Petition of Jacques Bonhomme, Carpenter, to Mr. Cuningridaine, Minister
of Commerce
Mr. Manufacturer Minister,
I am a carpenter by trade, as was St. Joseph of old, and I handle the
hatchet and adze for your benefit.
Now, while engaged in hewing and chopping from morning to night upon the
lands of our Lord the King, the idea has struck me that my labor may be
regarded as national, as well as yours.
And, in these circumstances, I cannot see why protection should not visit
my woodyard as well as your workshop.
For, sooth to say, if you make cloths I make roofs; and both, in their own
way, shelter our customers from cold and from rain.
And yet I run after customers, and customers run after you. You have found
out the way of securing them by hindering them from supplying themselves
elsewhere, while mine apply to whomsoever they think proper.
What is astonishing in all this? Mr. Cunin, the minister of state, has not
forgotten Mr. Cunin, the manufacturer — all quite natural. But alas! My
humble trade has not given a minister to France, although practiced in
Biblical times by far more august personages.
And in the immortal code which I find embodied in scripture I cannot
discover the slightest expression that could be quoted by carpenters as
authorizing them to enrich themselves at the expense of other people.
You see, then, how I am situated. I earn 15 pence a day, when it is not
Sunday or holiday. I offer you my services at the same time as a Flemish
carpenter offers you his, and, because he abates a halfpenny, you give him
the preference.
But I desire to clothe myself; and if a Belgian weaver presents his cloth
alongside of yours, you drive him and his cloth out of the country. So that,
being forced to frequent your shop, although the dearest, my poor 15 pence go
no further in reality than 14.
Nay, they are not worth more than 13! For in place of expelling the
Belgian weaver, at your own cost (which was the least you could do), you, for
your own ends, make me pay for the people you set at his heels.
And as a great number of your co-legislators, with whom you are on a
marvelously good footing, take each a halfpenny or a penny, under pretext of
protecting iron, or coal, or oil, or corn, I find, when everything is taken
into account, that of my 15 pence I have only been able to save sevenpence or
eightpence from pillage.
You will no doubt tell me that these small halfpence, which pass in this
way from my pocket to yours, maintain workpeople who reside around your
castle, and enable you to live in a style of magnificence. To which I will
only reply that, if the pence had been left with me, the person who earned
them, they would have maintained workpeople in my neighborhood.
Be this as it may, Mr. Minister Manufacturer, knowing that I should be but
ill received by you, I have not come to require you, as I had good right to
do, to withdraw the restriction which you impose on your customers. I prefer
following the ordinary course, and I approach you to solicit a little bit of
protection for myself.
Here, of course, you will interpose a difficulty. "My good
friend," you will say, "I would protect you and your fellow workmen
with all my heart; but how can I confer custom-house favors on carpenter
work? What use would it be to prohibit the importation of houses by sea or by
land?"
That would be a good joke, to be sure; but, by dint of thinking, I have
discovered another mode of favoring the children of St. Joseph, which you
will welcome the more willingly, I hope, as it differs in nothing from that
which constitutes the privilege you vote year after year in your own favor.
The means of favoring us that I have thus marvelously discovered is to
prohibit the use of sharp axes in this country.
I maintain that such a restriction would not be in the least more
illogical or more arbitrary than the one to which you subject us in the case
of your cloth.
Why do you drive away the Belgians? Because they sell cheaper than you.
And why do they sell cheaper than you? Because they have a certain degree of
superiority over you as manufacturers.
Between you and a Belgian, therefore, there is exactly the same difference
as in my trade there would be between a blunt and a sharp axe.
And you force me, as a tradesman, to purchase from you the product of the
blunt hatchet!
Regard the country at large as a workman who desires, by his labor, to
procure all things he has want of, and, among others, cloth.
There are two means of effecting this.
The first is to spin and weave the wool.
The second is to produce other articles, as, for example, French clocks,
paper-hangings, or wines, and exchange them with the Belgians for the cloth
wanted.
Of these two processes the one that gives the best result may be
represented by the sharp axe, and the other by the blunt one.
You do not deny that at present, in France, we obtain a piece of cloth by
the work of our own looms (that is the blunt axe) with more labor than by
producing and exchanging wines (that is the sharp axe). So far are you from
denying this that it is precisely because of this excess of labor (in which
you say wealth consists) that you recommend, nay, that you compel the
employment of the worse of the two hatchets.
Now, only be consistent, be impartial, and if you mean to be just, treat
the poor carpenters as you treat yourselves.
Pass a law to this effect: "No one shall henceforth be permitted to
employ any beams or rafters but such as are produced and fashioned by blunt
hatchets," and see what will immediately happen.
Whereas at present we give 100 blows of the axe we shall then give 300.
The work we now do in an hour will then require three hours. What a powerful
encouragement will thus be given to labor! Masters, journeymen, apprentices,
our sufferings are now at an end! We shall be in demand; and, therefore, well
paid. Whoever shall henceforth desire to have a roof to cover him must comply
with our exactions, just as at present whoever desires clothes to his back
must comply with yours.
And should the theoretical advocates of free trade ever dare to call in
question the utility of the measure we know well where to seek for reasons to
confute them. Your inquiry of 1834 is still to be had. With that weapon we
shall conquer; for you have there admirably pleaded the cause of restriction
and of blunt axes, which are in reality the same thing.
