Wool?
They get along without it as much as possible.

Can any one imagine that all these objects of consumption can be thus left untouched by the masses, without lowering prices?
That which we say of a farmer, we can say of a manufacturer.
Cloth-makers assert that foreign competition will lower prices owing to the increased quantity offered.

Very well, but are not these prices raised by the increase of the demand?
Is the consumption of cloth a fixed and invariable quantity?
Is each one as well provided with it as he might and should be?
And if the general wealth were developed by the abolition of all these taxes and hindrances, would not the first use made of it by the population be to clothe themselves better?
Therefore the question, the eternal question, is not whether protection favors this or that special branch of industry, but whether, all things considered, restriction is, in its nature, more profitable than freedom?
Now, no person can maintain that proposition.

And just this explains the admission which our opponents continually make to us: "You are right on principle." If that is true, if restriction aids each special industry only through a greater injury to the general prosperity, let us understand, then, that the price itself, considering that alone, expresses a relation between each special industry and the general industry, between the supply and the demand, and that, reasoning from these premises, this _remunerative price_ (the object of protection) is more hindered than favored by it.
APPENDIX.
We published an article entitled _Dearness-Cheapness_, which gained for us the two following letters.

We publish them, with the answers: "DEAR MR.