With competition
the progress of the scourge is slower, but no less fatal: how
many deaths from exhaustion or hunger before the high prices
attract food to the market! how many victims of extortion after
it has arrived! It is the story of the king to whom God, in
punishment for his pride, offered the alternative of three days'
pestilence, three months' famine, or three years' war. David
chose the shortest; the economists prefer the longest. Man
is so miserable that he would rather end by consumption than by
apoplexy; it seems to him that he does not die as much. This is
the reason why the disadvantages of the maximum and the benefits
of free trade have been so much exaggerated.
For the rest, if France during the last twenty-five years has
experienced no general famine, the cause is not in the liberty of
commerce, which knows very well, when it wishes, how to produce
scarcity in the midst of plenty and how to make famine prevail in
the bosom of abundance; it is in the improvement in the methods
of communication, which, shortening distances, soon restore the
equilibrium disturbed for a moment by local penury.
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