SELL DEAR; BUY CHEAP. 



consumers, and which he, as an integral unit of society, owes to 

 them. If the consumer buys cheap, he induces the vendor to 

 break the precept that exhorts him to sell dear ; or, should the 

 consumer buy dear, then he upholds a wrong to his class which 

 society should see put down. Whether the dealer sells either dear 

 or cheap, and whether the consumer buys either cheap or dear, 

 they both violate each other's rights or privileges, considered 

 from a Free Trade stand-point. In fact, there can be neither buy- 

 ing nor selling without violating a precept which the Free Traders 

 esteem as of the highest importance. Thus does visionary theory 

 butt its head very hard against practice, and experience, and com- 

 mon sense, getting badly worsted in the encounter. Such is the 

 result of closet-logic, inventing maxims of conduct without con- 

 sulting experience. 



The truth is that the price of a sale always embodies a compro- 

 mise or adjustment of conflicting interests between buyer and sell- 

 er, unless some element of compulsion enters into the contract 

 a compromise which varies according to the knowledge, needs, 

 and other surroundings of the parties to the transaction. It is one 

 of the crowning merits of the Protective policy that it more and 

 more tends to establish circumstances which result in increasing 

 the prices of raw materials and the rate of wages, and in reducing 

 the prices of finished products. An example of these conse- 

 quences is found in the case of the woolen manufacturer in Indi- 

 ana, who, in 1860, under partial Free Trade, paid 25 cents per 

 pound for wool and $1.50 per day for labor, wholesaling 9-oz. 

 jeans at 60 cents per yard; yet who, in 1874, under a Protective 

 tariff, paid 50 cents per pound for wool and $3 per day for labor, 

 wholesaling g-oz. jeans at 50 cents per yard. A whole bookful of 

 impracticable maxims weighs as nothing in the scale against this 

 single fact. 



