loth, you must acknowledge
that protection is as much due to the one as to the other. Now, why is
this bag of wool worth a hundred dollars? Is it not because that sum
is the price of production? And is the price of production anything
but that which it has been necessary to distribute in wages, salaries,
manual labor, interest, to all the workmen and capitalists who have
concurred in producing the article?"

The RAW-MATERIALIST: "It is true, that in regard to wool, you
may be right. But a bag of wheat, an ingot of iron, a quintal of
coal--are they the produce of labor? Did not Nature create them?"

The PROTECTIONIST: "Without doubt Nature _creates_ the
_elements_ of all things; but it is labor which produces their
_value_. I was wrong myself in saying that labor creates material
objects, and this faulty phrase has led the way to many other errors.
It does not belong to man, either manufacturer or cultivator, to
_create_, to make something out of nothing; if, by _production_, we
understand _creation_, all our labors will be unproductive; that of
merchants more so than any other, except, perhaps, that of law-makers.
The farmer has no claim to have _created_ wheat, but he may claim to
have created its _value_: he has transformed into wheat substances
which in no wise resembled it, by his own labor with that of his
ploughmen and reapers. What more does the miller effect who converts
it into flour, the baker who turns it into bread? Because man must
clothe himself in cloth, a host of operations is necessary. Before the
intervention of any human labor, the true raw materials of this
product (cloth) are air, water, gas, light, the chemical substances
which must enter into its composition. These are truly the raw
materials which are _untouched by human labor_; therefore, they are of
no _value_, and I do not think of protecting them. But a first labor
converts these substances into hay, straw, etc., a second into wool, a
third into thread, a fourth into cloth, a fifth into clothing--who
will dare to say that every step in this work is not _labor_, from the
first stroke of the plough, which begins, to the last stroke of the
needle, which terminates it? And because, in order to secure more
celerity and perfection in the accomplishment of a definite work, such
as a garment, the labors are divided among several classes of
industry, you wish, by an arbitrary distinction, that the order of
succession of these labors should be the on