All labor, without a result, is clear loss.

To pay sailors for transporting rough dirt and filthy refuse across the ocean, is about as reasonable as it would be to engage their services, and pay them for pelting the water with pebbles.
Thus we arrive at the conclusion that _political Sophisms_, notwithstanding their infinite variety, have one point in common, which is the constant confounding of the _means_ with the _end_, and the development of the former at the expense of the latter.
XXII.
METAPHORS.
A Sophism will sometimes expand and extend itself through the whole tissue of a long and tedious theory.

Oftener it contracts into a principle, and hides itself in one word.
"Heaven preserve us," said Paul Louis, "from the Devil and from the spirit of metaphor!" And, truly, it might be difficult to determine which of the two sheds the most noxious influence over our planet.

The Devil, you will say, because it is he who implants in our hearts the spirit of spoliation.

Aye; but he leaves the capacity for checking abuses, by the resistance of those who suffer.