would then be worth a thousand times its natural value! So much for
looking at prices alone.

According to us, the French would be infinitely rich if their annual
produce were infinitely abundant, and consequently bearing no value at
all.




CHAPTER XII.

DOES PROTECTION RAISE THE RATE OF WAGES?


When we hear our beardless scribblers, romancers, reformers, our
perfumed magazine writers, stuffed with ices and champagne, as they
carefully place in their portfolios the sentimental scissorings which
fill the current literature of the day, or cause to be decorated with
gilded ornaments their tirades against the egotism and the
individualism of the age; when we hear them declaiming against social
abuses, and groaning over deficient wages and needy families; when we
see them raising their eyes to heaven and weeping over the
wretchedness of the laboring classes, while they never visit this
wretchedness unless it be to draw lucrative sketches of its scenes of
misery, we are tempted to say to them: The sight of you is enough to
make me sicken of attempting to teach the truth.

Affectation! Affectation! It is the nauseating disease of the day! If
a thinking man, a sincere philanthropist, takes into consideration the