The wisdom and beauty of these laws strike me with admiration and
reverence.

What has been said of printing, can be extended to every agent for the
advancement of labor--from the nail and the mallet, up to the
locomotive and the electric telegraph. Society enjoys all, by the
abundance of its use, its consumption; and it _enjoys all
gratuitously_. For as their effect is to diminish prices, it is
evident that just so much of the price as is taken off by their
intervention, renders the production in so far _gratuitous_. There
only remains the actual labor of man to be paid for; and the
remainder, which is the result of the invention, is subtracted; at
least after the invention has run through the cycle which I have just
described as its destined course. I send for a workman; he brings a
saw with him; I pay him two dollars for his day's labor, and he saws
me twenty-five boards. If the saw had not been invented, he would
perhaps not have been able to make one board, and I would none the
less have paid him for his day's labor. The _usefulness_, then, of the
saw, is for me a gratuitous gift of nature, or rather, is a portion of
the inheritance which, _in common_ with my brother men, I have
received from the genius of my ancestors. I have two workmen in my
field; the one directs the handle of a plough, the other that of a
spade. The result of their day's labor is very different, but the
price is the same, because the remuneration is proportioned, not to
the usefulness of the result, but to the effort, the [time, and] labor
given to attain it.

I invoke the patience of the reader, and beg him to believe, that I
have not lost sight of free trade: I entreat him only to remember the