Let us give up ... the puerility of applying to industrial competition
phrases applicable to war,--a way of speaking which is only specious
when applied to competition between two rival trades. The moment we come
to take into account the effect produced on the general prosperity, the
analogy disappears.
In a battle, every one who is killed diminishes by so much the strength
of the army. In industry, a workshop is shut up only when what it
produced is obtained by the public from another source and in _greater
abundance_. Figure a state of things where for one man killed on the
spot two should rise up full of life and vigor. Were such a state of
things possible, war would no longer merit its name.
This, however, is the distinctive character of what is so absurdly
called _industrial war_.
Let the Belgians and the English lower the price of their iron ever so
much; let them, if they will, send it to us for nothing: this might
extinguish some of our blast-furnaces; but immediately, and as a
_necessary_ consequence of this very cheapness, there would rise up a
thousand other branches of industry more profitable than the one which
had been superseded.
We arrive, then, at the conclusion that domination by labor is
impossible, and a contradiction in terms, seeing that all superiority
which manifests itself among a people means cheapness, and tends only to
impart force to all other nations. Let us banish, then, from political
economy all terms borrowed from the military vocabulary: _to fight with
equal weapons, to conquer, to crush, to stifle, to be beaten, invasion,
tribute_, etc. What do such phrases mean? Squeeze them, and you obtain
nothing. Yes, you do obtain something; for from such words proceed
absurd errors, and fatal and pestilent prejudices. Such phrases tend to
arrest the fusion of nations, are inimical to their peaceful, universal,
and indissoluble alliance, and retard the progress of the human race.