OfD wA./'Pvci. 
 
 .■ILLot 
 
 
 
THE 
 
 DOCTRINE AND 
 
 OF 
 
 POLICY 
 
 PROTECTIO^^, 
 
 )F THE FEDERAL 
 AESENT TIME. 
 
 UR TARIFFS, 
 
 SECOnrW-UANO SHIPS FOH SAJLE. 
 
 England has a large sarplus of tonnage which 
 she is trying very hard to dispose of. These snper- 
 flaous idle vessels are the result of over- speculation 
 in that branch of commerce in Great Britain, just 
 as there has been over-speculation in our internal 
 transportation by establishing too many competing 
 lines of railway, and by starting others through ter- 
 ritory that has not bnsiness to support them. If the 
 owners of the idle ships referred to would take their 
 pay in these useless or used-up railroads, it is possi- 
 ble something in the way of rational exchange might 
 be accomplished ; but to take the cast-off lumber 
 and iron of the British ship yards, to the damage of 
 our own builders and their workmen, and to keep 
 our railway and other lumber and iron unavailable 
 on our own hands, looks a little too much like the 
 buzzard and turkey divide between the white hunter 
 and the Indian ; it is t urkey all the time on one e idfi, 
 and teozzard njl tha tinnft nn-lhfi Other. 
 
 Philadelphia, Ledger, 
 
 EY ■ ^ 
 
 DR. WILLIAM ELDER. 
 
 PHILADELPHIA: 
 
 Published and for sale by RINGWALT & BROWN, No. 34 South Third St. 
 Price, 10 cts. per copy^ 75 cts. per dozen; $5.00 per hundred. 
 
—It appears from the Newcastle Daily Chronicle / 
 that the people who are selling American meat In 
 the north of England have been interfered with in a 
 singular manner. The town council of Newcastle 
 let to Mr. Tindall, a gentleman employed by .John 
 Hell A Sons, the consignees of T. C, Eastman, of 
 this city, a cattle shed at a rental of $375 a year. 
 
 This was used as the wholesale sales-room of Ame- 
 rican meat. East month, without a word of warn- 
 ing the town authorities of Newcastle tore off the 
 sides ol the shed, just as a consignment of meat was 
 to arrive, leaving the interior exposed to the wea- 
 ther. This was done without explanation, although 
 the animus of it was clear enough. The American 
 importations by the agents ol Mr. Eastman, which 
 amount to 1,500,000 pounds annually to the north of 
 England have kept down the price of meat in that 
 region, and the liveliest hostility is entertained 
 towards the Americans and their agents by the local 
 and Irish dealers. This unfriendly act of the town 
 authorities, being without cause, was immediately 
 protested against by Evan K. Jones, the United 
 states Consul, and every effort is being made by 
 
 Tins Essay upon tlie Protection of American Industry was first published in a 
 
 series of articles which appeared in The Press” during the month of June last — 
 
 Col. Forney having kindly consented to the re-publication in the present form. 
 The judgment of the most competent political economists with whom we are 
 
 acquainted, affirms our own of the value of the treatise. They think with us that, 
 
 it ought to be put into convenient form for general distribution. It is not a partisan 
 
 presentment of the subject, but a candid, bold, and clear discussion of the topics 
 
 involved. We have given the name of the author upon the title page, for the 
 
 better assurance of the public that it is well v/orth a careful perusal. A glance at 
 the headings of the sections is sufficient to show how wide and comprehensive is the 
 
 view which he has taken of his subject. 
 
 THE rUBLISHERS. 
 
 rniLABEi.pniA, August, 1860. 
 
THE DOCTRIM AND POLICY OP PROTECTION. 
 
 REVIVAL OF PROTECTION DOCTRINE — REVENUE 
 AND PROTECTION INTER-DEPENDENT. 
 
 The passage of the Morrill tarilf bill through 
 the House of Representatives by a majority so 
 much larger than its warmest friends expected, 
 and the slightness of the resistance offered to 
 it by the men classed as its opponents, indi- 
 cate a favorable change in the governing mind 
 of the nation. The system of ad valorem 
 duties has been so long in operation, and the 
 doctrine of protection had fallen so much in 
 current opinion, that the large success of the 
 counter movement excites as much surprise as 
 pleasure among its friends. Four years ago 
 protection was generally regarded as an obso- 
 lete idea, although the tariff of 1840 was, in 
 fact, decidedly protective, both by its discrim- 
 inations and its rates of duty — failing only in 
 the mode of assessment — and the income from 
 customs was so much in excess of the wants of 
 the Treasury, that the politicians, the statisti- 
 cians, and the people, felt the resulting embar- 
 rassment of maintaining a theory of protection, 
 absolute and adequate, both in the rates of 
 duty and the manner of levying them. It was 
 not clearly understood tha^the lower rates of 
 duty produce the larger revenue, although this 
 was the very ground upon which the tariff of 
 1846 was put by Mr, Walker and its ablest 
 advocates. Even Mr. Guthrie recommended 
 a general reduction of about fifteen per cent, 
 upon the tariff as a means of reducing the ac- 
 cumulating surplus in the Treasury. This 
 was a general mistake. The tariff of 1857 
 shows to what an extent it prevailed. The 
 enormously high tariff of 1828, in its highest 
 year, produced but twenty-eight millions of 
 revenue, for the reason that the foreign im- 
 ports per head of the population never went 
 above six dollars and twenty-five cents; while 
 the moderate tariff of 1846 raised the customs 
 of 1853, to sixty-four millions, because the 
 importations had swollen to ten dollars a head 
 of the population, and in 1857 to eleven dollars 
 and eighty-two cents. Our duty-paying im- 
 ports have varied in amount in five years, 
 from one hundred and eighty-three to two 
 hundred and ninety-four millions, or more 
 than doubled. How, then, can a system of 
 finance be founded upon a mere difference of 
 percentages, without regard to their effect 
 upon the amount of the imports ? Twenty-five 
 per cent, more duty may produce twenty-five 
 per cent, less revenue, and vice versa. A tariff, 
 to be a steady revenue measure, must be con- 
 structed in reference to the amount of imports 
 it favors, as well as to the rate of imposts 
 
 which it levies. It is the business of our Leg- 
 islators, as much as it is of the industrial 
 classes, to regulate our foreign trade. Adjust- 
 ment to the wants of the Government is just 
 as necessary as to the interests of domestic 
 industry ; and, fortunately, the requirements 
 of the Government and the interests of home 
 industry are not at variance. Duties so high 
 as to be prohibitory, or nearly so, would beg- 
 gar the Treasury ; very much too low, say five 
 per cent, upon three hundred millions of duti- 
 able imports, would yield the revenue but 
 fifteen millions per annum ; an average of 
 twenty-five per cent, yields seventy-five mil- 
 lions. Neither of these rates has the power to 
 regulate the amount of imports, nor of the 
 accruing revenue. No mere rule of per-cent- 
 ages, exclusively arithmetical, can do it. At 
 an average below twenty per cent., the cus- 
 toms last year amounted to fifty millions. If 
 the country had wholly recovered itself from 
 the revulsion of 1857, the amount would have 
 been seventy-five millons. The secret is not 
 to be found in the multiplication table, nor in 
 the noddles of ciphering statisticians. 
 
 On the other hand, adequate protection to 
 the productive forces of the country is not mis- 
 chievous to the national revenue from customs. 
 All that is gained by the one is not lost by the 
 other, for foreign trade is a variable quantity. 
 Its amount may be increased by a policy which 
 regulates it in the whole, while it restrains it 
 in particulars. A nation needing it only 
 wants the capability of buying a thousand lux- 
 uries which it cannot yet produce for itself. 
 By a sound policy secure to it the power to 
 purchase and its exchanges will enlarge in 
 proportion. England has a revenue of one 
 hundred and ten millions of dollars from cus- 
 toms, although her system is as nearly free 
 trade as may be, simply because she is able to 
 buy nearly a thousand millions’ worth of for- 
 eign products. Some how or other, the ab- 
 surdly high tariff of 1828 allowed a sufficient 
 income from customs to free the nation from 
 debt, and yield besides so large a revenue for 
 current purposes, that it led to the adoption 
 of a large free list in 1832, by which coffee, 
 tea, and other tropical luxuries, were for the 
 first time exempted from duty, and brought 
 within the reach of the poorest of our people. 
 
 Here, again, it is apparent that the problem 
 of national finance is too broad for a mere 
 schoolmaster or a bureau clerk. That it has 
 been too hard for our politicians is well proved 
 by the twenty different tariffs which we have 
 had in the last seventy years. 
 
 JL 
 
 ( 3 ) 
 
4 
 
 t 
 
 PRACTICAL SOLUTION OF THE QUESTION BY 
 NAPOLEON. 
 
 If a true system of international trade could 
 be built out of logic, theorists would have ac- 
 complished it by this time, for there has been 
 a vast quantity of brains employed in the 
 speculation. If experiment could liave blun- 
 dered on it, it would have been found long 
 ago, for nations have again and again run the 
 whole round of hap-hazard trials. Or if it 
 were any one unchangeable thing, and the 
 same conditions could concur twice in as many 
 centuries among the same people, men miglit 
 have learned something useful from experience, 
 whether they understood its principles or not; 
 but neither naked logic nor luck can command 
 it. Napoleon I. was ahead of us in this 
 opinion. He said : “ If an Empire were made 
 of adamant, political economy would grind it 
 to dust.” He prohibited the publication of 
 J. B. Say’s system for a dozen years. He knew 
 that the logic of that work was specious, and he 
 knew that it was pernicious; and being too busy 
 with the practical work of governing a nation 
 to enter the lists as a disputant, he interdicted 
 the book. Under the circumstances he was 
 exactly right. The short answer of a blockade 
 all around the maritime coasts of continental 
 Europe, declared by the Berlin and Milan de- 
 crees, was the practical solution of the ques- 
 tions involved. Then again, the sword cut 
 the gordian knot, and France and Germany 
 were thereby released from industrial depen- 
 dence upon Great Britain forever. A profes- 
 sor of political economy could not have done 
 as much with any quantity of foolscap. 
 
 Napoleon had another idea worthy of him. 
 “Formerly,” he said, “there was only one 
 kind of property, land; another has since 
 arisen, industry ;” and he held it as wise and 
 as necessary to defend the one as the other 
 from foreign invasion. He knew that a na- 
 tion’s welfare is not measured by its foreign 
 trade, but by its productive power — that the 
 policy of a huckster is not the law of national 
 life ; and he freely sacrificed values, while he 
 fostered and cherished the power that pro- 
 duced them. He would not stand to haggle 
 over prices, but concerned himself with the 
 real question — how shall a nation increase its 
 powm- to command and consume commodities? 
 Neither has Gobden over-reached liis nephew. 
 Thirty per cent, duties, reduced to specifics, 
 and useless ])rohibi(ions removed, because no 
 longer necessary or y)()litic, kcei)S France safe 
 from d(!.H(ructive comi)efition. Ho may rc- 
 rnemlutr tiuit Lord Biuxhijiam said in 1815, 
 “ lOnglanil can afford to incur some loss on 
 the (ixport of English goods, for the pur|)ose 
 of dcslroying foredgn manufaef ures in tJieir 
 cradl*!,” and that (lie renowned .Ioseimi Hume, 
 in I H'JH, declared in I'arliament ( hat ho desired 
 to see “the mariu fn(;( ures of (he conlinent 
 sfrangleil in (h<^ cradle.” Or ho may have 
 read the icport made in I’arlianu'ut, upon 
 (lu! condition of (Iw; peiiple in (he mining dis- 
 trief-', in IH.')!, in whi(!h (hc^ following ai'gu- 
 ment is pu( (o tlu! strikers for higher wages: 
 
 “Authentic instances arc well known of 
 (English) employers having in such times 
 (times of depressed prices) carried on their 
 works, at a loss amounting to three or four 
 hundred thousand pounds in the course of as 
 many years. If the efi'orts of those who en- 
 courage the combination to restrict (he amount 
 of labor, and to produce strikes, were to be 
 successful for any length of time, the great 
 accumulations of capital could no longer be 
 made, which enable a few of the most wealthy 
 capitalists to overwhelm all foreign competition 
 in times of great depression, and thus to clear 
 the way for the whole trade to step in when 
 prices revive, and to carry on a great business 
 before foreign capital can again accumulate 
 to such an extent as to be able to establish a 
 competition in prices with any chance of 
 success.” 
 
 That Louis Napoleon had these things in 
 his mind when he concluded the late treaty 
 with England, is clear enough, and according- 
 ly he treated the English economists’ books, 
 and the free traders’ speeches, just as he 
 treated their other commodities, made, not for 
 home consumption, but for foreign markets. 
 
 trade, the one idea of free-trade 
 
 AUTHORITIES. 
 
 Political economy, as it is formally taught 
 and popularly apprehended, begins with 
 wealth, and ends with wealth, by which is 
 meant material riches, capital, or exchange- 
 able values. Adam Smith treats the whole 
 subject within the limits of an “Inquiry into 
 the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Na- 
 tions.” J. B. Say, his best expositor, and the 
 founder of the prevailing school, thinks Politi- 
 cal Economy is nothing else than a science of 
 “The Production, Distribution and Consump- 
 tion of Wealth.'" McCulloch says, “it may 
 be defined to be the science of values;” and 
 Archbishop Whately even proposed to sub- 
 stitute the definition, ‘ ‘A Science of Exchanges. ” 
 Taking either the technical or popular notion, 
 a complete system might be justly called a 
 Treatise upon Trade, a Mercantile Policy, or 
 anything else that concerns itself first and only 
 with the products of industry when they are 
 ready for mai;Jvct, or brought into the field of 
 distribution. To this limited apprehension, 
 the maxim “buy cheap and sell dear” exactly 
 corresponds. There is nothing else in the 
 whole system. A nation is regarded as a mer- 
 chant, whoso wliole concern is to make the 
 largest profit out of the trade in which it is at 
 the moment engaged ; and buying and selling 
 between distant communities of men is held to 
 bo the moans and the measure of national 
 prosperity. In other words, national wealth 
 is ])roduced by exchange or barter, which, of 
 course, is entitled to the first consideration 
 and the best etforts of a people aiming at ad- 
 vancement. Hero money and merclnindise arc 
 central and supreme; and man, if ho is con- 
 sidered at all, must bo regarded simply as an 
 instrument of production. Under this system 
 it is not HO clear that products arc made for 
 
5 
 
 men as that men are made for products ; and 
 consumpiion is, accordingly, only an expression 
 of demand, and a condition of supply; and 
 prices are regarded only as they facilitate or 
 hinder that consumption which keeps up trade. 
 
