Colbert was its inventor, and it was the rule of all the States of Europe.  What is more singular, it has remained so till lately, despite anathemas and contempt, and despite the discoveries of the modern school.  This system, which our writers have called the mercantile system, consists in opposing, by prohibitions and duties, such foreign productions as might ruin our manufacturers by their competition.  This system has been pronounced futile, absurd, capable of ruining any country, by economical writers of all schools.  It has been banished from all books, reduced to take refuge in the practice of every people; and we do not understand why, in regard to the wealth of nations, governments should not have yielded themselves to wise authors rather than to the old experience of a system.  Above all, we cannot conceive why, in political economy, the American government should persist in resisting the progress of light, and in preserving, in its practice, those old errors which all our economists of the pen have designated.  But we have said too much about this mercantile system, which has in its favor facts alone, though sustained by scarcely a single writer of the day.”

Would not one say, who listened only to this language, that we political economists, in merely claiming for every one the free disposition of his own property, had, like the Fourierists, conjured up from our brains a new social order, chimerical and strange; a sort of phalanstery, without precedent in the annals of the human race, instead of merely talking plain meum and tuum It seems to us that if there is in all this anything utopian, anything problematical, it is not free trade, but protection; it is not the right to exchange, but tariff after tariff applied to overturning the natural order of commerce.

But it is not the point to compare and judge of these two systems by the light of reason; the question for the moment is, to know which of the two is founded upon experience.

So, Messrs. Monopolists, you pretend that the facts are on your side; that we have, on our side, theories only.

You even flatter yourselves that this long series of public acts, this old experience of the world, which you invoke, has appeared imposing to us, and that we confess we have not as yet refuted you as fully as we might.

But we do not cede to you the domain of facts, for you have on your side only exceptional and contracted facts, while we have universal ones to oppose to them; the free and voluntary acts of all men.

What do you say, and what say we?

We say: 

“It is better to buy from others anything which would cost more to make ourselves.”

And on your part you say: 

“It is better to make things ourselves, even though it would cost less to purchase them from others.”

Now, gentlemen, laying aside theory, demonstration, argument, everything which appears to afflict you with nausea, which of these assertions has in its favor the sanction of universal practice?