352 FALLACIES. 



at least as much industry as A employs during the whole of 

 his career, hut coming back with increase by the sale of the 

 goods which have been manufactured or imported, forms a 

 fund for the employment of the same and perhaps a greater 

 quantity of labour in perpetuity. But the observer does not 

 see, and therefore does not consider, what becomes of B s 

 money ; he does see what is done with A s : he observes the 

 amount of industry which A s profusion feeds; he observes 

 not the far greater quantity which it prevents from being fed ; 

 and thence the prejudice, universal to the time of Adam Smith, 

 that prodigality encourages industry, and parsimony is a dis 

 couragement to it. 



The common argument against free trade was a fallacy of 

 the same nature. The purchaser of British silk encourages 

 British industry ; the purchaser of Lyons silk encourages only 

 French ; the former conduct is patriotic, the latter ought to 

 be interdicted by law. The circumstance is overlooked, that 

 the purchaser of any foreign commodity necessarily causes, 

 directly or indirectly, the export of an equivalent value of 

 some article of home production (beyond what would other 

 wise be exported), either to the same foreign country or to 

 some other ; which fact, though from the complication of the 

 circumstances it cannot always be verified by specific observa 

 tion, no observation can possibly be brought to contradict, 

 while the evidence of reasoning on which it rests is irrefragable. 

 The fallacy is, therefore, the same as in the preceding case, 

 that of seeing a part only of the phenomena, and imagining 

 that part to be the whole : and may be ranked among Fallacies 

 of Non-observation. 



5. To complete the examination of the second of our 

 five classes, we have now to speak of Mai- observation ; in 

 which the error does not lie in the fact that something is 

 unseen, but that something seen is seen wrong. 



Perception being infallible evidence of whatever is really 

 perceived, the error now under consideration can be committed 

 no otherwise than by mistaking for conception what is in fact 

 inference. We have formerly shown how intimately the two 