 The man of the economists, obviously enough, 
 ismot the man of nature and society. Their 
 theory is nothing but a policy of exchangeable 
 values. Invoices and ledgers are its exponents, 
 and exports and imports its only data. But a 
 science of society, a theory of national life, 
 should be occupied with the individual and 
 national welfare of men. It should concern 
 itself with the productive power of a people, 
 and with their power to consume products ; 
 and with trade and exchange only as they con- 
 tribute to these, which are the means and the 
 objects of wealth. The wealth of a man, or of 
 a nation, consists of, and is measured by, 
 their power to command the services of nature 
 for their uses ; their productive power, there- 
 fore, and their consumption of products, are the 
 starting points of study, as they are the things 
 to be secured and promoted in a true system 
 of social science. All else is but subsidiary to 
 these ends. Neither international free trade, 
 nor commercial restriction and protection are 
 anything more than means or agencies. They 
 are not in themselves substantive or absolute. 
 They are regulative or remedial, but they are 
 not of the essence of political or national life ; 
 they are not ends or aims, but means of attain- 
 ment. 
 
 PRINCIPLES AND AIMS OP A TRUE NATIONAL 
 SYSTEM. 
 
 Before proceeding to state our doctrine of 
 Protection, we propose, briefly and as clearly 
 as we can, to outline our notion of political 
 economy applied in the practice of a nation’s 
 government. 
 
 To be sound, beneficial, and practical, it 
 should rest alike upon Philosophy and Policy, 
 upon reason and expediency. The experience 
 of the past, adjusted to the exigencies of the 
 present, is to be consulted and observed, and 
 the future must be kept steadily in view, and 
 be allowed its due influence upon opinion and 
 action in the present, just as the end of a 
 journey rightly directs every footstep in the 
 route, and for the reason that, whatever best 
 promotes the maturity of a process is necessa- 
 rily best adapted to every stage of its growth. 
 
 In the matter of international relations. 
 Philosophy teaches the importance and the 
 necessity of trade and exchange between na- 
 tions which are dissimilar in their natural or 
 acquired capabilities of production, in all 
 things in which they can be mutually helpful 
 or complementary. It enjoins abstinence from 
 war ; the establishment of international law, 
 governing their necessary relations according 
 to justice and amity ; and, freedom of commu- 
 nication in all things that promote their moral 
 and material interests. So far, a sound na- 
 tional economy is cosmopolitan in its range ; 
 but, furtlier than the well-being of the whole 
 race m it listers to that of a particular nation 
 that nation must not go in philanthropy. Its 
 
 immediate concern is self-development; and 
 after, and subsidary to this, all that is practi- 
 cable for the world outside. Here Policy has 
 place, and the maxims of universal and mil- 
 lenial science must be put under the limitations 
 of expediency. 
 
 A wise administration, in the case of a par- 
 ticular people, pursues special objects — mea- 
 sures calculated to hasten their progress in 
 civilization, power, and well-being, and the 
 improvement of their social condition, so that 
 the body politic shall be harmoniously devel- 
 oped in all its parts, perfect in itself, and 
 politically independent. The teachings of ab- 
 stract theory must be accommodated to the ac- 
 tual conditions and capacities of the people. 
 First principles and general laws apply only 
 in those sciences whose subjects are fixed, 
 orderly, and perfect, as in arithmetic, and in 
 chemistry ; but the remedial arts, whether 
 they are medical or political, have disorder, 
 inconstancy, and variability to deal with, and 
 their principles and policies cannot be thrown 
 into stereotyped formulae. 
 
 THE COSMOPOLITE SCHOOL OF THEORISTS. 
 
 A mind, governed wholly by what it calls ex- 
 perience, blindly follows the restrictive sys- 
 tem of national policy, if that is the inherited 
 faith, on the assumption that customs, favora- 
 ble in any circumstances, are best for all cir- 
 cumstances, and that the restraints imposed 
 upon childhood are necessary to maturity. 
 Such a man believes that it was the toll-gate, 
 not the turnpike-road, that cheapened the 
 butter he bought in market thirty years ago, 
 and he has terrible apprehensions of a free 
 road after such an experience. England levied 
 a duty of thirty-two dollars per ton upon iron 
 for years after she was making it at fifteen dol- 
 lars less than it could be done by the nations 
 whose competition she was defending herself 
 from ! Your man of experience is thoroughly 
 convinced that his own shadow is the only 
 light to walk in. On the other hand, the 
 speculative free-trader turns the little end of 
 his telescope upon the routinist, and imagines 
 he sees him at his exact relative distance. 
 How small, and how high up in antiquity, the 
 man who would be meddling with the natural 
 and universal law of things seems to him ! 
 How narrow the theory that does not embrace 
 the whole family of nations as in millenial 
 harmony and identity of interest, and governed 
 by the one general law of unconditional policy ! 
 With him, diversity of conditions and difi'eren- 
 ces of nationality are of no account, because 
 he is quite sure that man is cosmopolite ; that 
 the zones were intended to supply each other’s 
 deficiencies ; that the laws of trade are just as 
 inflexible as those of chemical affinity, or the 
 attraction of gravitation ; that commerce is 
 the great civilizer, Christianizer, and equali- 
 zer of the earth; that the more a nation trades 
 with other nations, and the greater the distance 
 between them, the better ; that if one nation 
 limits its purchases by restrictive imposts, it 
 must limit its sales in the same proportion ; 
 that every penny added to the cost of a foreign 
 
G 
 
 commodity makes it that much dearei’ to the ! 
 consumer; that protection is a monopoly to flie 
 few at the expense of the many ; and a thou- 
 sand other plausibilities and platitudes are 
 ready to overwhelm the man of policy ; 
 and with all the less respect for his opinions, 
 that he is really regarded as a mere charlatan 
 in social science. 
 
 These people deal in generalities always. 
 With them freedom of trade means free foreign 
 trade; but whether that might in any case 
 prevent free domestic trade tlicy will not stop ! 
 to inquire. Ask them, “ when free trade 
 means slave men, what will you do about it?” 
 The answer is another generality, “buy where 
 you can buy cheapest, is the law of merchan- 
 dising, and that will take care of its own 
 consequences.” With them whatever is “free” 
 is right and best; and, if commerce is in any 
 case a conflict, a free fight has their sanction, 
 and they would pull down custom-houses 
 though they were shown to be fortifications of 
 defence. Appeal to history and you are 
 answered that it is obselete ; that policy is a 
 blunder and abuse; and that the practical is 
 nothing but routine. They deny all results to 
 be effects ; and declare that England, whose 
 system has been the most restrictive, and 
 whose success has been correspondingly com- 
 plete, prospered, not by her policy, but in 
 spite of it. Why? Why, because it was un- 
 philosophical. Which means, that the neces- 
 sary policy of feebleness is not the true theory 
 of conduct, because it is not only unnecessary, 
 but inconvenient and burdensome to matured 
 strength ; that no child should be tolerated 
 when once a man is produced ; that the end 
 is so much better than the beginning, that 
 the alphabet and infancy ought to be instantly 
 abolished. 
 
 These are philanthropists, not statesmen; 
 prophets, not historians ; theorists, not phi- 
 losophers. They do not know that civil 
 government is a system of expediency, and 
 not of speculation ; that the absolute best is 
 not so good for use as the best adjusted; nor 
 that liberty itself must be postponed for law, 
 under which it may grow until it becomes 
 identical with law. Tliey do not know that 
 absolute science applies only to order and 
 healtli, not to disorder and disease. They 
 would repress tlie adhesiveinflammation which 
 heals a broken bone, because it is not the nor- 
 mal state* of the circulation; and would tell 
 the convahiscent Dial lie got well in spile of 
 if. — that tlic sfilinis and bandages did not pro- 
 te*ct, l)ut rather eniliarassed tlie conslitufional 
 forces. 'I’his is I he way (liey treat the naviga- 
 tion act of Ihigland, umh'r which lu'r navy 
 grew to the niasfei'y of the ocean; and her 
 jerofc.ctive syslciri, wliich lias given lu'r ])re- 
 ceih'uce anmng the industrial and coniinei'cial 
 nations of t Ik; earth. 
 
 'I’hat I Ik; sysfi'in of the iheorisls of the 
 Hmith and S\y school is cosinopolil i(;al, and 
 not jiaf ional, is apparent (Voni the fact that all 
 their principles are ah.'dracf, universal, and 
 uneondil ion.'il; I hat universal peace* is the basis 
 of Die.ir whole .'ilructure of doctrines; that 
 
 they hold all mcarsures of civil government 
 for the promotion of industrial prosperity as 
 utterly useless; and teach, in ge/icral, that to 
 “ i-aisc a State from the lowest degree of bar- 
 barism to the highest jirosperity of whicli it 
 is capable, only three things are necessary — 
 moderate taxation, a good administration of 
 distributive justice, and peace, foreign and do- 
 mestic.” This is the language of Aoam Smitu. 
 J, C. Say speaks of private economy, by which 
 he means that of the single family ; public 
 \ economy, which is that of a nation ; and of 
 political economy, by which he intends that of 
 all nations, or of the whole human race, con- 
 sidered as one great partnership of mutual and 
 harmonious relations in trade and commerce ; 
 but he does not treat of i\n^ public or national 
 economy, thus distinguished from political, at 
 all ; yet his disciples insist that his system is 
 a manual and a directory for statesmen ! 
 
 AVe will now endeavor to present such ideas 
 of a national system of economy as may help 
 us to a better elucidation of our particular 
 subject. 
 
 ADAPTATION OF POLICY TO NATIONAL CONDITIONS. 
 
 A science or system of political economy, 
 true in principle and useful in application, 
 must be adapted to the special conditions of 
 the people with whose affairs it is concerned. 
 But there are now existing in the world nations 
 in the savage state ; others in the pastoral ; 
 others purely agricultural ; others mixed agri- 
 cultural and manufacturing ; and others, still, 
 who are agricultural, manufacturing and com- 
 mercial ; and all of them are yet further varied 
 by their respective degrees of advancement in 
 each of these stages. Moreover, some of them 
 occupy the frigid, some the torrid, and some 
 the temperate zones, with their capabilities 
 and their destinies either inflexibly fixed or 
 greatly influenced by climatic laws. Nor is 
 national character to be overlooked. They are 
 not all equally capable of everything, nor can 
 the races of men be treated as homogenous and 
 equal in the things with which economical sci- 
 ence is concerned ; and we have not yet em- 
 braced all the diversities of condition with 
 which a practical system is necessarily occu- 
 pied ; for the same people, if they are favora- 
 bly situated in a temperate climate, with a 
 sufficient extent of territory, and variety of 
 industrial agencies, must, in the progress of 
 growtli, pass tlirough all the stages, from the 
 simplest agricidture up to the most perfect and 
 complete diversification of productive industry 
 and international commerce. No code of doc- 
 trinal and practical economy can be true for 
 all Ihcso differences of condition in which 
 Hlalos are actually found; and no system will 
 ajiply to the same people in ciroumstaiioes ma- 
 terially changed. 
 
 'I'lie lhs(iuiniaux of the Arctic region may 
 liavo an invariable jniblio law, simply because 
 they need none of any kind, 'flioir productive 
 indiislry di tiers in nolliing, with whicli political 
 economy can lie concerned, from Itiat of the 
 polar lieai’S and walruses. Boniewhat nearer 
 I the borders of civilization, barter in furs and 
 
7 
 
 peltry with foreigners can be just as well con- 
 ducted without a system of public policy. — 
 For such regions and conditions a uniform 
 and permanent rule of conduct may be easily 
 contrived. Adam Smith’s notion of light 
 taxes, social justice, and national peace, as the 
 sum and substance of a political economy, is 
 just in place. In the tropical and semi-tropi- 
 cal regions of the earth, there is such constancy 
 of conditions, and such limitations of indus- 
 trial productiveness, and their communities 
 are so far removed from the class of progres- 
 sive nations, that the primal laws of nature 
 need but little modification for their political 
 uses. A people who cannot considerabl}^ di- 
 versify their industry, or develop their pro- 
 ductive power except by mere increase of force 
 in a single form, depend upon a natural mo- 
 nopoly of their special product ; and that 
 condition of things takes the government of 
 their affairs out of the reach of all interfer- 
 ence. If their soil, climate, and quality of 
 labor are capable only of more cotton, rice, 
 gold, or silver, until their soils and mines are 
 exhausted, they no more need a system of po- 
 litical economy, regulative and protective, 
 than the Esquimaux do. The philosophy of 
 the “ let alone” system, or universal free trade, 
 is precisely the thing for them, from the be- 
 gining to the end of their career. A theory of 
 their interests is just what a work on botany 
 is to the vegetable word — descriptive, but not 
 in any sense directory. It is as far from a 
 code of economical laws as a zoological treatise 
 is from a system of jurisprudence for the ani- 
 mal kingdom ; that is, they can have a logical 
 and invariable doctrine of industrial policy, 
 because they need none vdiatever. States 
 dedicated by nature to cotton-growing exclu- 
 sively have but two cardinal points of policy 
 to pursue — the one is, to increase the quantity 
 of their product ; the other to get exchange 
 commodities as cheap as possible. Values 
 and profits are their sole concern, and all 
 other things are subordinate to these. “Buy 
 cheap and sell dear,” is their policy of trade. 
 Their prosperity, such as they are capable of, 
 demands the freest intercourse with the more 
 advanced nations, whom they need as custo- 
 mers and consumers. “Light taxes, internal 
 order, and general peace,” is their system, 
 certainly, and the whole of it. With them 
 exchangeable values is everything, the de- 
 velopment of productive power, or the na- 
 tional power, nothing. Only secure to them 
 their national independence, and the simplest 
 instincts will take care of their national life. 
 Unrestricted trade, or trade without law, is 
 their natural rule. 
 
