Is it fraudulent to mix wines? Chaptal, in his treatise on the art of making wine, advises this as eminently useful; on the other hand, experience proves that certain wines, in some way antagonistic to each other or incompatible, produce by their mixture a disagreeable and unhealthy drink.Then you are obliged to say what wines can be usefully mixed, and what cannot.Is it fraudulent to aromatize, alcoholize, and water wines? Chaptal recommends this also; and everybody knows that this drugging produces sometimes advantageous results, sometimes pernicious and detestable effects.What substances will you proscribe? In what cases? In what proportion? Will you prohibit chicory in coffee, glucose in beer, water, cider, and three-six alcohol in wine?
The Chamber of Deputies, in the rude attempt at a law which it was pleased to make this year regarding the adulteration of wines, stopped in the very middle of its work, overcome by the inextricable difficulties of the question.
It succeeded in declaring that the introduction of water into wine, and of alcohol above the proportion of eighteen per cent., was fraudulent, and in putting this fraud into the category of offences.It was on the ground of ideology; there one never meets an obstacle.But everybody has seen in this redoubling of severity the interest of the treasury much more than that of the consumer; the Chamber did not dare to create a whole army of wine- tasters, inspectors, etc., to watch for fraud and identify it, and thus load the budget with a few extra millions; in prohibiting watering and alcoholization, the only means left to the merchant-manufacturers of putting wine within the reach of all and realizing profits, it did not succeed in increasing the market by a decrease in production.The chamber, in a word, in prosecuting the adulteration of wines, has simply set back the limits of fraud.To make its work accomplish its purpose it would first have to show how the liquor trade is possible without adulteration, and how the people can buy unadulterated wine, -- which is beyond the competency and escapes the capacity of the Chamber.
If you wish the consumer to be guaranteed, both as to value and as to healthfulness, you are forced to know and to determine all that constitutes good and honest production, to be continually at the heels of the manufacturer, and to guide him at every step.He no longer manufactures; you, the State, are the real manufacturer.
Thus you find yourself in a trap.Either you hamper the liberty of commerce by interfering in production in a thousand ways, or you declare yourself sole producer and sole merchant.
In the first case, through annoying everybody, you will finally cause everybody to rebel; and sooner or later, the State getting itself expelled, trade-marks will be abolished.In the second you substitute everywhere the action of power for individual initiative, which is contrary to the principles of political economy and the constitution of society.Do you take a middle course? It is favor, nepotism, hypocrisy, the worst of systems.
Suppose, now, that the marking be left to the manufacturer.I say that then the marks, even if made obligatory, will gradually lose their significance, and at last become only proofs of origin.He knows but little of commerce who imagines that a merchant, a head of a manufacturing enterprise, making use of processes that are not patentable, will betray the secret of his industry, of his profits, of his existence.The significance will then be a delusion; it is not in the power of the police to make it otherwise.
The Roman emperors, to discover the Christians who dissembled their religion, obliged everybody to sacrifice to the idols.They made apostates and martyrs;
and the number of Christians only increased.Likewise significant marks, useful to some houses, will engender innumerable frauds and repressions;
that is all that can be expected of them.To induce the manufacturer to frankly indicate the intrinsic composition -- that is, the industrial and commercial value - of his merchandise, it is necessary to free him from the perils of competition and satisfy his monopolistic instincts: can you do it? It is necessary, further, to interest the consumer in the repression of fraud, which, so long as the producer is not utterly disinterested, is at once impossible and contradictory.Impossible: place on the one hand a depraved consumer, China; on the other a desperate merchant, England;
between them a venomous drug causing excitement and intoxication; and, in spite of all the police in the world, you will have trade in opium.
Contradictory: in society the consumer and the producer are but one, --
that is, both are interested in the production of that which it is injurious to them to consume; and as, in the case of each, consumption follows production and sale, all will combine to guard the first interest, leaving it to each to guard himself against the second.
The thought which prompted trade-marks is of the same character as that which formerly inspired the maximum laws.Here again is one of the innumerable cross-roads of political economy.
It is indisputable that maximum laws, though made and supported by their authors entirely as a relief from famine, have invariably resulted in an aggravation of famine.Accordingly it is not injustice or malice with which the economists charge these abhorred laws, but stupidity, inexpediency.
But what a contradiction in the theory with which they oppose them!
To relieve famine it is necessary to call up provisions, or, to put it better, to bring them to light; so far there is nothing to reproach.
To secure a supply of provisions it is necessary to attract the holders by profits, excite their competition, and assure them complete liberty in the market: does not this process strike you as the absurdest homoeopathy?
How is it that the more easily I can be taxed the sooner I shall be provided?
