Transcriber's Note
Every effort has been made to replicate this text asfaithfully as possible, including obsolete and variant spellings and otherinconsistencies.
[1] A paper read January 29th, 1878, before the New YorkFree-Trade Club.
The questions relating to copyright belong naturally to the sphere ofpolitical economy. They have to do with the laws governing production,and with the principles regulating supply and demand; and they aredirectly dependent upon a due determining of the proper functions oflegislation, and of the relations which legislation, having for itsend the welfare of the community as a whole, ought to bear towardsproduction and trade.
As students of economic science, we recognize the fact that, in allits phases, it is in reality based upon two or three very simplepropositions, such as:
Two plus two make four.
Two from one you can't.
That which a man has created by his own labor is his own, to do whathe will with, subject only to his proportionate contribution to thecost of carrying on the organization of the community under theprotection of which his labor has been accomplished, and to the singlelimitation that the results of his labor shall not be used to the[Pg 2]detriment of his fellow-men.
It is not in the power of legislators to make or to modify the laws oftrade; it is their business to act in accordance with these laws.
Economic science is, then, but the systematizing, on the basis of afew generally accepted principles, of the relations of men as regardstheir labor and the results of their labor, namely, their property.There is therefore an essential connection between the systemsgoverning all these relations, however varied they may be. Soundnessof thought in regard to one group of them leads to soundness ofthought about the others.
Interested as we are in the work of bringing the community to a soundand logical standard of economic faith and practice, it is importantfor us to recognize and to emphasize the essential relationsconnecting as well the different scientific positions as the varioussets of fallacious assumptions. Further, we can hardly lay too muchstress upon the oft-repeated dictum that a system may be correct intheory yet pernicious in practice, maintaining, as we do, that wherethe application of a theory brings failure the result is due either tothe unsoundness of the theory or to some blundering in itsapplication.
We claim, also, that with reference to the rights of labor, property,and capital, the free-trader is the true protectionist. It is thefree-trader who demands for the laborer the fullest, freest use of[Pg 3]the results of his labor, and for the capitalist the widest scope inthe employment of his capital; and it is he who asserts that thepaternal authority which restricts the workingman in