 But nations in the temperate climates, well 
 provided for progress, and with a future before 
 them, have their fortunes to make or mar by 
 their own management. Their destiny is not 
 determined, nor their conditions established 
 by a vertical sun in the heavens, or a continent 
 of ice on the earth. They occupy a position 
 that imposes responsibility, because it confers 
 freedom. They are to master the elements, 
 not to submit to them; and that “natural 
 
 law,” or naturalness of law which rules ani- 
 mals and men who cannot materially modify 
 their own fortunes, loses all its authoritative 
 absoluteness for them. 
 
 Such a people, in their transition from simple 
 agriculture, in all its earlier stages, will have 
 their welfare greatly promoted by unrestricted 
 commerce with manufacturing and commercial 
 nations ; their exchanges will be more profita- 
 ble ; the importation of instruments of pro- 
 duction, and the supply of wants which they 
 are not yet in condition to meet by their own 
 industry, operate every way to their benefit. 
 Their production and consumption are in- 
 creased ; their enterprise is stimulated ; they 
 are educated and refined ; their ambition for 
 excellence is awakened ; and every form of 
 advantage, moral and material, is derived to 
 them, as all that are inferior must profit by 
 commerce with their superiors, up to the point 
 where that commerce begins to repress their 
 own growth. 
 
 The external trade of nations of the tempe- 
 rate zones with those of the frigid and tropi- 
 cal, is so inflexibly determined by the natural 
 law of the subject that it offers no problem for 
 the exercise of reasoning, submits to no system 
 of policy, and neither asks nor allows any 
 regulative interference. But the trade of the 
 several communities of men occupying similar 
 climates, and with similar capabilities in all 
 things, is necessarily subject to conditions, 
 and is materially dependent upon them for 
 its policy. Two neighboring islands in the 
 Caribean sea have no more natural reciproci- 
 ties of want and supply, than two adjoining 
 farmers, or two gold-diggers, working in the 
 same mine. Great Britain, France and Ger- 
 many, are not by nature so unlike that either 
 of them must of necessity be the food-produ- 
 cer, or cloth-maker, or manufacturer of tools 
 and cutlery, for the other. England must go 
 to France or elsewhere for her wines, and 
 France must get her copper from England if 
 she can find no mines of the ore in her own 
 territory ; for the natural law of trade is the 
 mutual supply of the things in which the parties 
 a, re respectively deficient. This condition of ex- 
 change exists, therefore, not only as to com- 
 modities or products, of which either has the 
 natural monopoly, but also as to those things 
 which either may be accidentally and tempo- 
 rarily incapable of furnishing on demand for 
 use. The economical condition of a country 
 of even the highest prospective capabilities, 
 while yet in its infancy, thinly peopled, and 
 with little material and mental capital, is 
 greatly benefitted by free trade with manu- 
 facturing nations. But it cannot be too 
 strongly insisted upon that all foreign trade 
 must be merely complementary, for all other 
 and all beyond this is merely domination of the 
 one and dependency of the other. An emi- 
 grant to one of our Western prairies may ad- 
 vantageously, because he must, work in his 
 neighbor-farmer’s cornfield for a year or two, 
 and take his wages in corn and pork ; but if 
 he continues to sell his labor thus for a dozen 
 years, he is at the same time selling his farm 
 
8 
 
 to that neighbor and losing the ownership. 
 So a whole nation may very profitably exchange 
 its raw materials and provisions for foreign 
 manufactures, until its own labor and capital 
 can supply them for domestic use. In other 
 words exchangeable values may be the aim of a 
 national policy, while they promote productive 
 power ; but when trade begins to cripple pro- 
 duction, it must be subordinated. In a nation 
 holding the highest rank, or rapidly approach- 
 ing it, raw materials and provisions have their 
 whole value in home consumption and inter- 
 nal trade. 
 
 EXPORT OP RAW PRODUCTS, THE TRADE OF RAW 
 COMMUNITIES. 
 
 A nation which exports all its products raw, 
 and imports all its manufactures, cannot grow 
 in wealth, population and power above the 
 grade of infancy and dependence. Its exports 
 are enormous in bulk and low in value; its 
 imports are small in bulk and high in value. 
 The exports must bear the cost of their trans- 
 port to foreign markets, and the imports must 
 pay an equal freight, for ships that return in 
 ballast must be compensated, in effect, for the 
 loss of cargo. If Alabama exchanges a bale 
 of cotton with England for one pound of lace, 
 she must pay the full freight of the return trip 
 to the vessel which carried her raw cotton 
 across the Atlantic ; for there is no raw mate- 
 rial of equal bulk to come from England again, 
 either to her own ports or those of the West 
 Indies. The farmer who hauls fifty bushels of 
 wheat a day’s journey to the market, and 
 brings home the price in silks for his wife and 
 daughters, must charge that little bundle with 
 the freight of a ton and a half of goods, or else 
 charge the wheat with the expense of the re- 
 turn trip, which comes to the same thing ; for 
 it is clear that even Avhen the exchanged pro- 
 ducts bear their own cost of transportation, 
 the difference betiveen the freights of the com- 
 modities exchanged must fall upon the heavier 
 article. This is always against the exporter 
 of raAv materials. 
 
 It is not denied that an Indian hunter makes 
 a large profit by exchanging a horse-load of 
 doer and beaver skins for a blanket, a rifle, 
 and a few pounds of powder and lead ; but it 
 cannot be doubted that if he continues this 
 trade for a generation or so, tlm purchaser of 
 liis pedtries will become the owner of his liunt- 
 ing grounds; and there is nothing in the dif- 
 ference of color or race that can lake such a 
 traffic out, the laws of trade. In due time the 
 clock-peddlei-s of New Kngland must take i)os- 
 HCHKion of the fai'in-lands of old Virginia, if 
 Virginia continiu's (o (;xcha,ngo her raw mate- 
 rials for V'ankee clocks. If V'ii’ginia had the 
 natural monopoly of anything which I he Avorld 
 outside, requires, sIm; c.ould live out her na- 
 tional life, and g(!t along a.s well as [jossible 
 ujion external trad(q until sin; ha<l sold out. 
 and exhnui'tcd that, speciality of Imm’S. Hut, 
 slni liitit nothing that, the laws of nature can 
 take cure of if sIk; neglecl.sit h(‘rH(df; and she 
 muHl perish like a sfiendt hrift if sin* neglects 
 or mistake.s (lie j)olicy of her own W(dfaro. — 
 
 Ireland exported provisions largely when her 
 people were starving, and flax when they were 
 naked. Ireland had nothing which the laws 
 of nature could protect against the laws of 
 trade ; she had nobody to take care of her 
 welfare but its enemies, and she Avas reduced 
 to selling her food, and starving, and expatri- 
 ating her people; a process that, in Ireland 
 and Virginia is mildly called emigration. — 
 With ten or a dozen people to the scjuare mile 
 in a new and fertile country, the savage sys- 
 tem of selling abroad whatever nature yields 
 with the least possible help of skill and art, 
 may be borne, but fifty people to the square 
 mile must starve or run off their excessive pop- 
 ulation. 
 
 AGRICULTURE OP TEMPERATE CLIMATES. 
 
 A nation of the temperate zone, having the 
 capabilities of a varied industry, must culti- 
 vate, and protect its productive liberties against 
 invading competition ; it must restrict a re- 
 pressing foreign trade, or it must restrict itself 
 to the coarsest, least remunerative, least edu- 
 cating foi’ms of labor. Unmixed agriculture 
 cannot develop the enterprise and skill of its 
 people. It cannot accomplish that division of 
 labor which brings into use every variety of 
 ability, and associates a community helpfully 
 in accumulating wealth. One-half its popula- 
 tion — its women — must be put into the sup- 
 ported class, or driven to unsuited drudgery ; 
 another quarter — those not physically qualified 
 for the labors of the field — are made non-pro- 
 ducers and dependants, and all the remainder, 
 except a few traders and cobblers, are kept in 
 competitive rivalry, under-working and under- 
 selling each other in that foreign market to 
 which they have already sold their industrial 
 liberty, for the most trivial of all considera- 
 tions, a matter of nominal ditference in price, 
 at the sacrifice of the ability to purchase and 
 consume commodities. 
 
 The farming interest cannot prosper without 
 a home market. Only the heaviest, cheapest, 
 and smallest variety of its products will bear 
 distant transportation. It cannot have a home 
 market that can be relied upon unless two- 
 thirds of the population are engaged in other 
 industrial occupations ; and if the country does 
 not protect and defend these against foreign 
 hostility, all the conditions of groAVth in wealth 
 and power must fail. 
 
 The immediate loss by protection prices to a 
 community, ready to begin a career of indus- 
 trial independence, is a loss in values merely, 
 but tlic country gains productive poxver, by 
 Avliich it is enabled to produce an indefinite 
 mass of values; or this loss of values may be 
 regardofl as (he price of training, to be after- 
 wards compensated even in prices to purcha- 
 sers by a c('rtuin reduction, and, immediately, 
 more Ilian compensated by a general distribu- 
 tion of benefits I hrougliout the Avliole commu- 
 nity. i^upposo a farmer pays ton dollars a 
 year more for the iron lie consumes, to effect 
 the cn'ction of a fuimace in his neighborhood, 
 and immediately gets a market, for green crops 
 wliicli he never had before, worth a hundred 
 
9 
 
 dollars a year. Is it not the same in kind with 
 an advance, called a subscription or donation, 
 for the establishment of a school or college so 
 near him that he will be enabled to board his 
 own children who require tuition, and other- 
 wise derive from it the advantages of every 
 kind which it will be sure to bring to him and 
 his family? Nay, the enhanced cost to the 
 consumer of products which require protection 
 to introduce and maintain their manufacture, 
 is not only like the present expenses or sacri- 
 fices made for education and training in letters, 
 arts and sciences, but it is, in fact and effect, 
 an instance of such training, and has for its 
 warranty every consideration of prospective 
 remuneration to the public which recommends 
 any department of education which is com- 
 monly fostered by enlightened communities, 
 and much more certain of the expected ben- 
 efits. 
 
 VICIOUS QENERALIZATIONS OF THE LET-ALONE 
 SYSTEM. 
 
 The current theories of political economy 
 owe their origin to a curious class of college 
 professors, professional litterateurs, metaphy- 
 sicians, and philanthropic world-menders, and 
 not a few tlieologicians have taken leading po- 
 sitions among the authorities, covering with 
 their “pale cast of thought the native hue of 
 practical affairs and turning awry their cur- 
 rents till they lose the name of action.” They 
 are all probably aware that self-government, 
 and so much of independence as personal and 
 moral liberty require, is the true policy of an 
 individual’s business affairs ; but they recog- 
 nise no corresponding rule for the government 
 and protection of a nation, which is but the 
 aggregate of some millions of such individuals. 
 With them, atoms must be cared for against 
 atoms, but masses against masses are perfectly 
 harmless ; their instances of contact cannot be 
 collisions, nor their motions interferences ! 
 They would protest vehemently against a 
 naval invasion intended to wrest from a nation 
 its political liberties ; but they can see no 
 violation of rights, no mischief, in a mercantile 
 fleet invading the same country to wrest from 
 it its industrial freedom and prosperity. — 
 Dealing, as they do, in the most abstract and 
 general ideas, they confuse all the practical 
 differences existing between the infinitely 
 varied forms of human industry. Give them 
 three, or four, or a half a dozen terms of art 
 to work upon, and they need no other data ; 
 capital, labor, exchange, profits, and tlie logic 
 necessary to manipulate them into arguments 
 and essays, contain their whole system, and 
 answer all their purposes. The facts of his- 
 tory, and the teachings of experience, must 
 be philosophized into conformity, or silenced, 
 as the successes of quackery are treated by the 
 doctors, by ascribing the fortunate results to 
 the occult powers of nature, working their 
 way against all intermeddlings. 
 
 It will forward our present aim to notice 
 some of their vicious deductions from certain 
 general truths, applied to all particular cases 
 without regard to conditions. 
 
 Take, for example, the case of a country like 
 our own, comparatively young, exceedingly 
 fertile, capable of every variety of agricultural 
 production, with its improved lands vei’y cheap, 
 and millions of acres to be had for little more 
 than the cost of preparing them for the plough, 
 and, in all respects, eminently fitted for fur- 
 nishing provisions and raw materials. The 
 inference drawn by these theorists is, that 
 nature, by these circumstances, makes farm- 
 ing, planting, and lumbering, our distinctive 
 occupations, and invites our energies into 
 these special fields of industry. Now, there is 
 nothing in a statement so general as this that 
 anybody need dispute. But there are some 
 other things just as true, which must be con- 
 sidered before we draw from it a practical 
 policy of national conduct. In the first place, 
 if labor is really the source of wealth, and the 
 various forms or kinds of labor are not equally 
 productive, it behooves us, as soon as we are 
 capable of choosing among them, to ascertain 
 whether exclusive agricultural labor is the 
 most productive which we can adopt. We 
 know, very certainly, that the wages of labor 
 are not equal, and that the products are also 
 of unequal market value. The work of an ox 
 is held at a less price than that of th6 man 
 who drives him, and all wages are graded up- 
 wards from the field laborer to the artist; from 
 the body servant to the body curer ; from the 
 teacher of the alphabet to the teacher of reli- 
 gion ; from the newsboy to the editor ; from 
 the ragpicker to the author of the book ; from 
 the organist on the pavement to the prima 
 donna of the opera; from the dressmaker to 
 to the portrait painter. Wages grow with the 
 education and training required for the labo- 
 rer. The value of the work is the measure of 
 the wealth it yields, understanding wealth 
 merely in the sense of market values. 
 
