It has been banished from all books, reduced to take refuge in the practice of every people; and we do not understand why, in regard to the wealth of nations, governments should not have yielded themselves to wise authors rather than to _the old experience_ of a system.

Above all, we cannot conceive why, in political economy, the American government should persist in resisting the progress of light, and in preserving, in its practice, those old errors which all our economists of the pen have designated.

But we have said too much about this mercantile system, which has in its favor _facts_ alone, though sustained by scarcely a single writer of the day." Would not one say, who listened only to this language, that we political economists, in merely claiming for every one _the free disposition of his own property_, had, like the Fourierists, conjured up from our brains a new social order, chimerical and strange; a sort of phalanstery, without precedent in the annals of the human race, instead of merely talking plain _meum_ and _tuum_ It seems to us that if there is in all this anything utopian, anything problematical, it is not free trade, but protection; it is not the right to exchange, but tariff after tariff applied to overturning the natural order of commerce.
But it is not the point to compare and judge of these two systems by the light of reason; the question for the moment is, to know which of the two is founded upon experience.
So, Messrs.

Monopolists, you pretend that the facts are on your side; that we have, on our side, theories only.
You even flatter yourselves that this long series of public acts, this old experience of the world, which you invoke, has appeared imposing to us, and that we confess we have not as yet refuted you as fully as we might.
But we do not cede to you the domain of facts, for you have on your side only exceptional and contracted facts, while we have universal ones to oppose to them; the free and voluntary acts of all men.
What do you say, and what say we?
We say: "It is better to buy from others anything which would cost more to make ourselves." And on your part you say: "It is better to make things ourselves, even though it would cost less to purchase them from others." Now, gentlemen, laying aside theory, demonstration, argument, everything which appears to afflict you with nausea, which of these assertions has in its favor the sanction of _universal practice_?
Visit the fields, work-rooms, manufactories, shops; look above, beneath, and around you; investigate what is going on in your own establishment; observe your own conduct at all times, and then say which is the principle that directs these labors, these workmen, these inventors, these merchants; say, too, which is your own individual practice.
Does the farmer make his clothes?
Does the tailor raise the wheat which he consumes?
Does not your housekeeper cease making bread at home so soon as she finds it more economical to buy it from the baker?
Do you give up the pen for the brush in order to avoid paying tribute to the shoe-black?
Does not the whole economy of society depend on the separation of occupations, on the division of labor; in one word, on _exchange_?
And is exchange anything else than the calculation which leads us to discontinue, as far as we can, direct production, when indirect acquisition spares us time and trouble?
You are not, then, men of _practice_, since you cannot show a single man on the surface of the globe who acts in accordance with your principle.
"But," you will say, "we have never heard our principle made the rule of individual relations.

We comprehend perfectly that this would break the social bond, and force men to live, like snails, each one in his own shell.