It is impossible to sell it below that without loss.

It is impossible to sell it for more than that, for the _competition_ between merchants forbids.
Under these circumstances, if a Frenchman desires to buy the cloth, he must pay a _hundred francs_, or do without it.

But if an Englishman comes, the government interferes, and says to the merchant: "Sell your cloth, and I will make the tax-payers give you _twenty francs_ (through the operation of the _drawback_)." The merchant, who wants, and can get, but one hundred francs for his cloth, delivers it to the Englishman for eighty francs.

This sum added to the twenty francs, the product of the _bounty robbery_, makes up his price.

It is then precisely as if the tax-payers had given twenty francs to the Englishman, on condition that he would buy French cloth at twenty francs below the cost of manufacture,--at twenty francs below what it costs us.