 The difference between skilled and unskilled 
 labor is apparent enough, and the difference 
 between their products ought not to be forgot- 
 ten when a people are in condition to make an 
 election among them. Nature has no more 
 determined that any particular country, capa- 
 ble of anything else, shall confine itself to 
 agriculture than that Washington should 
 spend his life as a land surveyor, because 
 there was a wilderness full of that work for 
 him in Virginia, and he was an expert in 
 the business. The matter for Washington to 
 decide, in choosing his occupation, was how 
 he could best promote his own growth in worth 
 and power, and best serve the general welfare; 
 and this Is the very question for a community 
 to solve, in deciding upon its industrial policy. 
 Nature has nothing to do with it except to 
 furnish the means. Man is her master, on 
 condition that he will be his own. Educated 
 industry is no longer mere toil, muscle-work : 
 it is the art of making nature work in man’s 
 service obediently. The farmer who drains, 
 irrigates, manures, and tills his fields scien- 
 tifically, trains the forces inherent In the soil 
 from the drift of their wild liberty into the 
 production of corn, just as the engineer directs 
 the current of a stream upon the wheels of the 
 
10 
 
 mill tliai grinds it; ami the result in value is 
 always in the raiio of the mastership attained. 
 In mechanics, miraculous control of nature’s 
 forces is displayed, and the effects arc equally 
 marvellous ami beneficent. The screw, the 
 compound-pully, and the wheel and axle, which 
 nature does not possess, overcome all the forces 
 she can array in resistance to man’s dominion, 
 and the agents tliat effect the conquest rank 
 according to their respective efficiency, and 
 share the resulti)ig Avealth in the like ratio. — 
 It is therefore not a matter of indifference, to 
 an individual or to a community, what sort of 
 labor he or they shall adopt Avhen a choice 
 presents itself. 
 
 TUE CONSUMPTION, NOT THE PPTCE OF COMMOOI- 
 TIES, MEASURES NATIONAL WELFARE. 
 
 The wealth of a community is measured 
 more accurately by the amount of values it 
 consumes than by any other standard. It is 
 not the dearness or cheapness of goods that 
 determines the prosperity of a people, but their 
 ability to purchase them. The man who buys 
 a fine coat and luxurious food pays high prices 
 for them ; the man Avho wears and eats the 
 coarsest has the cheapness. Is it a benefit? 
 A southern slave may be kept for thirty dol- 
 lars a year ; his master expends a thousand 
 upon himself. This marks the difference of 
 their respective conditions, and of their worth 
 to the community as consumers. Every man 
 in the country is the poorer for every poor 
 man in it. The diminished consumption falls 
 back upon the general capital of productive 
 poAver of every kind, wasting it by failure of 
 employment. 
 
 That, therefore, is the highest policy of a 
 people which provides for the highest rate of 
 consumption. Unmixed agriculture cannot do 
 this. The largest export of our farmers’ pro- 
 duce does not exceed five per cent, of the whole 
 annual yield. The exports from the forest do 
 not add more than tAVO per cent, to this amount, 
 which, together, would enable us to expend 
 only tlie value of seven per cent, of our actual 
 product in for-eign manufactures, if we depended 
 upon that resource alone. The cotton crop of 
 the United States amounts to one-tenth of the 
 annual crop of the Union, but Ave arc not con- 
 sidering ihe products of hot climates noAV — 
 they are, under a different law. The point of 
 inquiry is, Iioav agricidf ure in temperat e regions 
 aff(!ctH I lie ability, of the pcojde to buy and 
 consume the commodities of manufacturing 
 Slates; and Ave Ihinl; w(! are safe in saying 
 that an a.LM'icull ure depeiuh'ut, mainly on a 
 foreign market e.'iiinoi, under any circum- 
 •itancca, (■■.cliaiige for luanufacl iires and tropi- 
 cal produel.: more than one teutli of its total 
 jirodiicl. I'or Midi :• [lercenlage as tliishow 
 meagre mu f be llie eoMSUm])l ion of elotliing, 
 book", implements, and luxuries! 'i’luit man 
 i: liviii)' poorly indeeil wliose I'mxl is llu' nine- 
 tenlli-' of hi eonsumjil ion. ^Ve may be 
 an wered Ijial no fteopleare wholly de|iend(‘n(, 
 nor can In-, for all the eoinmodilies wliiidi (h(‘y 
 efifi: lime ujion fnreigii nrlisniis; that lliere 
 are neee!'; arily in eveiy disti ict dgmeslio me- 
 
 chanics, Avcaver.s, lilacksrnilhs, cabinet makers, 
 printers, &c. This is true, but at what rate 
 must such artisans Avork if t hey are to meet 
 the products of t he foreign Avork.«ho])s at every 
 villa, go store? Tliey Avill be .just as much im- 
 poverished as the fanners and day laliorcrs, 
 under the agricultural system. There can be 
 no money unde)' such a system, for the demand 
 for manufactures is always gr'cater than the 
 means of paying for them. Thei'e is nothing 
 in such a conlition of things to invite an in- 
 crease of the population by immigration, and 
 everything to hindei' the free cornmniption of 
 a prosperous country. Provisions Avill be 
 cheapened, indeed, but Avages Avill be so much 
 lowered by the severity of the competition for 
 labor, that consumption Avill be kept at the 
 loAvest mark in value. 
 
 AGRICULTURE MUST IIAA^E A HOME MARKET. 
 
 But the development of agriculture itself is 
 not possible except under the influence of a 
 home market ; potatoes, beets, cabbage, fruit, 
 poultry, veal, mutton, cheese, butter, milk, 
 unless transformed by the labor of the vicinity 
 into iron, steel, hardware, linen, cotton and 
 woollen goods, will not bear distant transpor- 
 tation ; and Avithout a market for these, farm- 
 ing must dAvindle into the narrowest circle of 
 the coarsest and cheapest of its products. 
 
 We think it must be obvious that unmixed 
 agriculture cannot develop itself, nor command 
 a large foreign trade, nor induce a large home 
 consumption, nor build up the material Avealth, 
 the population, or the political poAver of a 
 people. Let nature bestoAV Avhat fertility and 
 variety of soil and extent of territory she may, 
 she cannot thereby confine the industry of a 
 community to the upper six or nine inches of 
 the surface. The limestone, coal and ore 
 that lie a little deeper are as much and as 
 temptingly offered for use as the sods which 
 cover them. 
 
 lYhile a country is so new that its timber is 
 in the way of the farmer, and must be removed, 
 it may as well be sold abroad as burnt on the 
 ground ; and Avhile the fertility of the soil is so 
 vigorous, and population so sparse, that the 
 little surplus of evei’y man's crop must Avaste 
 if not sent to a foreign )uarket. an exchange 
 with manufacturing counti'ies Avill bo t he means 
 of turning such surplus to some accoinit ; but 
 in a stage of iiopulaliou and cajutal somcAvhat 
 advanced, it may be fairly asked Avhy a system 
 of exchange Avitli manufacturers at home Avill 
 not do infuiitely )uore for the fanning iutei'est 
 than a distant ono? The mercantile .system 
 puts the pi'ospei'ity of the country into absolute 
 dependence upon foi’eign trade the most un- 
 stable of all rermueos that can be thought of. 
 (Ireat Ib itain usually takes of our bread-stuffs 
 and ]irovisions about, lil'ly-si'ven i-ents’ Avorth 
 jier head of her total population. Would not 
 one addiiional blacksmith, carpemter or tailor, 
 Avith his family, in I'veiy township of the United 
 States, alfoi'd a sti'ady market for twice this 
 amount? (Ireat Britain lakes from us liftecii 
 I millions’ worth; Ave produce more than fifteen 
 ! Inindrod millions’ AVorth. iShe gives our farm- 
 
11 
 
 crs a market for less than one per cent, of 
 their produce ; the thing is simply contempti- 
 ble. Our natural market for all such surplus 
 is in the islands and tropical regions of our 
 own continent. I^ast year all the manufactur- 
 ing countries together took but twenty-two 
 per cent, of our agricultural exports. The 
 countries whose products we must purchase 
 or do without took seventy-eight per cent. 
 Our imports from tliem did not interfere with, 
 but every way helped, our own industries ; 
 while the people who sent us cloth, cutlery 
 and iron sent us back fifty per cent, more food, 
 worked into their commodities, than we sent 
 them, and besides displaced our own capital, 
 labor and enterprise to the whole extent of the 
 imports. How absurd to talk about the United 
 States being naturally a food-exporting coun- 
 try, with the fact easily demonstrated that we 
 really import quite half as much more food in 
 the shape of commodities than we export in 
 the raw state ! 
 
 “But the whole North and West are well 
 fitted for the production of sheep’s wool.” — 
 Yes, admirably. “ And must not the groover’s 
 interest in this great enterprise be cared for 
 abroad ? If we do not buy largely of foreign 
 goods how can Europe purchase our wool?” 
 Well, we do buy very largely, and with what 
 effect? In the year ending July 1st, 1857, we 
 exported nineteen thousand dollars’ worth of 
 wool to all foreign countries, and we exported 
 seventy-seven thousand dollars’ worth of 
 onions in the same year ! Moreover, this was 
 about the proportion of our exports in these 
 two agricultural products for five or six years 
 together. Is not this ridiculous ? Our import 
 of pins for the same year amounted to fifty- 
 six thousand dollars, and of figs to two hun- 
 dred and twelve thousand, “A fig for the 
 foreign wool trade ; it is not worth a pin.” 
 
 Are we not right in saying that to us bread- 
 stuffs, provisions, and raw materials are not of 
 any importance except for home consumption 
 and internal trade? No prosperous country 
 sells food, wool, hides, pig metal, or anything 
 else until the last touch of converting skill has 
 been put upon it. Our farmers have been 
 strangely imposed upon by the sophistries of 
 demagogues and dreamers, aiming to array 
 them against those thousand forms of produc- 
 tive labor which alone can give them a home 
 market, and free them from their bondage to 
 the London jobbers. They ought to know 
 that an Illinois farmer could make more money 
 out of the vegetables raised in liis fence cor- 
 ners, with a manufactory in the neighborhood 
 demanding such little luxuries, than all his 
 fields will pay clear in wheat, sent three or 
 tour thousand miles to find a market, and help 
 to glut it when it gets there. 
 
 Why will an acre of land near Philadelpliia 
 yield from three to five hundred dollars’ worth 
 of crops a year, and not more than twenty or 
 thirty in one of our Western praries? Six 
 hundred thousand people whose daily walks 
 are on paved streets are not rival producers, 
 but enormous consumers. Could we but drive 
 the foolish idea of “ cheapness” out of peo- 
 
 ples’ heads, we might get them to believe, per- 
 haps, the bold proposition, that a country is 
 going to ruin where land and labor are not 
 constantly rising in price. Especially is this 
 true of labor, which is the only property of 
 the mass of the people — tlie mass of consumers. 
 Whoever does not endeavor to increase their 
 means of purchasing is simply impoverishing 
 his customers, no matter what product of art, 
 skill, science, or learning he lias to sell. And 
 there is no other way of improving the condi- 
 tion of the laborer except by diversifying the 
 industry of the country to the greatest practi- 
 cable extent, and by lifting it as fast as possi- 
 ble from the lower styles and less remunera- 
 tive wages, to the higher qualities and market 
 values. 
 
 We do not fear the exhaustion of our read- 
 ers’ patience, for we expect them to get out of 
 temper with the mischievous nonsense which 
 we are exposing, and that will keep the interest 
 well awake throughout the discussion which 
 is — to be continued. 
 
 FREE-TRADE POLICY OF THE GULF STATES THE 
 
 UNION COMPENSATES THEM FOR PROTECTION 
 
 PRICES. 
 
 It must be borne in mind that we are not 
 constructing an economical system for the 
 Gulf States of this Union, or for that portion 
 of our common country which is confined by 
 the laws of nature to the production of cotton, 
 rice, and cane sugar. They are destined to be 
 exporters of raw material, and are legitimately 
 free traders. They have the monopoly of 
 their special products; or, if the}'- have not, 
 they have nothing which they can by any ex- 
 ercise of civil power protect from foreign com- 
 petition. Until cotton and rice come from 
 abroad to undersell them on their own planta- 
 tions, there is nothing regulative or restrietive 
 of foreign trade which they can do for them- 
 selves. To advance their conditions they must 
 push their tillage to the utmost, even to the 
 exhaustion of the soil, and then they must 
 seek fresh lands, for the same system of ex- 
 haustive treatment. They cannot emancipate 
 their slaves ; and, to keep up their stock they 
 must import others from whatever region they 
 can get them cheapest. Their prosperity rests 
 upon the social institutions of the age of feud- 
 alism. They are severed from the fortunes as 
 well as from the sympathies of the peoples 
 who are advancing in the modern way of eco- 
 nomical progress, and they must abide the 
 conflict which their institutions necessarily 
 encounter from the moral, intellectual, and 
 social forces of civilization. On what ground, 
 then, it will be asked, can we require them to 
 consent to those measures of policy by which we 
 would foster the unlike interests of the North- 
 ern States ? 
 
 Our answer would run this : They have all 
 the benefits of a common nationality by virtue 
 of the Federal Union. Their political inde- 
 pendence is insured against the world. This 
 would be cheaply purchased at a much higher 
 price than all the concessions which we ask 
 can possibly cost them. An army might be 
 
12 
 
 extemporized easily enough where every man 
 is a soldier, but a navy they cannot command. 
 The frequent failures of an endeavor to es- 
 tablish direct trade with Europe is proof 
 enough of this; besides, no agricultural people 
 ever had a marine, either mercantile or naval; 
 not even an imposing fishing fleet. The wealth 
 that is all in money, is not that wealth which 
 makes a nation strong, or maintains its inde- 
 pendence against foreign foes. The wealth 
 of a nation is in its men, their numbers, and 
 the interests and affections which inspire pa- 
 triotism. 
 
