See how it comes to pass. Ambitious hypocrites will have some sinister purpose; for example, sowing national hatred in the public mind. This fatal germ may develop, lead to general conflagration, arrest civilization, pour out torrents of blood, draw upon the land the most terrible of scourges—invasion. In every case of indulgence in such sentiments of hatred they lower us in the opinion of nations, and compel those Americans, [148] who have retained some love of justice, to blush for their country. Certainly these are great evils; and in order that the public should protect itself from the guidance of those who would lead it into such risks, it is only necessary to give it a clear view of them. How do they succeed in veiling it from them? It is by metaphor. They alter, they force, they deprave the meaning of three or four words, and all is done.
Such a word is invasion itself. An owner of an American furnace says, "Preserve us from the invasion of English iron." An English landlord exclaims, "Let us repel the invasion of American wheat!" And so they propose to erect barriers between the two nations. Barriers constitute isolation, isolation leads to hatred, hatred to war, and war to invasion. "Suppose it does," say the two sophists; "is it not better to expose ourselves to the chance of an eventual invasion, than to accept a certain one?" And the people still believe, and the barriers still remain.
Yet what analogy is there between an exchange and an invasion? What resemblance can possibly be established between a vessel of war, which comes to pour fire, shot, and devastation into our cities, and a merchant ship, which comes to offer to barter with us freely, voluntarily, commodity for commodity?
As much may be said of the word inundation. This word is generally taken in bad part, because inundations often ravage fields and crops. If, however, they deposit upon the soil a greater value than that which they take from it; as is the case in the inundations of the Nile, we might bless and deify them as the Egyptians do. Well! before declaiming against the inundation [149] of foreign produces, before opposing to them restraining and costly obstacles, let us inquire if they are the inundations which ravage or those which fertilize? What should we think of Mehemet Ali, if, instead of building, at great expense, dams across the Nile for the purpose of extending its field of inundation, he should expend his money in digging for it a deeper bed, so that Egypt should not be defiled by this foreign slime, brought down from the Mountains of the Moon? We exhibit precisely the same amount of reason, when we wish, by the expenditure of millions, to preserve our country—From what? The advantages with which Nature has endowed other climates.
Among the metaphors which conceal an injurious theory, none is more common than that embodied in the words tribute, tributary.
These words are so much used that they have become synonymous with the words purchase, purchaser, and one is used indifferently for the other.
Yet a tribute or tax differs as much from purchase as a theft from an exchange, and we should like quite as well to hear it said, "Dick Turpin has broken open my safe, and has purchased out of it a thousand dollars," as we do to have it remarked by our sage representatives, "We have paid to England the tribute for a thousand gross of knives which she has sold to us."
For the reason why Turpin's act is not a purchase is, that he has not paid into my safe, with my consent, value equivalent to what he has taken from it, and the reason why the payment of five hundred thousand dollars, which we have made to England, is not a tribute, is simply because she has not received them gratuitously, [150] but in exchange for the delivery to us of a thousand gross of knives, which we ourselves have judged worth five hundred thousand dollars.
But is it necessary to take up seriously such abuses of language? Why not, when they are seriously paraded in newspapers and in books?
Do not imagine that they escape from writers who are ignorant of their language; for one who abstains from them, we could point you to ten who employ them, and they persons of consideration—that is to say, men whose words are laws, and whose most shocking sophisms serve as the basis of administration for the country.
A celebrated modern philosopher has added to the categories of Aristotle, the sophism which consists in including in one word the begging of the question. He cites several examples. He should have added the word tributary to his vocabulary. In effect the question is, are purchases made abroad useful or injurious? "They are injurious," you say. And why? "Because they make us tributary to the foreigner." Here is certainly a word which presents as a fact that which is a question.
How is this abusive trope introduced into the rhetoric of monopolists?
Some specie goes out of a country to satisfy the rapacity of a victorious enemy—other specie, also, goes out of a country to settle an account for merchandise. The analogy between the two cases is established, by taking account of the one point in which they resemble one another, and leaving out of view that in which they differ.
This circumstance, however,—that is to say, non-reimbursement in the one case, and reimbursement freely agreed upon in the other—establishes such a difference between them, that it is not possible to class them under the same title. To deliver a hundred dollars by compulsion to him who says "Stand and deliver," or voluntarily to pay the same sum to him who sells you the object of your wishes—truly, these are things which cannot be made to assimilate. As well might you say, it is a matter of indifference whether you throw bread into the river or eat it, because in either case it is bread destroyed. The fault of this reasoning, as in that which the word tribute is made to imply, consists in founding an exact similitude between two cases on their points of resemblance, and omitting those of difference.