Without doubt it is individual interest which weighs us down with tariffs; but it acts upon conviction.

"The will (said Pascal) is one of the principal organs of belief." But belief does not the less exist because it is rooted in the will and in the secret inspirations of egotism.
We will return to the Sophism drawn from internal taxes.
The government may make either a good or a bad use of taxes; it makes a good use of them when it renders to the public services equivalent to the value received from them; it makes a bad use of them when it expends this value, giving nothing in return.

To say in the first case that they place the country which pays them in more disadvantageous conditions for production, than the country which is free from them, is a Sophism.

We pay, it is true, so many millions for the administration of justice, and the maintenance of order, but we have justice and order; we have the security which they give, the time which they save for us; and it is most probable that production is neither more easy nor more active among nations, where (if there be such) each individual takes the administration of justice into his own hands.

We pay, I grant, many millions for roads, bridges, ports, steamships; but we have these steamships, these ports, bridges, and roads; and unless we maintain that it is a losing business to establish them, we cannot say that they place us in a position inferior to that of nations who have, it is true, no budget of public works, but who likewise have no public works.