 Again, the Union, besides giving the cotton 
 States security, gives them also the cheapest 
 Government Vfhich they possibly can have. — 
 The tax-collector never visits them for their 
 contingent to support the army, the navy, or 
 the Federal authorities. They feel taxation 
 only through the custom house, and as they 
 do not consume more than one-half their share 
 of imports according to population, they are 
 greatly relieved by the manner of the levy. — 
 By the Constitution they are exempt from ex- 
 port duties. Their exports are usually as one 
 hundred and seventy-five millions to one hun- 
 dred millions from the North. When the Con- 
 stitution was under debate in the Convention 
 this inequality was pressed, but the North 
 yielded in the expectation that it might soon 
 be removed. This difference of seven or ten 
 millions a year in their favor fairly pays back 
 their share of protection prices. But those 
 protection prices are in themselves the very 
 best investments which they can make. Every 
 article which they consume, whose production 
 is thus encouraged in the North, goes down in 
 price below all former rates so soon as we get 
 fairly and evenly into rivalry with the foreign 
 manufacture. They make the mistake of com- 
 paring the price of the domestic article Avith 
 that of the foreign after our competition has 
 reduced it. That policy is a very blind one 
 that docs not favor the largest possible compe- 
 tition among the producers of the commodities 
 it must purchase. It Avould not be diilicult to 
 state an afxount ctirrent witli the cotton States 
 and show a l)iil!»nce to their profit every Sat- 
 uiday night in the year. 
 
 Tliat tin; fre(‘ States make a large ])rofil by 
 their trade with the slave States is doubtless 
 true; but that is tlie law of trade Avherc the 
 p:irtii-« are producers iif raw materials on the 
 one ri le, and mi'iadianl s a nd manufacturers on 
 the m liei • II iiui her reason, or another state- 
 ment of till- rea-oM, for di^velopiiig agricult ure, 
 manulacl lire ,, and commerci^ in due propor- 
 tion in all ec)unliie> capabh' <d' the more proti- 
 tiihle indii 111- . We have known a Norlhern- 
 inade hed. id to carry oil’ the price of twenty 
 b.ile (,| e.iiNin. When the exchange is lie 
 tween ail! <■ kill and slav(> drudgery, of 
 < 0111 e ; he : 1 . i pidlit goos to t he liigliei' style 
 of w<o , I’ll, I there ia no help for this; and, 
 a it I n - 0 .1 lault, they should not maki' it 
 a e(, i|> iini again I U" or agaiiiHt the Union, 
 «ir lie I n. It in nothing eh e than the 
 nece iiy a 1 \ a ii I a (O' that mind mn.il have 
 over mu if ihii world is to come to any 
 
 thing worthy of the Divine endeavor expended 
 upon it in creation and providence. 
 
 PROTECTION, THE POLICY OF THE NORTHER^ 
 SLAVE STATES. 
 
 But it is not quite certain that slave labor 
 cannot be profitably employed in making at 
 least the coarser and cheaper styles of cotton 
 cloth, and in the manufacture of iron. 'J’lio 
 experiments made in Georgia and Tennessee, 
 under the taritf of 1824 and that of 1828, did 
 not fail until the protection failed. Henry 
 Clay said, in 1848, that the cotton-growing 
 region was destined to become the greatest 
 cotton-manufacturing region in the world. A 
 lucky device in machinery and a little enter- 
 prise, helped by the possible decline of price 
 in Europe of raw cotton, and it may come to 
 to be spun in the fields where it is grown, as 
 our wheat is threshed without the trouble of 
 housing the straw. North Carolina, Mary- 
 land, Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky, just 
 as certainly as Missouri, are destined to adopt 
 the better forms of industry, and all the polit- 
 ical events of the time show that they 
 must soon become more and more self-sup- 
 porting. 
 
 But finally, if the Union is to continue, the 
 necessary expenses of the Government, en- 
 hanced not a little by a continuous system of 
 Territorial extension made in the interest of 
 slavery, will require an immense revenue to be 
 raised either by import duties or direct taxes. 
 The south must needs choose the former for all 
 reasons, and this settles the question, and of 
 itself balances the equities of the money ac- 
 count between us. If sixty millions must be 
 raised, and the South takes only half the im- 
 ports which would meet her population ratio 
 of the revenue, then she escapes ten millions 
 a year of the twenty she should pay, which 
 cuts down the twenty-five per cent, average 
 duties of a protective tariff to about twelve 
 and a half in the partnership settlement with 
 the Northern States. She is compensated 
 fully in half a dozen ways for all taxation 
 imposed upon her in protection of Northern 
 manufactures. This is our answer to the 
 Gulf States. To the Northern slave States wq 
 wouhl say that this is just the time to avail 
 themselves of the opportunity ofi'ered them by 
 I lie free Stales. The day is coming speedily, 
 Avhen New Fngland, to monopolize the domestic 
 trade, will re-preach Southern free trade to its 
 authors with a vengeance. If Ncav England’s 
 capital and skill are not now invited, by 
 adequate protection, to move forward upon 
 till' nianufaci lire ol the liner styles of goods, 
 she will fall back contentedly uimn the coarser; 
 and then' will be no custom houses on Mason 
 and Dixon’s line, when Maryland, A'irginia, 
 Kentucky, and 'I’ennessee will need them. 
 Tin' fri'c Stales south of New 't Ork and of the 
 ^'aiikee Stales id' the Nort Invest, show that 
 they are read}', as they always have been, to 
 cohere with all I ho South Avhiidi have any 
 allinily nf interest, and destiny with them; 
 and they look with conlidenco for a fair rcci- 
 pioeily of good feeling and good service. 
 
13 
 
 We thus, for the present, dispose of the 
 geographical modification of the protective 
 policy, as it applies to the United States. We 
 think that the line which divides the North 
 from the South, in economical policy, coin- 
 cides with the thirty-fifth parallel of latitude 
 sweeping through from the Atlantic to the 
 Pacific ocean, varied only by the mountains 
 and plains which it cuts, always deflecting 
 southward in proportion to the elevation of 
 the surface, which would carry it, westward of 
 the Mississipi river, nearly along the proposed 
 track of the Southern Pacific Railroad, south 
 of El Paso, and thence along the “ divide” 
 that separates the Territory of New Mexico 
 from Chihuahua and Sonora. 
 
 These views of our question, as it affects 
 the cotton States, asked presentment on their 
 own account, but we specially intended to give 
 emphasis to the idea that economical policy 
 is not a thing of generalities and abstractions, 
 made up of unconditional first principles, and 
 calculated only for the illustration of logical 
 perspective. 
 
 PROTECTION IS NOT TAXATION. 
 
 Let US now look a little more exactly into 
 the subject of protection as it applies to the 
 issue pending in Congress. 
 
 By protection we mean defense of new in- 
 dustrial enterprises, whose success is the com- 
 mon interest of the community. We do not 
 mean class legislation, or the establishment of 
 monopolies, but the development of the produc- 
 tive power of the nation, with a due distribu- 
 tion of its benefits over every industrial inter- 
 est of the country. If protection in any 
 instance is partial, either in principle or in 
 practical operation, we repudiate and oppose it. 
 For this reason we condemn it when carried 
 either in terms or in ejffect to the extent of 
 prohibition. Prohibitory duties are never 
 right as a measure for promoting home produc- 
 tion. Their adoption indicates the incapacity 
 of the country for the undertaking. So far 
 from stimulating enterprise they release it 
 from the operation of its best influences, and 
 all the time that the market must wait for its 
 supply they operate like a blockade or an em- 
 bargo upon the consumers. Protection means : 
 first, freedom of industry and trade at home ; 
 and eventually free foreign trade ; and it must 
 have nothing in it of the spirit of war, either 
 between classes of interests at home, or with 
 the nations abroad; just as Law must intend 
 Liberty, and cannot employ force except for 
 its defense and maintenance. 
 
 In the selection of the commodities on which 
 to impose protective duties, we must be guided 
 by the same policy that induces a man to give 
 temporary credit to his neighbor entering upon 
 a new business — the fair probability that he 
 will soon be able to make himself independent 
 of all such assistance. The enterprise must 
 be practicable, promising, and generally bene- 
 ficial ; else it is not a case to be assisted, and 
 is not entitled to the favor. 
 
 As no favoritism to classes must be indulged, 
 so no hostility to any class can be allowed. — 
 
 The notion that luxuries should bear higher 
 duties than articles of common necessity, has 
 nothing of the proper policy of protection to 
 industry in it, nor has it anything else to re- 
 com.mend it to the acceptance of the masses, 
 but the contrary. Protection is totally mis- 
 understood, and fatally abused, when it is 
 reasoned upon, or employed as if it were 
 identical with taxation. It means and intends 
 the protection of domestic labor, skill, and 
 enterprise, and of the capital which they em- 
 ploy. These are not benefited by a tax upon 
 such luxuries of manufacture or of agriculture 
 as we cannot ourselves produce. Invidious 
 distinctions made in a tarifif bill between the con- 
 sumption of the rich and of the poor, have no 
 help in them for the labor of the poor. More- 
 over, those things are called luxuries which 
 the poor cannot well alford to purchase. To 
 burden them is simply to put them still further 
 out of the reach of the poor ; and like other 
 prejudices of classes, it only operates to the 
 injury of the weaker party, and under the 
 guise of a preference for the common people, 
 really keeps up the worst of aristocratic dis- 
 tinctions — those which touch the essential 
 interests of life. Tea and cofl'ee were luxuries 
 but a little while ago. So soon as they went 
 into the free list, they became the common 
 fare of every cottage in the country. Coffee 
 was taxed five cents per pound, and teas, from 
 fourteen to sixty-eight cents per pound, ac- 
 cording to quality, from the year 1816 until in 
 1832, when they were made free. We call 
 the duty upon these tropical products taxes, 
 for these duties could not protect any home 
 industry of ours. Last year we imported 214 
 million pounds of cofl'ee for consumption, or 
 about seven pounds a head. What would the 
 laboring people have gained by paying about 
 three-fourths of ten millions of duties upon 
 this article in order to tax a luxury ? Or what 
 would they have gained by confining them- 
 selves to coarse and inferior teas, at fourteen 
 cents a pound duty, in order to make wealthy 
 people pay sixty -eight cents on theirs ? Or in 
 the matter of silks, apply the doctrine of 
 luxury to them, and the result would be that 
 the wife and daughters of the man of moderate 
 means whenever they go into the street or 
 church must betray the economy which his 
 circumstances compel. 
 
 When taxing is the object for the uses of 
 revenue, lay it on wherever it should be borne, 
 and in reference to the ability to bear it, but 
 never allow the idea to enter a tariff for pro- 
 tection. 
 
 PROTECTION AND REVENUE CONCURRENT. 
 
 But a tariff of duties under our system must 
 look to revenue, also, and must be adjusted to 
 the wants of the Government. Here a ques- 
 tion of national finance mixes itself with the 
 policy of duties ruled by the requirements of 
 protection. But for years past, and doubtless 
 for years to come, these distinct policies have 
 no conflict. It would not be difficult to show 
 that the exigencies of the Government and the 
 just protection of labor coincide very exactly 
 
14 
 
 in their requirements. Under a protective 
 tariff we never yet suffered a deficiency of 
 revenue. Under tariffs somet})ing below the 
 rates required for protection we have more than 
 once had a mischievious excess of revenue, 
 immediately followed by a great deficiency. 
 The first reduction of duties under the com- 
 promise act of 1833 took effect upon the 1st 
 January, 1834. The second on the 1st January, 
 183G. At the close of the year 183t) there 
 was a surplus in the Treasury amounting to 
 forty millions of Dollars. But by the year 
 1842 the Treasury had borrowed over fifty- 
 three millions, and left ten or twelve more of 
 its liabilities to be provided for in the follow- 
 ing year. In like manner the Treasury -was 
 gorged with a surplus of seventeen millions 
 on the 1st of July, 1857, and on the 1st July 
 1860 its debt will have been increased above 
 fifty millions. These things resulted from 
 tariffs for revenue, with incidental protection ; 
 no such effects can follow a tariff for protec- 
 tion, with revenue resulting. Adequate pro- 
 tection effectually prevents excessive importa- 
 tion, and so prevents excessive revenue. 
 While such immaturity of our manufacturers 
 remains as demands it, the increased importa- 
 tion of goods, and of qualities of goods, which 
 we cannot fabricate cheaply will keep up the 
 revenue by transferring it from the lower to 
 the higher qualities of goods, which yield in 
 proportion to their value, a state of things 
 that vrill be compensatory till the policy of 
 protection shall expire and be replaced by 
 that of taxation — a change that the country [ 
 will have years to wait for and ample time to 
 provide for. 
 
 We do not believe that a state of things ad- 
 mitting universal, absolute free trade will ever 
 occur among the nations of the earth. Eng- 
 land is still receiving one hundred millions of 
 dollars per annum from import duties, and we 
 have no doubt the highest perfection that we 
 can attain in tlie manufacturing arts in a 
 century will still leave us a customs revenue as 
 large as we have ever had, or will ever need 
 from that source. But we are not speculating 
 upon the far future. It is the duties and ne- 
 cessities of the })resent that concern us, with 
 such provision for the future only as will give 
 it a fair opportunity for taking care of itself 
 according to its own exigencies. 
 
 AnVAl.OIlKM, AND HI’ECrFIU, DUTIES. 
 
 'I'lie dint incf ion wliicli we make between 
 duties levied iipoti foreign goods foi’ the jiro- 
 t(!cfion (A' Iionu! industry, and the assessment 
 of taxes npfU) Hk; properly of the citizens tor 
 th(! support of t Jov(n'nnienl , needs a careful 
 and (dear exposition. So mmdi confusion pre- 
 vails in I he (lisenssion of this point that we 
 must ir I( oni- readers to ine(d our Klatement of 
 the doclrim^ in a ^'piril. as frank and favorable 
 u ' I hey ( in coniftiand. 
 
