The third (articles which have received from labor all the finish of which they are capable) we regard as _most proper for taxation_." "Considering," say the petitioners of Havre, "that it is indispensable to reduce _immediately_ and to the _lowest rate_, the raw material, in order that manufacturing industry may give employment to our merchant vessels, which furnish its first and indispensable means of labor." The manufacturers could not allow themselves to be behindhand in civilities towards the ship-owners, and accordingly the petition of Lyons demands the free introduction of raw material, "in order to prove," it remarks, "that the interests of manufacturing towns are not opposed to those of maritime cities." This may be true enough; but it must be confessed that both, taken in the sense of the petitioners, are terribly adverse to the interest of agriculture and of consumers.
This, then, gentlemen, is the aim of all your subtle distinctions! You wish the law to oppose the maritime transportation of _manufactured_ articles, in order that the much more expensive transportation of the raw material should, by its larger bulk, in its rough, dirty and unimproved condition, furnish a more extensive business to your _merchant vessels_.

And this is what you call a _wise system of political economy_! Why not also petition for a law requiring that fir-trees, imported from Russia, should not be admitted without their branches, bark, and roots; that Mexican gold should be imported in the state of ore, and Buenos Ayres leathers only allowed an entrance into our ports, while still hanging to the dead bones and putrefying bodies to which they belong?
The stockholders of railroads, if they can obtain a majority in the Chambers, will no doubt soon favor us with a law forbidding the manufacture, at Cognac, of the brandy used in Paris.

For, surely, they would consider it a wise law, which would, by forcing the transportation of ten casks of wine instead of one of brandy, thus furnish to Parisian industry an _indispensable encouragement to its labor_, and, at the same time, give employment to railroad locomotives! Until when will we persist in shutting our eyes upon the following simple truth?
Labor and industry, in their general object, have but one legitimate aim, and this is the public good.

To create useless industrial pursuits, to favor superfluous transportation, to maintain a superfluous labor, not for the good of the public, but at the expense of the public, is to act upon a _petitio principii_.

For it is the result of labor, and not labor itself, which is a desirable object.