came to the labourer himself. Ought not Mr. Carey to consider further whether those "State expenses" are
not the "natural" fruits of capitalistic development? The reasoning is quite worthy of the man who first
declared the relations of capitalist production to be eternal laws of nature and reason, whose free, harmonious
working is only disturbed by the intervention of the State, in order afterwards to discover that the diabolical
influence of England on the world-market (an influence which, it appears, does not spring from the natural
laws of capitalist production) necessitates State intervention, i.e., the protection of those laws of nature
and reason by the State, alias the System of Protection. He discovered further that the theorems of
Ricardo and others, in which existing social antagonisms and contradictions are formulated, are not the
ideal product of the real economic movement, but on the contrary, that the real antagonisms of capitalist
production in England and elsewhere are the result of the theories of Ricardo and others! Finally he
discovered that it is, in the last resort, commerce that destroys the inborn beauties and harmonies of the
capitalist mode of production. A step further and he will, perhaps, discover that the one evil in capitalist
production is capital itself. Only a man with such atrocious want of the critical faculty and such spurious
erudition deserved, in spite of his Protectionist heresy, to become the secret source of the harmonious
wisdom of a Bastiat, and of all the other Free-trade optimists of today.