 In levy ing internal lax(‘S iho (i<f nttlorrr/i rule 
 of u' -( iiiciil <li'(| rihnie': the hurdiui (Mpiilahly 
 tipon all till' various ■ pi'oies of taxable properly. 
 A fi < '-d p( r eenlage, ncaansling to valuation, 
 cover'', fa irly and nnilbi inly all its subjends, llni 
 
 intention being that every property-lioldcr 
 shall contribute to the support of the Govern- 
 ment in the ratio of his means. The ad valorem 
 principle, with this universality of range, ha.s 
 no place in the policy of protection. If it had, 
 there could be no such thing as a free list in 
 the tariff-tables, and there could be no differ- 
 ence of rates among its several schedules. To 
 admit the ad valorem principle of assessment 
 in imposts is to sweep away the whole doctrine 
 of protection. To give it any influence what- 
 ever in our reasonings upon protection is to 
 confound and vitiate the whole process. All 
 the debates that we have had in Congress, and 
 out of it, between the ad valorem, and specific 
 duty parties, owe their inconclusivencss to a 
 misunderstanding of this matter. In the tariff 
 of the Prussian or German Commercial Union, 
 commonly called the Zoll-verein, the principle 
 and the policy of protection are purely pre- 
 sented. It lays a duty of fifty rix dollars per 
 Prussian quintal on all cotton goods, Avithout 
 respect to quality or price. The quintal being 
 equal to 113 pounds avoirdupois, and the rix 
 dollar worth three shillings, English, it is equal 
 to £7 10s. per 113 pounds. 
 
 Now, the effect of this duty is, that a quintal 
 of coarse shirting worth four pence per yard, 
 and £8 6s. per quintal, pays the equivalent of 
 ninety per cent, ad valorem. 
 
 A quintal of superior shirting, worth one shil- 
 ling per yard, and £22 17s. 7d. per quintal, 
 pays a duty of 32|- per cent. 
 
 A quintal of printed cottons, worth Is. 6d. a 
 j yard, and £47 9s. per quintal, is equal to 15|- 
 per cent. 
 
 A quintal of fine printed cottons, worth 2 s. 6d. 
 a yard, and £84 15s. per quintal, pays but SJ 
 per cent. 
 
 Here the idea of taxation, and the ad valorem 
 principle of assessment which rules it, are 
 obviously excluded, but not more so, in fact, 
 than in our own tariffs, with their free lists, 
 and half a dozen different rates of dutj'^ on the 
 articles in the several schedules. 
 
 The ad valorem doctrine requires a level rate 
 of percentage upon all imports, intends taxa- 
 tion only, and has no thought of protection in 
 it. In all our reasonings upon the adjustment 
 of a protective tariff, therefore, we must en- 
 tirely exclude it, or we will be confused at 
 every step we take. 
 
 The Zoll-verein intended the protection of 
 the lower styles of home manufactures, Avhich 
 the German people Avere capable of ])roducing 
 at the time of its adoption, ami properly ab- 
 stained from taxing the tine goods, Avhich they 
 could not yet manufacture, it did not exclude 
 those fine goods from its markets, nor the com- 
 mon ])eO|)le from their use. It secured the 
 labor of its artizans, in the work they Avero 
 ca|)al)Ie of, from a, deslrnctive foreign comjic- 
 lilion; and, Avhile it thus enabled them to 
 ))nr(diase, took care to ke('p the fine goods 
 Avilhin their roach. 'I'iio ad valorem ]n’inciple 
 ap])lied to imposts is, in its vei'y nature, a rule 
 oi' disei iminal ion against the poor, and Avorks 
 only in the ini en'sl s of I he aristocrats of prop- 
 erly. In internal taxation it graduates the 
 
15 
 
 public burdens to the means of the citizens, 
 and is entirely equitable; but as applied to 
 imposts it has only one effect, and that is the 
 exclusion of the poor from the enjoyment of 
 anything but the coarsest articles of consump- 
 tion. The protective principle works just the 
 other way ; it lightens the cost of tropical pro- 
 ductions and the finer manufactures to the 
 common consumer, and secures to him the 
 profit of manufacturing the cheaper articles 
 for the entire domestic market. It finds him 
 employment in the kind of work he can do, 
 and supplies him the means of purchasing the 
 commodities of foreign production which he 
 needs, and keeps down their price within his 
 reach. 
 
 PROTECTION NOT CLASS LEGISLATION. 
 
 These views upon the ad valorem rule in im- 
 port duties may be met with any quantity of 
 declamatory generalizings ; but it will be seen, 
 after a little careful reflection, that every prin- 
 ciple of reasoning with which they are opposed 
 is borrowed over from the theory of internal 
 taxation, which has no sort of analogy or 
 parallelism. It will be askedj would you tax 
 heavily the cheaper fabrics of common con- 
 sumption, and exempt the luxuries of the rich ? 
 To which we would answer, if we must, that 
 this complaint fits the circumstances of nobody 
 in the United States, except the slaveholders, 
 who must buy the coarse clothing of their stock 
 because they cannot make it. To them our 
 answer has been made in a previous article 
 But to the free laborer and consumer of the 
 country, we answer again, that in a true pro- 
 tective duty there is no taxation upon anything 
 or anybody. It is a defense, not a burden. 
 The man who spins or weaves a yard of cloth 
 is interested above all others in the security of 
 a market, and a fair price for it, though all 
 his interest in it is his wages. The man that 
 has an article of furniture, a pair of shoes, a 
 barrel of flour, a book, to sell, or medical or 
 legal services to dispose of, or depends in any 
 way upon his industry for his living, is con- 
 cerned that every species of labor of which 
 his neighbors are capable should be perfectly 
 defended and well rewarded. 
 
 The only people in the United States, north 
 of the 35th parallel of latitude, who have no 
 personal interest in protection, are salaried 
 officers, annuitants, and those who live upon the 
 interest of their money. We would not fail in 
 social duty to any class of men ; therefore, 
 we would say to public functionaries, we can 
 better afford to double your salaries than to 
 keep the community on low wages, low prices, 
 and little work, that your money may com- 
 mand the more of their products and services ; 
 and we are ready to increase your stipends 
 with all rise in the price of living, whether 
 induced by protection prices, or the California 
 gold mines. But to annuitants and money- 
 lenders, we are obliged to answer, we can do 
 nothing for you, you do nothing for the com- 
 munity; you have thrown yourselves idly upon 
 the industry of society for support, and we 
 owe you nothing, especially we owe no obliga- 
 
 tion to keep your silver dollar worth a bushel 
 of wheat, or a day’s work forever. 
 
 Is it not curious that every objection to the 
 fair protection of industry turns out an arrant 
 piece of aristocracy, when fairly understood ! 
 
 The principle of protection knows nothing 
 of the distinctions in society. It is not blind- 
 ed by the words, rich and poor, capital and 
 labor, freedom and restriction. It has no pre- 
 judices, preferences, or charities. It is nothing 
 else or other than a system of national policy, 
 looking to the common welfare and providing 
 for it, leaving all parties alike to make their 
 respective advantage of it, and securing to them 
 the opportunity. It is the general providence 
 of a good Government that cares for and se- 
 cures the means of national welfare, and leaves 
 the distribution of the benefits to the agency 
 of the individuals as they are respectively 
 capable of appropriating them. 
 
 USE OF ADVALOREMS IN ASSESSING DUTIES. 
 
 But is the value of a commodity to have no 
 effect in levying protective duties ? We answer, 
 that the value is to be considered, but we must 
 take care to keep clear of ad valorem” in our 
 reasonings. The words have the infection of 
 falseness in every letter. In the offices of our 
 county commissioners they are excellent, good 
 words, but they no sooner get a lodgement in 
 the custom-house than they turn malignant in 
 spirit, and at every opportunity run into fraud 
 and perjury. 
 
 The value of an article is the cost of its pro- 
 duction at the time, or more exactly the cost 
 of reproduction. The cost of such reproduc- 
 tion in our money of account is so many dol- 
 lars and cents ; but England can, or to under- 
 sell us in our market, will produce it upon our 
 wharves at so much less. To protect our own 
 industry against this hostility we must add the 
 difference of these values to that of the English 
 article, in the shape of a protective duty. — 
 Here, of course, there is a certain proportion 
 of values, and that proportion may be expressed 
 by a percentage. The figures used in the cal- 
 culation may all be most conveniently rendered 
 to the understanding in percentages, and some 
 of them naturally take that form, as, for in- 
 stance, the difference in the rate of interest 
 upon the capital employed in manufacturing 
 in the two countries. Here the values of the 
 raw material, of the labor, of the transporta- 
 tion, and insurance, are all to be used in the 
 estimate, and the difference between the cost 
 of the English and American product is best 
 expressed and grasped when expressed as so 
 much per cent. So far the use of values and 
 per cents, is safe and necessary. In the ab- 
 stract process of assessing the duty, they serve 
 and render all the service they can be trusted 
 with. When the duty is to be levied it must be 
 thrown into specifics — so much money on the 
 pound, yard, cubic or square foot, or number, 
 as will best describe and indentify the article 
 to be reached. It might be said that here ad 
 valorems are the rule of assessing, and specifics 
 the rule of levying the duty ; but it is the 
 safest never to trust a phrase that is accus- 
 
IG 
 
 tomed to take the bit in his teeth and run away 
 with the rider. 
 
 The examples of England and France, in 
 this respect, are so striking and so significant 
 that we will close this article with a brief 
 statement of them. Tlie French tariff has 
 above fifteen hundred articles in its schedules. 
 Of these, but twenty are under ad valornns, 
 and they are such as game and poultry, clock 
 and watch works, new clothing, household 
 linen, ai-tificial flowers, furniture, optical and 
 nautical instruments, laces and millinery. — 
 Everything else is weighed, measured, or 
 counted, and in very few instances are articles 
 of the same description, classified by their re- 
 spective values, liowever variant. 
 
 Under the English tariff twenty millions of 
 pounds sterling are raised from imports. Of 
 this sum but two hundred and eighty thousand 
 pounds by ad valorems ; or less than one and 
 a half per cent, of the whole. Yet to get rid 
 of this fag-end of the nuisance Parliament ap- 
 pointed a commission to inquire and report a 
 remedy. They sat long enough, and worked 
 attentively enough, to report about 1500 pages, 
 8vo, of testimony taken on the subject from 
 all sorts of dealers, manufacturers, and im- 
 porters. They expurgated the schedules to 
 the utmost of iheir ability ; among other de- 
 vices, putting artificial flowers under a specific 
 duty by charging them by the cubic foot, and 
 no allowance for vacancy in the packages. 
 
 MISCHIEFS OF AD VALOREMS IN PRACTICE. 
 
 We have stated the objections to ad valorem 
 as a principle in the assessment of import du- 
 ties. As a rule for levying them it is always 
 hostile to the protection of domestic industr 3 \ 
 Even where a free list is fairly made, and va- 
 ried rates are fixed among the schedules of a 
 tariff law, intending protection by its exemp- 
 tions and discriminations, the taxation princi- 
 ple, inseparable from the ad valorem rule, 
 always disappoints, and frequently counter- 
 acts, the protective policy of classification and 
 graduation. 
 
 If imported goods stood for ten or fifteen 
 years together at the same price per ton, yard, 
 or dozen — and if, at the same time, the values 
 were easily and certainly ascertained for the 
 purpose of applying the protective duty — then 
 values and quantities would permanently cor- 
 respond, ancJ it would be a matter of indiffer- 
 ence wlietlier the duty in the tables were 
 expressed in specifics or ad valorems. But the 
 tluctuati(ms of prices, and tlic faithlessness of 
 invoices, each and both, are so freciucnt and 
 so great as to disap[)oint any such reliance. — 
 Tliey are, in fact, flic very evils to be guarded 
 against. A single article will illustrate this 
 geneial |)r()[)OHil ion. For tliirty years (before 
 ]81H) the avciage |»ric<5 of mcridiant. bar iron 
 in I'ingifind was $11 per ton. Hut within that 
 tinur il Jiiid l)(!cn up to .$1)2.50 and down to 
 ill |HI7 it. was at $10.80, and in 1818 
 at $2-. HI); (hiiH, in one year a duty of thii'ty 
 jter cent, ((d ralurem fell, in its ])rnfecfive 
 force, f rom $12.21 to $8.f) l per Ion, and in the 
 ne.xt year f|8|'.lj ;{|8,875 tons of Ihirojiean 
 iron were thiowii uimn ilie American mai ket 
 
 at prices far below the cost of ])roduction. 
 Thus ad valorem duties helj) England to repair 
 her mistakes and retrieve her recklessness. 
 She has capital enough to w.ait safely for the 
 b.alance of profit and loss of a number of years 
 of fluctuation in prices. What she loses by 
 glutting our market one year will be abund- 
 antly repaid the next, when our furnaces and 
 forges are closed. The worst blunder she can 
 make in over-production p.ays well by beating 
 down the American competition for the Ameri- 
 can market, which would otherwise hold lier 
 down to the lowest rate of profit, until it would 
 finally drive her clean out of the field. 
 
 When iron is high in England and the other 
 markets of the world, the imports are light 
 and an ad valorem duty puts on an absurdly 
 high protection, rather a severe tax upon the 
 consumer. When it is low, tlic duty is entirely 
 unprotective, and the Government derives a 
 greatly reduced revenue. But the worst and 
 most malignant feature of the system is, that 
 whenever the foreign manufacturers undertake 
 to break down our domestic industry, by re- 
 ducing prices say one-third, ad valorems con- 
 spire, by a sacrifice of their third, to consum- 
 mate the mischief. Thus they are chargeable 
 with taxing the consumer preposterously when 
 prices are high, and conspiring with the enemy 
 when, by low prices, they aim at the ruin of 
 the home production. 
 
 That which is true of imported iron is true 
 of every other commodity which, in a condition 
 of industrial freedom and independence, we 
 might make for ourselves. 
 
 The essential vice of ad valorems is that they 
 operate as taxation and not as protection. 
 This is their original sin, and settles their fate 
 at the bar of a just judgment. But they 
 abound in actual transgression. Fraudulent 
 under-valuations seem to be inseparable from 
 the system. “Custom-house oaths” are a 
 proverb of profligacy. Vast quantities of 
 goods are imported on foreign account, and 
 the agents are hired to swear them through. 
 The American merchant must stifle his con- 
 science, cheat his own Government, or suffer 
 the difference. The system offers rewards to 
 frauds and perjuries. 
 
