… is from the newly released collection of Bastiat‘s letters, The Man and the Statesman: The Correspondence and Articles on Politics; this quotation – from a letter that Bastiat wrote to Richard Cobden – is highlighted in James Grants’s delightful review of this collection in today’s Wall Street Journal:
I want not so much free trade as the spirit of free trade for my country. Free trade means a little more wealth; the spirit of free trade is a reform of the mind itself, that is to say, the source of all reforms.
(HT Fred Dent)
