12 On the Importance of 
we ought not to be insensible to the hard- 
ships which really attach to the loss of foreign 
commerce. There is, no doubt, room for 
devising expedients by which the pressure of 
these might be considerably alleviated. 
Much improvement may also be made in 
the art of disseminating more widely those 
principles of political ceconomy which are 
established on sound reasoning.’ Those literati 
who have ready access to the press, and leisure 
for instructing the public, should spare no 
exertion to combat error in all the channels in 
which it flows. No periodical publication, 
however trifling, should be suffered to soothe 
the prejudices of the ill-informed, without an 
offer being made to exhibit the antidote along 
with the poison. The difficulty of convincing 
the public of truths which they have not 
been in the habit of believing, should not 
give rise to elegiac lamentations, rude re- 
proaches, or contemptuous neglect, but be 
viewed as a fact which furnishes a motive to 
patient exertion, and which, when minutely 
studied in its various aspects, will suggest the 
means of conveying truth more successfully. 
Great care ought to be taken to avoid con- 
founding those questions which are agitated 
by the political parties of the day, with any 
particular argument with which such questions 
1 
