The father of
the family has received for his work only a slender salary. The icy
northern blast makes his half naked children shiver, the fire is
extinguished, and the table bare. There are wool, and wood, and coal,
just over the St. Lawrence; but these commodities are forbidden to the
family of the poor day-laborer, for the other side of the river is no
longer the United States. The foreign pine-logs may not gladden the
hearth of his cabin; his children may not know the taste of Canadian
bread, the wool of Upper Canada will not bring back warmth to their
benumbed limbs. General utility wills it so. All very well! but
acknowledge that here it contradicts justice. To dispose by
legislation of consumers, to limit them to the products of national
labor, is to encroach upon their liberty, to forbid them a resource
(exchange) in which there is nothing contrary to morality; in one
word, it is to do them injustice.
"Yet this is necessary," it is said, "under the penalty of seeing
national labor stopped, under the penalty of striking a fatal blow at
public prosperity.
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