Note A3-3-1 — Chapter III

P. de la Court, in his freedom of trade, has in view not the interest of consumers—and least of all of the whole world—but the interest of the commercial class. Compare Tüb. Ztschr., 1862, p. 273. Similarly, Child, Discourse of Trade, 1690; whereas D. North, Discourses upon Trade (1690), may be called a free-trader in the sense in which the expression is used to-day. No nation has yet grown rich by state-measures; but peace, thrift and freedom, and nothing else, procure wealth. (Postscr.) Davenant also zealously opposes the craving of a people to produce everything themselves, to want only to sell, etc. He considered very few laws on commerce a sign of a flourishing condition of trade. (Works, I, 99, 104 ff.; V, 379 ff., 387 seq.) Fénélon's antipathy for import and export duties in Telémaque, a part of his general opposition to the siècle de Louis XIV. The view of the Physiocrates (La police du commerce interiéur et extérieur la plus sure, la plus exacte, la plus profitable à la nation et à l'état consiste dans la pleine liberté de la concurrence: Quesnay, Maximes générales, No. 25) is directly connected with their deepest fundamental notions of produit net and impôt unique. Turgot vindicates the interests of workmen against protective duties, for whom no compensation is possible, where one industry gains by its being favored in the same way that it loses when another is favored. (Sur la Marque de Fer, I, p. 376 ff., Daire.) "Those who cry so loudly for protective duties are partly thoughtless persons who wish to avoid the consequences of bad speculations, and in part shrewd persons who would like to earn during the first years a rate of profit higher than that usual in the country." (Rossi.) Bastiat ridicules the advocates of a protective tariff by the petition of the lamplighters, lamp manufacturers, etc., that to advance their industry, and indirectly almost all others, the mighty foreign competition of the sun might be removed from all houses. (Sophismes écon., ch. 7.) To him, the protective system is precisely the system of want; freedom of trade, the system of superabundance. Political economy would have fulfilled its practical calling, if, by means of universal freedom of trade, it had done away with all that is left of that system which excludes foreign commodities because they are cheap, that is, because they include une grande proportion d'utilité gratuite. (Harmonies, p. 174, 306.) Cobden's pet expression: "Free trade, the international law of the Almighty!" (Polit. Writings, II, 110.) K. S. Zachariä calls the protective system a step introductory to communism (Staatsw. Abh., 100), because it nearly always leads to over-population and List's system, a politico-economical absurdity. (Vierzig Bücher vom Staate, VII, pp. 23, 92.)