stand behind the counter from morning to night
engaged in the not very delightful task of doing
up small parcels of tea and sugar. Buyers are
far more numerous than sellers, and it is the
buyers that give this bad account of the tradesman.
If the seller were allowed to have his
say, we should hear a very different story.
"Yes," he would say, "I profit by my sales, but
so also do you. What would you do without
the articles that I sell at the lowest market
price? You would be miserable without them.
They are worth to you, all and even more than
you pay. What the article has cost me is no
more to the point than if I were to ask what
your money has cost you. I sell the pound of
tea because it is less valuable to me than four
shillings and sixpence, and you give me that sum
of money because it is less valuable to you than
a pound of tea. You know precisely what my
gain is, because it is measured in the current
coin of the realm; but it does not follow that
because your gain is more indefinite, therefore it
is none at all. In paying me that four shillings
and sixpence, you simply paid me in a convenient
form the bottle of wine which I wanted
to have for dinner to-day. I have exchanged
my pound of tea which cost me three shillings
and sixpence, for a bottle of wine which cost the
wine merchant no more. That is surely quite
fair. That is surely not robbery. Yet he and I
are both enriched by the transaction, in obtaining
what we value more, for what we value less;
and are you, the medium of exchange, the only
person who reaps no benefit? I said that I
would not ask what your money has cost you,
what it represents of corn and wine, the fruit of
your own labour. Therefore I will not ask
whether your money does not represent a
considerable profit obtained by your own labour,
and which you have simply exchanged against
my profit. I am content to rest my case on the
simple fact, that your four-and-sixpence is
of less value to you than my pound of tea, or
you would not have purchased it, and that you
too, therefore, have a profit on the transaction.
If you reply that my profit is greater than yours,
it is possible that you are right, but it is
nothing to the point. The question raised
was, not whether you and I ought to have equal
profits, but whether my profit is not your loss;
whether I have not robbed you of a shilling. It
appears that you are not a loser, and that I am
not a robber." To most persons it is a great
mystery where all this profit comes from, and they
cannot understand how two people can profit by
the same transaction. The only sort of profit
which is generally understood, is that which
comes from the kindly increase of nature. If a
bushel of corn yield ten bushels in the harvest,
it is taken as a matter of course. But if a
bushel in one market realise double the price
which it costs in another market, there are people
who think the advance of price must be a
swindle, and who cannot understand that the
energy and foresight which are able to command
it in a season of scarcity, are fully entitled
to their reward. The fallacy is of the same
kind as one not long since exploded. It was
considered injurious, and, indeed, criminal, to
demand interest on money. The usurer was a
wrong-doer who violated the scriptural precept.
If I remember rightly, it is stated in no less than
three of Lord Bacon's Essays, certainly in two,
that the charge of breaking the Fourth
Commandment is also to be brought against the
usurer. He counts interest for the Sundays
as well as other days, and, therefore, virtually
works upon the Sabbath.

An error on a small scale looks very absurd,
when nothing can be more imposing on a grand
scale. I have dwelt on the absurdity of objecting
to the tradesman's profit as if it were the
customer's loss, because this is precisely the
absurdity which is committed by those who are
troubled at the prospect of importing too much
of our neighbours' goods. Our friends over
the Straits are distressed at the idea of being
inundated with Sheffield ware, Manchester
coton, Redditch needles, and Staffordshire pottery.
We were in our time alarmed at the thought of
being dependent on the corn of Odessa and the
wheat flour of France, of wearing the silks of
Lyons, and drinking the vintages of the
Gironde. We look at our imports and our exports.
Our exports are what the nation sells, our
imports are what the nation buys, and we like the
former much more than the latter. People
fancy that there is something profitable in the
exports, but that there is a loss on the
imports; that it is good for the nation to sell, not
good for the nation to buy. At the end of the
year we sum up our imports and our exports;
we set the one against the other. If we have
sold more than we have bought, we say that the
balance of trade is favourable to us; if we
have bought more than we have sold, that is to
say, if the imports are more than the exports,
then we pull long faces, and say that the balance
of trade is unfavourable to us.

Let no one suppose that it is only determined
Protectionists who maintain this theory. It is a
theory which but the other day was fully accepted
in the great Whig Review. Sir Archibald Alison,
consistent Protectionist as he is, had declared that
we are going to ruin, and adduced long lines of
figures to show that ever since free trade, we were
as a nation buying far more than we were selling,
the inevitable result of which must be an imperial
bankruptcy. The answer of the Whig
Review is, that the figures are scarcely so bad
as Sir Archibald Alison represents them to be,
that in point of fact our exports exceed our
imports, and that, therefore, we are not on the
road to bankruptcy, but are getting on very
well indeed. The principle is then admitted
that it is by our sales we are to profit, and not
by our purchases; that we may export as much
as we like, but that it is not necessary for us to
import. It is supposed that if we export more
than we import, the balance must be paid to us
in gold; while, on the other hand, if we import
more than we export, we must discharge our
debt in gold, thus impoverishing ourselves.
For many long years this doctrine of the balance