assimilate. As well might you say, it is a matter of indifference
whether you throw bread into the river or eat it, because in either
case it is bread _destroyed_. The fault of this reasoning, as in that
which the word _tribute_ is made to imply, consists in founding an
exact similitude between two cases on their points of resemblance, and
omitting those of difference.

CHAPTER XXIII.

CONCLUSION.

All the sophisms we have hitherto combated are connected with one
single question: the restrictive system; and, out of pity for the
reader, we pass by acquired rights, untimeliness, misuse of the
currency, etc., etc.

But social economy is not confined to this narrow circle. Fourierism,
Saint-Simonism, communism, mysticism, sentimentalism, false
philanthropy, affected aspirations to equality and chimerical
fraternity, questions relative to luxury, to salaries, to machines, to
the pretended tyranny of capital, to distant territorial acquisitions,
to outlets, to conquests, to population, to association, to
emigration, to imposts, to loans, have encumbered the field of science
with a host of parasitical _sophisms_, which demand the hoe and the
sickle of the diligent economist. It is not because we do not
recognize the fault of this plan, or rather of this absence of plan.
To attack, one by one, so many incoherent sophisms which sometimes
clash, although more frequently one runs into the other, is to condemn
one's self to a disorderly, capricious struggle, and to expose one's
self to perpetual repetitions.

How much we should prefer to say simply how things are, without
occupying ourselves with the thousand aspects in which the ignorant
see them! To explain the laws under which societies prosper or decay,
is virtually to destroy all sophistry at once. When La Place had
described all that can, as yet, be known of the movements of the
heavenly bodies, he had dispersed, without even naming them, all the
astrological dreams of the Egyptians, Greeks, and Hindoos, much more
surely than he could have done by directly refuting them through
innumerable volumes. Truth is one; the book which exposes it is an
imposing and durable monument:

Il brave les tyrans avides,
Plus hardi que les Pyramides
Et plus durable que l'airain.

Error is manifold, and of ephemeral duration; the work which combats
it does not carry within itself a principle of greatness or of
endurance.

But if the power, and perhaps the opp