A Negative Railroad

First Series, Chapter 17

I have said that as long as one has regard, as unfortunately happens, only to the interest of the producer, it is impossible to avoid running counter to the general interest, since the producer, as such, demands nothing but the multiplication of obstacles, wants, and efforts.

I find a remarkable illustration of this in a Bordeaux newspaper.

M. Simiot
74* raises the following question:

Should there be a break in the tracks at Bordeaux on the railroad from Paris to Spain?

He answers the question in the affirmative and offers a number of reasons, of which I propose to examine only this:

There should be a break in the railroad from Paris to Bayonne at Bordeaux; for, if goods and passengers are forced to stop at that city, this will be profitable for boatmen, porters, owners of hotels, etc.

Here again we see clearly how the interests of those who perform services are given priority over the interests of the consumers.

But if Bordeaux has a right to profit from a break in the tracks, and if this profit is consistent with the public interest, then Angoulême, Poitiers, Tours, Orléans, and, in fact, all the intermediate points, including Ruffec, Châtellerault, etc., etc., ought also to demand breaks in the tracks, on the ground of the general interest—in the interest, that is, of domestic industry—for the more there are of these breaks in the line, the greater will be the amount paid for storage, porters, and cartage at every point along the way. By this means, we shall end by having a railroad composed of a whole series of breaks in the tracks, i.e., a
negative railroad.

Whatever the protectionists may say, it is no less certain that the
basic principle of restriction is the same as the
basic principle of breaks in the tracks: the sacrifice of the consumer to the producer, of the end to the means.

[Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832), a French professor of political economy and a free-trade advocate. His ideas had great influence on Bastiat.—TRANSLATOR.]

[
De l’administration commerciale opposée a l’économie politique, page 5.—EDITOR.]*

* [F. L. A. Ferrier (1777-1861), French tariff administrator and author of books on tariffs and finance.—TRANSLATOR.]

[Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683), French statesman, chief economic and financial advisor to King Louis XIV, under whom he served as Controller-General of Finances. He is credited with introducing the mercantilist system in conjunction with the many industries that he promoted.—TRANSLATOR.]

Could we not say: In what a frightfully prejudicial light Messrs. Ferrier and Saint-Chamans are put by the fact that economists of
every school, that is, all the men who have studied the question, have reached the conclusion that, after all, freedom is better than coercion, and the laws of God are wiser than those of Colbert?

Du système de l’impôt, etc., by the Vicomte de Saint-Chamans, p. 11.

[An administrative unit in France, between the commune and the department.—TRANSLATOR.]

[Cf. chap. 15.—EDITOR.]

First Series, Chapter 14

[In French,
la méture, a rather rare dialect word. Maslin is a mixture of different kinds of grain, usually wheat and rye, or a bread baked from such a mixture. Biscay and Navarre are provinces of Spain just across the Pyrenees from France.—TRANSLATOR.]

[Cf.,
infra, chaps. 18 and 20, and the letter to M. Thiers entitled “Protectionism and Communism,”
Selected Essays on Political Economy, chap. 7.—EDITOR.]

First Series, Chapter 16

[The Spanish legislature.—TRANSLATOR.]

[A river rising in Spain and flowing through Portugal into the Atlantic.—TRANSLATOR.]

[A member of the inferior nobility.—TRANSLATOR.]

[Toulouse is a French city on the Garonne well upstream from Bordeaux. Palencia is a Spanish city on a tributary of the Douro; and Oporto, a Portuguese city at the mouth of the Douro.—TRANSLATOR.]

[A modified version of the personification of the Rhine in the
Fourth Epistle of the French poet Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636-1711).—TRANSLATOR.]

First Series, Chapter 17

[Alexandre Étienne Simiot, author of
Gare du chemin de fer de Paris à Bordeaux (Bordeaux: Durand, 1846), and subsequently representative of the Gironde in the Constituent Assembly.—TRANSLATOR.]

First Series, Chapter 18

[Cf., in Vol. V (of the French edition), the first letter to M. de Larmartine, and
Economic Harmonies, chap. 1—EDITOR.]*

* [Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine (1790-1869), leading French poet, a less important historian, a member of the Chamber of Deputies, and a major political figure just after the fall of King Louis Philippe in 1848.—TRANSLATOR.]

First Series, Chapter 19

[Louis Adolphe Thiers (1797-1877), French statesman and historian, opponent of free trade and, in Bastiat’s time, advocate of an aggressively anti-English policy for France. Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston (1784-1865), British statesman, Foreign Secretary when
Economic Sophisms was written, and an opponent of France.—TRANSLATOR.]

[Cf. the pamphlet entitled “Justice and Fraternity,”
Selected Essays on Political Economy, chap. 4. Cf. also the Introduction to “Cobden and the English League,” and the “Second Campaign of the League,” in Vol. II (of the French edition).—EDITOR.]