 As against specific duties, ad valorems have 
 another offense to answer for. When the 
 value of the goods fixes the amount of duty, 
 inferior qualities bear it best, and the market 
 is deteriorated to the extent to which the im- 
 posture can be practised. An experienced 
 clothier, cannot, at the distance of six feet, 
 distinguish between a coat of Brussels cloth 
 worth two dollars a yard and one worth twice 
 that amount. Ilow arc the common purchasers 
 to distinguish them by any oxaminulion ? But 
 ])ut on a specific duly, and you compel the 
 foreigner to send his best of the class or kind, 
 for that will best bear the charge. This is 
 true, and as important as true, of all textile 
 fabrics. 
 
 American cutlery has almost, excluded the 
 foreign from use. The protective duties have 
 not of themselves been sutlicient to produce 
 the result ; but as every man who buys a saw, 
 
17 
 
 a plane-bit, a chisel, a hatchet, a razor, or 
 knife, is a judge of the article, and will not be 
 worried with a mean one, he escapes the im- 
 position of imported trash; and the home man- 
 ufacturer escapes its competition. But in the 
 matter of cloths, not one customer in a thou- 
 sand knows, or can discover by the use, the 
 difference between the grades of quality which 
 afford margin enough for successful rivalry 
 with the goods of those who live among us, and 
 are responsible for the quality of their manu- 
 factures. Cosmopolitan traffic scarcely needs 
 a character, for the world is wide, and fools 
 and dupes are plenty. 
 
 But ad valorems are inconsistent with the 
 steadiness of protection which productive in- 
 dustry requires. A retail storekeeper need 
 care but little about the fluctuation of prices. 
 It can hardly be so rapid as to catch him with 
 a heavy stock on hand. But the man who 
 builds a furnace, or cotton or woollen factory, 
 might almost as well be tenant at will of the 
 land he builds them on as exposed to the ups 
 and downs of twenty-five, fifty, or one hundred 
 per cent, in the course of a year or two. A 
 small grog-shop can get along under ad valo- 
 rems upon the foreign liquors it requires, for 
 it can sell out between Sunday morning and 
 Saturday night ; but what is to become of an 
 establishment costing hundreds of thousands 
 of dollars in fixtures and stock, and of the labor 
 and wages of the workmen, if the products are 
 to be run ruinously low by every change in all 
 the world beyond the ocean ? We are not 
 bound to take off the shock of every indiscre- 
 tion, and abide the hostility of every rival in- 
 dustry, in Europe. 
 
 Now, ad valorems have the effect of putting 
 us into full partnership in all the losses of our 
 rivals, but they give us none of the profits. — 
 In a word, they are a contrivance of the enemy, 
 and are manufactured, like the worst of their 
 goods, not for home, but for foreign, consump- 
 tion. 
 
 SPECIFIC DUTIES VINDICATED BY OUR 
 EXPERIENCE. 
 
 Specific duties stand steadily to the defence 
 of our industrial liberties. They take no cri- 
 minal share in the foreign conspiracy against 
 us. They cannot entirely protect against very 
 low prices, but they never betray us. There 
 is no dodge and no fraud, no uncertainty and 
 no treachery, in them. 
 
 It is now so long since we have had a tariff 
 of specific duties, that the proposition to re- 
 store them may seem like a novelty and an 
 experiment to the men whose experience in 
 political affairs dates no more than twenty 
 years back. But really ad valorems are the 
 innovators, coming in upon the first opportu- 
 nity after the policy of free trade got on foot, 
 and intended to counter-work whatever of pro- 
 tection there might be left in a tariff construct- 
 ed mainly with a view to revenue. The 
 national treasury requires money enough in 
 amount from imposts to foster home production 
 fairly, if properly distributed and justly and 
 steadily levied. Under the tariffs devised to 
 B 
 
 promote the interests of labor, and supply the 
 wants of the Government, at least ten years 
 of continuous trial had proved specific duties 
 to be adequate, uniform, and reliable, as the 
 mode of collecting the customs; evenly and very 
 accurately covering the current expenditure, 
 and gradually providing for the discharge of 
 the public debt, until it was by their happy 
 operation extinguished. When the debt 
 of the two wars was discharged and the 
 country was beyond all example prosperous 
 and happy, our politicians seemed to think 
 that they were in the midst of a revolution in 
 financial affairs ; that the policy which paid 
 the national debt and secured the national 
 welfare must be obsolete as soon as it was 
 vindicated by its results ; and thereupon 
 followed such a train of mischiefs as might 
 almost give countenance to the old saying, 
 “A national debt is a national blessing.” 
 Very certainly the extinguishment of ours was 
 followed by a dispensation of national curses. 
 The only substantive thing for which a Federal 
 Union would be formed by wise men — the more 
 effectual guardianship of the interests of 
 labor — was found to be unconstitutional ! And 
 the only honest way of levying the duties, 
 which necessarily must be raised, was dis- 
 covered to be unequal. It had not the equity 
 of ad valorem taxation in it ; and so, specific 
 duties went by the board, and our system ever 
 since has not only drifted away from the bene- 
 ficent care of the productive power of the 
 people, but it has more than once run into 
 national bankruptcy and financial disgrace. 
 
 Previous to the Compromise act of 1833, 
 we had thirteen general tariffs. In all of them 
 ad valorems were avoided, directly by specific 
 duties wherever they could be applied in form; 
 and where they could not, by mixed specifics 
 and ad valorems in some cases, and in others, 
 by minimum valuations, which of itself 
 converts a percentage into a specific duty in its 
 effects. No one can look over these old tariffs, 
 from the first which Hamilton produced to 
 the last that Clay helped to frame, without 
 being struck with the evident solicitude shown 
 in every item to escape the fraud and treachery 
 of ad valorems in the national customs. 
 
 protection, a failure if not general and 
 
 IMPARTIAL. 
 
 A nation must have a considerable extent of 
 territory, must possess, within its own domain, 
 a full variety of raw material and natural 
 agents, labor to spare from agricultural pro- 
 duction, adequate capital, and be situated in a 
 temperate climate, if it would enter upon 
 manufacturing enterprise with success ; and 
 without these conditions it cannot avail itself 
 of the protective system. 
 
 If its limits are too narrow, and its resources 
 too scanty, Federal Union, acquisition of ad- 
 ditional territory, or commercial treaties, must 
 be resorted to in order to put it into the 
 required condition. The countries that are 
 thus qualified must diversify their labor, and 
 apply it in the most profitable departments of 
 production, if they would develop their agri- 
 
18 
 
 culture, increase their -vveaKh, extend their 
 commerce, and escape industrial vassalage to 
 the more advanced nations. Ilut they must 
 do it tliorouglily, if they would command all 
 its advantages. No single or limited number 
 of interests must be selected, to the neglect of 
 otliers. One limb of the industrial body must 
 not be groAvn and the others dwarfed or ne- 
 glected. That is unequal, therefore inequi- 
 table, and as certainly injudicious. They must | 
 all be brought out in fair proportion, that each 
 member may strengthen tlie whole. 
 
 Very erroneous notions are afloat in this 
 respect. The iron and coal of Pennsylvania 
 are put into the position of preferred claim- 
 ants, by some of the advocates of the bill be- 
 fore the Senate, and the majority of its oppo- 
 nents make concessions in behalf of this branch 
 of our industry, as if they believed they can 
 buy off our urgency for a protective tariff by 
 indulging this pet selfishness of ours. All this 
 is a mistake. The Pennsylvania iron men 
 want customers, consumers for their iron, vv^ith 
 the ability to purchase abundantly. They 
 want the whole country to build their bridges, 
 make their fences, construct their public and 
 private buildings of iron, and so oj^en a gene- 
 rous market for all the iron that Pennsylvania, 
 Virginia, Tennessee, and Missouri, can find 
 the capital and labor to supply. They want 
 every form of industry to be revived, and every 
 man made able to consume their products. 
 Protection for them, without a corresponding 
 enlargement of their market at home, is simply 
 throwing them upon the ocean, to contend with 
 England for the foreign trade. This is every 
 way absurd. 
 
 The manufacturing, mining, and mechanical 
 products of Pennsylvania in 1850 are rendered 
 by the census at one hundred and fifty-five 
 millions of dollars, of which her pig iron, 
 castings, and wrought iron, amount to no more 
 than twenty-one millions, or less than one 
 seventh of the whole. If her iron could even 
 be held at this rate amid the decay of her 
 other industries, it would not repay the State 
 the expense of the music in a Presidential 
 campaign. If the nation of our proper cus- 
 tomers is to be kept poor, no favoritism can 
 make our iron masters rich. Moreover, we 
 feel indigiiant at tlie implied selfishness, to 
 say nothing of the folly, of pushing Congress 
 to grant us a monopoly of its favors. 
 
 The woollens and cottons manufactured in 
 tlie State are a larger interest in value than 
 our iron; iron and coal, however, holding this 
 difl(;renc(! from tluun, that tliey enijiloy a much 
 larger nundier of laborers in the production of 
 equal valu(;H. 'J'ho raw material of the textile 
 faliricM is a con,si<J(Mable jiart of the market 
 value of the commodity. Nearly all — all but 
 about tive to ten percent, of the, price of iron is 
 labor, and the profits of cufiital. Cenei-ally, 
 manufactur<!K pay twenty-live jier cent., of 
 llicir cost to wagci:; iron jiays full seventy-five 
 per cent,. Sxmqit for tin* dilference of human 
 jnterc.l in the respect iv(! (oises, iron holds no 
 sneh )to ition in tin; larilf policy us is com- 
 monly accorded to it. 'I’he men employed in I 
 
 making it cannot consume the agricultural 
 surplus of the whole country. They do not 
 number one in ten of the mechanics and 
 artisans of the country. They cannot open a 
 flourishing market for all the architects, cloth- 
 ing and furniture makers, and keep the mer- 
 cantile marine, and the internal arnl coastwise 
 transporters, busy besides. Protection is not 
 a thing to be huckstered by place-men and 
 I politicians; it is apolicy addressing its claims 
 to statesmen and patriots ; it is the demand of 
 the people whose capital is their labor-power, 
 upon whatever pure democracy there is in the 
 government, to guard tliat labor from foreign 
 invasion, as earnestly, at least, as the soil or 
 rhe flag of the nation from the attacks of their 
 foes. They are not asking anybody for cheap 
 clothes and cheap furniture, but for a fair 
 chance to earn enough of them for the comfort 
 of living, the means of educating their children, 
 and promoting their own fortunes. 
 
 OBJECT, RULE AND MEASURE OF PROTECTirB 
 DUTIES. 
 
 As we have elsewhere said, the prosperity of 
 a people is measured by their consumption. — 
 Whatever system of management fails to pro- 
 vide for an increase of consumption is a starv- 
 ing one. In a country so new, and feeble in 
 labor-power and capital that it cannot manu- 
 facture, ail import duties merely diminish con- 
 sumption, and are mischievous. In a country 
 so much advanced in manufacturing power 
 as to need no defence against foreign products, 
 import duties are only excises under another 
 name. Here, again, as they tend to diminish 
 consumption, they are mischievous. For the 
 same reason, duties upon tropical products are 
 always wrong ; they diminish consumption and 
 lessen the comforts of life to the poor. 
 
 The general principle is, that whenever im- 
 port duties check or abate the ability of the 
 people to consume, they are wrong. When- 
 ever imports throw the ready and waiting 
 labor of the country out of employment, 
 they diminish consumption, and ought to be 
 checked by protective duties. The people that 
 have the most wants, and these most amply 
 supplied — in other words, the greatest con- 
 sumers — are the happiest, the most civilized, 
 and farthest advanced in all that marks the 
 ditference betAveen savage and cultivated, edu- 
 cated, and ennobled humanity. 
 
 There are a million of people now in the 
 United States whose labor is worth a dollar a 
 day. Throw them idle for a year and you have 
 diminished their power of consumption to the 
 amount of three hundred millions, nine tenths 
 of which Avould be of domestic products. All 
 ourcxiiorls, including cotton for the year, will 
 not. settle that account. They are not greater 
 in amount, and they Avould be larger still than 
 lliey are if the labor of that million of men 
 hail been employed in jiroviding them. 
 
 W(^ have said enough to mark our oi)inion 
 of a pailial ])roteclion. When Ave have felt 
 obliged to tell the South that “iron is our 
 uiggm-,” tlial they might, underslaml by their 
 own tenacity Avhat avo mean to do about it, wo 
 
19 
 
 could have wished rather that they would un- 
 derstand the matter as it is. Indeed, we may 
 be allowed to extend the wish to vast multi- 
 tudes of the people whose highest interests are 
 directly involved in it. 
 
 It is not to be expected that we should ex- 
 amine the House bill in detail, testing all its 
 items. We profess no such universal business 
 knowledge. But finding all classes of interests 
 carefully considered, we think it probable that 
 they are justly dealt with. We do not say ac- 
 curately, but honestly treated. To make a 
 perfect tariff law, unexceptionable in all its 
 provisions, would require a Congress of adepts 
 in all the multiform arts and occupations of 
 the time. In lack of such formality of con- 
 sttltation, the committee that prepared it have 
 been more than a year employed upon it, using 
 all the help they could get, and it is to be pre- 
 sumed that they have done the best for it that 
 could be done. It has no faults of principle in 
 it; those of specialities are not very obvious 
 or numerous, and they are amendable by ex- 
 perience. 
 
 DOCTRINE OF JEFFERSON, MADISON AND JACKSON. 
 
 It will be in place just here to cite some of 
 the authorities, whom our readers reverence, 
 in support of our general propositions : 
 
 Thomas Jefferson, writing to J. B. Say, in 
 March, 1815, after carefully perusing that 
 gentleman’s treatise upon political economy, 
 which is the very Koran of free trade, says : 
 “ The duties we lay on all articles of foreign 
 manufacture which prudence requires us to 
 establish at home, with the patriotic determina- 
 tion of every good citizen to use no foreign 
 articles which can be made within ourselves, 
 without regard to difference of prices, secures us 
 against relapse into foreign dependency.” 
 
