It might just as correctly be said, that it is a matter of indifference whether we eat our bread, or have it thrown into the water, because in both cases it is destroyed.

We here draw a false conclusion, as in the case of the word _tribute_, by a vicious manner of reasoning, which supposes an entire similitude between two cases, their resemblance only being noticed and their difference suppressed.
CONCLUSION.
All the Sophisms which I have so far combated, relate to the restrictive policy; and some even on this subject, and those of the most remarkable, I have, in pity to the reader, passed over: _acquired rights_; _unsuitableness_; _exhaustion of money_, _etc._, _etc._ But Social economy is not confined within this narrow circle.
Fourierism, Saint Simonism, Commonism, agrarianism, anti-rentism, mysticism, sentimentalism, false philanthropy, affected aspirations for a chimerical equality and fraternity; questions relative to luxury, wages, machinery; to the pretended tyranny of capital; to colonies, outlets, population; to emigration, association, imposts, and loans, have encumbered the field of Science with a crowd of parasitical arguments,--_Sophisms_, whose rank growth calls for the spade and the weeding-hoe.
I am perfectly sensible of the defect of my plan, or rather absence of plan.

By attacking as I do, one by one, so many incoherent Sophisms, which clash, and then again often mingle with each other, I am conscious that I condemn myself to a disorderly and capricious struggle, and am exposed to perpetual repetitions.
I should certainly much prefer to state simply how things _are_, without troubling myself to contemplate the thousand aspects under which ignorance _supposes_ them to be....

To lay down at once the laws under which society prospers or perishes, would be _virtually_ to destroy at once all Sophisms.

When Laplace described what, up to his time, was known of the movements of celestial bodies, he dissipated, without even naming them, all the astrological reveries of the Egyptians, Greeks, and Hindoos, much more certainly than he could have done by attempting to refute them directly, through innumerable volumes.