This is a very generally received opinion.
"In proportion," says the petition of Bordeaux, "as raw material is abundant, manufactures will increase and flourish." "The abundance of raw material," it elsewhere says, "gives an unlimited scope to labor in those countries where it prevails." "Raw material," says the petition from Havre, "being the element of labor, should be _regulated on a different system_, and ought to be admitted _immediately_ and at the _lowest rate_." The same petition asks, that the protection of manufactured articles should be reduced, not _immediately_, but at some indeterminate time, not to the _lowest rate_ of entrance, but to twenty per cent.
"Among other articles," says the petition of Lyons, "of which the low price and the abundance are necessary, the manufacturers name all _raw material_." All this is based upon error.
All _value_ is, we have seen, the representative of labor.

Now it is undoubtedly true that manufacturing labor increases ten-fold, a hundred-fold, the value of raw material, thus dispensing ten, a hundred-fold increased profits throughout the nation; and from this fact is deduced the following argument: The production of a hundred weight of iron, is the gain of only fifteen francs to the various workers therein engaged.

This hundred weight of iron, converted into watch-springs, is increased in value by this process, ten thousand francs.

Who can pretend that the nation is not more interested in securing the ten thousand francs, than the fifteen francs worth of labor?
In this reasoning it is forgotten, that international exchanges are, no more than individual exchanges, effected through weight and measure.

The exchange is not between a hundred weight of unmanufactured iron, and a hundred weight of watch-springs, nor between a pound of wool just shorn, and a pound of wool just manufactured into cashmere, but between a fixed value in one of these articles, and a fixed equal value in another.