First Series, Chapter 20

Du système de l’impôt, etc., p. 438.

First Series, Chapter 21

I do not mention explicitly here that portion of the remuneration which reverts to the entrepreneur, the capitalist, etc., for several reasons: first, if one looks at the matter closely, one will see that this always involves the reimbursement of money paid in advance or the payment for
labor already performed; secondly, because under the general term
labor I include not only the wages of the workingman but also the legitimate recompense of all factors co-operating in the work of production; and thirdly, and above all, because the production of manufactured goods is, like that of raw materials, burdened with interest charges and costs other than those for
manual labor, so that the objection, in itself absurd, would apply to the most complicated spinning operation just as well as, and even better than, to the most primitive kind of agriculture.

[Cf., in Vol. I (of the French edition), the brief work dated 1834, entitled: “Reflections on the Petitions from Bordeaux, from Le Havre, etc.”—EDITOR.]

First Series, Chapter 22

[Paul-Louis Courier de Méré (1772-1825), French army officer, scholar, and publicist. The quotation is from his political satire, the
Pamphlet des pamphlets.—TRANSLATOR.]

[Nicolas de Malebranche (1638-1715), theologian and philosopher, author of
La Recherche de la vérité.—TRANSLATOR.]

[Also known as Mehemet Ali (1769-1849), viceroy of Egypt, who reformed Egypt to some extent according to European principles.—TRANSLATOR.]

[The Mountains of the Moon, in east-central Africa, are the traditional source of the Nile. However, the Nile-borne sediment in Egypt comes from Ethiopia via the Blue Nile.—TRANSLATOR.]

[Louis Dominique Cartouche (1693-1721), a celebrated Parisian outlaw, as synonymous with “highway robber” to the French as Jesse James is to Americans.—TRANSLATOR.]

[J. P. G. M. A. Seraphin, Comte de Villèle (1773-1854), French statesman, an extreme conservative, in Bastiat’s time a member of the Chamber of Peers.—TRANSLATOR.]

First Series, Chapter 23 Conclusion

[In French,
“j’en passe, et des meilleurs,” a line from the famous and controversial play
Hernani, by Victor Hugo (1801-1885). It was spoken by the Spanish grandee, Don Ruy Gomez de Silva, as he exhibited the portraits of his ancestors.—TRANSLATOR.]

[Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace (1749-1827), French astronomer and mathematician, whose great achievement was to solve the problem of apparent instability in the solar system.—TRANSLATOR.]

[We noted, at the end of chapter 4, that it obviously contained the germ of the doctrines expanded in
Economic Harmonies. Here again we find on the author’s part, a desire to undertake the writing of this last work at the first suitable opportunity.—EDITOR.]

[In
The Would-Be Gentleman (Le Bourgeois gentilhomme), by J. B. P. Molière (1622-1673), M. Jourdain, a bourgeois being trained in the manners of gentlemen, had never realized that common speech could have the high-sounding name of “prose.”—TRANSLATOR.]

[Adam Smith (1723-1790), Scottish moral philosopher and economist, probably the most influential of all writers and thinkers in the realm of economic freedom.—TRANSLATOR.]

[L. J. Thénard (1777-1857), a chemist; A. M. Legendre (1752-1834), a geometrist; Étienne Bezout (1730-1783), a mathematician.—TRANSLATOR.]

[Latin, “Mere words and sounds, and nothing more.”—TRANSLATOR.]

[In
The Would-Be Gentleman, the fencing master assures M. Jourdain that dueling is not at all dangerous, for all M. Jourdain need do is hit his adversary and not be hit in return.—TRANSLATOR.]

[A complex and efficient weaving apparatus developed over a lengthy period; one of the numerous contributors to this development was J. M. Jacquard (1752-1834), a businessman and inventor of Lyons, France.—TRANSLATOR.]

[This thought, which ends the first series of
Economic Sophisms, was to be taken up again and expanded by the author at the beginning of the second series. The impact of plunder upon the fate of man concerned him deeply. Having touched on this subject several times in
Economic Sophisms and
Selected Essays on Political Economy (cf., in particular, “Property and Plunder,” chap. 6, and “Plunder and Law,” chap. 8), he reserved a place for a lengthy discussion of it in the second part of
Economic Harmonies, among the “Disturbing Factors,” chap. 18. Final testimony of the importance that he attached to it was his statement on the eve of his death: “An important task for political economy is to write the history of plunder. It is a long history involving, from the very beginning, conquests, migrations of peoples, invasions, and all the disastrous excesses of violence at grips with justice. All this has left an aftermath that still continues to plague us and that renders it more difficult to solve the problems of the present day. We shall not solve them so long as we are unaware of the way, and of the extent to which, injustice, present in our very midst, has gained a foothold in our customs and laws.”—EDITOR.]

Second Series