for imposing laws on us,
in perfect ignorance of the reasons for them or against them.

But then we shall be told, "d