All those to whom I gave it keep expressing their surprise towards the serious facts that are revealed in it.

Frédéric Bastiat
Complete Works, Volume 7, pages 374 to 377 (in French)
July 29th, 1845

Frédéric Bastiat addresses here a few copies of his book Cobden and the League that had just been published to Abraham Walter Paulton. He is upset by the cool reception in France to this book that describes, through the translations of the Anti Corn Law League speeches, the liberal movement in England. This is the point of today’s quote.

The optimist view is that it is appreciated by the few readers it managed to reach, be it Hippolyte Passy, pair of France and former trade minister or M. de Langsdorf, chargé d’affaires in the Grand Duchy of Baden. However, the latter has only discovered the existence of the League through the book, thus underlying the total lack of knowledge about the topic in Germany.

What this letter shows us is the difficulty there was in having liberal ideas circulating then in the countries where the press was not interested in it. This reminds me of the issue that was very strong until the end of the 20th century when access to information was complicated. When I was young, the liberal thoughts in the United States were laughed at in France and most of us would accept whatever was said about it (Milton Friedman was a swearword in my family for example and only some insiders would then have been able to discover him through his writings). Nowadays, access to the internet highly facilitates access for anybody to the writings and videos of anybody expressing ideas that do not conform to the generally accepted presuppositions. I find this admirable.