 Mr. Madison, in his letter to Joseph C. 
 Cabell, Esq., dated 18th September, 1828, 
 arguing the constitutionality of protection, 
 says : 
 
 “The power (‘to regulate trade’) has been 
 understood and used by all commercial and 
 manufacturing nations, as embracing the 
 object of encouraging manufactures. It is 
 believed that not a single exception can be 
 named. This has been particularly the case 
 with Great Britain, whose commercial vocabu- 
 lary is the parent of ours. Such was under- 
 stood to be a proper use of the power by the 
 States most prepared for manufacturing in- 
 dustry, whilst retaining the power over their 
 foreign trade. Such a use of the power 
 by Congress, accords with the intention and 
 expectation of the States, in transferring the 
 power over trade from themselves to the 
 Government of the United States. If Con- 
 gress has not the power, it is annihiliated for 
 the nation — a policy without example in any 
 other nation, and not within the reason of the 
 solitary one in our own. That the encourage- 
 ment of manufactures was an object of the 
 power ‘to regulate commerce with foreign 
 nations’ is proved by the use made of the 
 power for that object in the first session of the 
 first Congress under the Constitution, when 
 
 among the members present were so many 
 who had been members of the Federal Conven- 
 tion which framed the Constitution, and of the 
 State Conventions which ratified it ; each of 
 these classes consisting, also, of members who 
 had opposed, and who had espoused the Con- 
 stitution in its actual form. It does not 
 appear from the printed proceedings of Con- 
 gress on that occasion, that the power was 
 denied by any of them. And it will be 
 remarked that members from Virginia, in 
 particular, as well of the anti-Federal as the 
 Federal party, did not hesitate to propose du- 
 ties and to suggest even prohibitions in favor 
 of certain articles of her production. By one 
 a duty was proposed on mineral coal in favor 
 of Virginia coal-pits ; by another, a duty on 
 hemp was proposed, to encourage the growth 
 of that article ; and by a third, a prohibition 
 even of beef was suggested as a measure of 
 sound policy.” 
 
 Upon the economical policy of protection, 
 Mr. Madison, in his letter to Mr. Cabell, 
 30th October, 1828, says, among other things : 
 
 “There are cases where a nation may be so 
 far advanced in the prerequisites for a particu- 
 lar branch of manufactures that this, if once 
 brought into existence, would support itself ; 
 and yet, unless aided in its nascent and infant 
 state by public encouragement and a confi- 
 dence in public protection, might remain, if 
 not altogether, for a long time unattempted, 
 or attempted without success. Is not our 
 cotton manufacture a fair example ? * * * 
 
 The number must be small that would now 
 pronounce this manufacturing boon not to have 
 been cheaply purchased by the tariff which 
 nursed it into its present maturity. 
 
 “ Should it happen, as has been suspected, 
 to be an object, though not of a foreign Gov- 
 ernment itself, of its great manufacturing 
 capitalists, to strangle the infant manufactures 
 of an extensive customer, or an anticipated 
 rival, it would surely, in such a case, be in- 
 cumbent on the suffering party, so far to make 
 an exception to the “let-alone” policy as to 
 parry the evil by opposite regulations of its 
 foreign commerce.” 
 
 General Jackson, to Dr. Coleman in 1824, 
 said: “ So far as the tariff bill before us em- 
 braces the design of fostering, protecting, and 
 preserving within ourselves the means of na- 
 tional defence and independence, particularly 
 in a state of war, I would support it. * * * 
 Heaven smiled upon and gave us liberty and 
 independence and national defence. If we 
 omit or refuse to use the gifts which He has 
 extended to us, we deserve not the continuation 
 of his blessings. He has filled our mountains 
 and our plains with minerals, with lead, iron, 
 and copper, and given us climate and soil for 
 the growth of hemp and wool. These being the 
 grand materials of our national defence, they 
 ought to have extended to them adequate and 
 fair protection, that our manufacturers and 
 laborers may be placed in a fair competition 
 with those of Europe, and that we may have 
 within our country a supply of those leading 
 and important articles so essential in war. 
 
20 
 
 Beyond this I look at the tariff with an eye 
 to the proper distribution of labor and revenue, 
 and with a view to discharge our national 
 debt. * * 1 will ask, Wliat is the real situa- 
 
 tion of the agriculturist? Wliere has tlie 
 American farmer a market for his surplus 
 product? Except for cotton, he has neither a 
 foreign nor a home market. * * Draw 
 
 from agriculture the superabundant labor ; 
 employ it in mechanism and manufactures, 
 thereby creating a home market for your 
 breadstuffs, and distributing labor to the most 
 profitable account and benefits to the country. 
 Take from agriculture in the United States 
 six hundred thousand men, women, and chil- 
 dren, and you will at once give a home mai’ket 
 for more breadstuffs than all Europe now 
 furnishes us. In short, sir, we have been too 
 long subject to the policy of the British mer- 
 chants. It is time that we should become a 
 little more Americanized, and instead of feeding 
 the paupers and laborers of England, feed our 
 own, or else, in a short time, by continuing our 
 present policy, we shall all be rendered pau- 
 pers ourselves.’’ 
 
 HISTORY OF OUR TARIFFS, AND OF MANUFAC- 
 TURES. 
 
 In the confidence that our readers are keep- 
 ing company with us in the study of our sub- 
 ject and are sufficiently interested to accept 
 such aid as we can give them gladly, we pro- 
 pose to sketch the history of our national ex- 
 perience, so far as it may serve to throw light 
 upon the policy of protection. 
 
 Almost within the memory of living men, 
 the United States have risen from the complete 
 subjection of colonial dependence, and from 
 the condition of separate provinces, united by 
 no political bond, to that of a compact, rich, 
 and independent nation, outranking the Em- 
 pires of the Old World in territorial extent and 
 varied capabilities of production; equaling 
 the strongest of tliem in population; composed 
 of the representatives of all the races ; com- 
 bining tlie climates and soils of the whole hab- 
 itable globe ; shaped into a continent conveni- 
 ent for internal commerce, with a sea-coast so 
 deeply indented, and a lake and river system 
 so tlioi-ouglily dissecting the mass, tliat a do- 
 main only one-sixth less than the area covered 
 by the fifty-nine or sixty empires, states, and 
 republics of Europe, and of equal extent with 
 the Homan Empire at its largest, is cut, for 
 the puT-pose of internal and exteiaial commerce, 
 into twenty islarnls of about the size of Ureat 
 Britian. Here are all the conditions, in ample 
 proportion, for the I'eheai'sal of the world’s 
 liistory ; here, there is nothing wanting to work 
 out, a world’s d(!st iny ; and Imi'c we have pi'e- 
 cipitated upon ns e.V(!ry social, polil ical and eco- 
 noinieiil proljlem of th(i past, and tin; future of 
 hnnnin liislory, with the pi^opb; of every kind- 
 red and fdimo Cor its subjects and ag(nds. 
 
 liven in the infancy of sindi a couidry, the 
 history o( its (roniinercc! and industry coidd not 
 fail to be more instruct ivo than any other. - 
 'J'he dev<'lopment has Immui so rapid, tin* pei iods 
 of free tiade and j)r(;teclion have been so fre- 
 
 quent and sudden, the results are so plainly 
 marked, that the varied experiences must bo 
 conclusively demonstrative of the doctrines 
 and policies so well tried. 
 
 The colonies were held under restraint so 
 absolute that, beyond the common domestic 
 industry and the most ordinary mechanical 
 employments, no kind of manufactures was 
 permitted. In 1750, a hatter-shop in Massa- 
 chusetts was declared by Parliament to be a 
 nuisance ; in the same year an act was passed 
 to encourage the importation of pig iron from 
 the colonies, because charcoal, then exclusively 
 used in smelting the ore in England, was ex- 
 hausted, but forbidding the erection of mills, 
 tilt-hammers, slitting or rolling mills, or any 
 establishment for the manufacture of steel. — 
 In the same year, the great Earl of Chatham, 
 alarmed at our enterprise, declared that the 
 colonies ought not to be allowed to manufac- 
 ture so much as a hob-nail. Joshua Gee (in 
 his work upon Trade,) at the same time said, 
 “manufactures in American colonies should be 
 discouraged, prohibited.” 
 
 He continues: “If we examine into the cir- 
 cumstances of the inhabitants of our planta- 
 tions, and our own, it will appear that one- 
 fourth part of their product redounds to their 
 own profit, for out of all that comes here, they 
 only carry back clothing and other accommo- 
 dations for their families, all of which is of 
 the merchandise and manufacture of this king- 
 dom. New England and the Northern colo- 
 nies have not commodities and products enough 
 to send us in return for purchasing their ne- 
 cessary clothing, but are under very great 
 difficulties ; and, therefore, any ordinary sort 
 sell with them, and ivhen they have grown 
 out of fashion with us, they are new-fashioned 
 enough for them.” 
 
 The British navigation laws were enacted in 
 the same spirit, and to the same intent — to 
 hold the colonies in industrial and commercial 
 vassalage to the mother country. It was this 
 systematic and despotic monopoly of manu- 
 facturing industry and the carrying trade that 
 caused the American Revolution ; the tax upon 
 tea was only the immediate cause of the ex- 
 plosion. 
 
 The interruption of commerce with Great 
 Britian during the War of the Revolution, 
 awakened, per force, the manufactures of the 
 States that had the materials and the labor- 
 power, so that, at its close, they found them- 
 selves considerably advanced in the power of 
 self-supply. Alexander Hamilton, in 1791, 
 arguing the practicability of manufactures in 
 this country, and the duty of encouraging 
 them, says; “Jt is certain that several im- 
 ])orlant bra nches have grown up, and nourished 
 with a rapidity which surprises, affording an 
 encouraging assurance of success in future 
 attempts.” Ho proceeds to enumerate, in de- 
 tail, seventeen grand tle])art nients which were 
 th(*n well established, among which, however, 
 cottons, woollens, and cutlery do not occur, 
 exce[)t as the two former arc embraced in the 
 following impressive ])a.ragraph of his report: 
 “ Besides manufactories of these articles, which 
 
21 
 
 are carried on as regular trades, and have at- 
 tained to a considerable maturity, there is a 
 vast scene of household manufacturing, which 
 contributes more largely to the supply of the 
 community than could be imagined without 
 having made it an object of particular inquiry. 
 This observation is the pleasing result of the 
 investigation to which the subject of this re- 
 port has led, and is applicable as well to the 
 Southern as to the Middle and Northern States. 
 Great quantities of coarse cloths, coatings, 
 serges, and flannels, linsey woolseys, hosiery 
 of wool, cotton and thread, fustians, jeans 
 and muslins, checked and striped cotton and 
 linen goods, bed ticks, coverlets and counter- 
 panes, tow-linens, coarse shirtings, sheetings, 
 toweling and table linen, and various mixtures 
 of wool and cotton, and of cotton and 
 flax, are made in the household way, and, in 
 many instances, to an extent not only sufficient 
 for the supply of families in which they are 
 made, but for sale, and even in some cases for 
 exportation. It is computed that in a number 
 of districts, two-thirds, three-fourths, and even 
 four-fifths of all the clothing of the inhabitants 
 are made by themselves.” 
 
 The household manufactures here spoken of 
 held their place until the general introduction 
 of machinery, after the war of 1812, sup- 
 pressed them; but the factories which the War 
 of Independence had protected and fostered 
 immediately fell under the inundation of for- 
 eign goods after the peace of Paris. A mem- 
 ber of Congress, speaking of that crisis, said : 
 “We bought, according to the doctrine of 
 modern theorists, where we could purchase 
 cheapest, and were soon inundated with for- 
 eign commodities ; English goods were sold at 
 lower rates in our maritime cities than at 
 Liverpool and London. Our manufactures 
 were ruined ; our merchants, even those who 
 had hoped to enrich themselves by importation, 
 became bankrupt, and all these causes united 
 had such a disastrous influence upon agricul- 
 ture that a general depreciation of real estate 
 followed, and failure became general among 
 proprietors.” 
 
 PROTECTIVE POLICY PROMINENT AMONG THE 
 
 CAUSES AND OBJECTS OF OUR NATIONAL 
 
 UNION. 
 
 This state of things continued from the 
 peace of Paris to the adoption of the Federal 
 Constitution, and there was no help for it, for 
 the Old Confederation gave no power to regu- 
 late commerce for the protection of the home 
 industry. This evil, we believe, more than 
 any other, impelled the States to draw closer 
 the bonds of political union, and to grant the 
 needful powers to Congress to establish an 
 effective system of commercial regulations for 
 the nation. Mr. Madison says: “During the 
 delays and discouragements experienced in 
 the attempts to invest Congress with the neces- 
 sary powers, the State of Virginia made vari- 
 ous trials of what could be done by her indi- 
 vidual laws. She ventured on duties and 
 imposts as a source of revenue. Among the 
 projects promoted by the want of a Federal 
 
 authority over commerce was that of a concert, 
 first proposed on the part of Maryland, for a 
 uniformity of regulations between the two 
 States, and commissioners were appointed for 
 that purpose. It was soon perceived, however, 
 that the concurrence of Pennsylvania was as 
 necessary to Maryland, as of Maryland to Vir- 
 ginia, and the concurrence of Pennsylvania 
 was accordingly invited. But Pennsylvania 
 could no more concur without New York, than 
 Maryland without Pennsylvania, nor New York 
 without the concurrence of Boston, &c. These 
 projects were superseded for the moment by 
 that of the Convention at Annapolis, in 178G, 
 and forever by the Convention in Philadelphia, 
 1787, and the Constitution which was the fruit 
 of it.” 
 
 This historical statement of Mr. Madison 
 shows how distinctively, among the other causes 
 operating to the same end, the necessity for 
 regulating our foreign trade, and holding it 
 obedient to all the interests and necessities of 
 the States included in the loose union of the 
 Old Confederation, was felt, and how prominent 
 it was in leading them to a “more perfect 
 union,” and better provision for the “general 
 welfare.” 
 
 No sooner was the first Congress under the 
 new Constitution assembled, than it was beset 
 with petitions for the protection of home in- 
 dustry, not excepting commercial New York, 
 or planting South Carolina. The sentiment of 
 the day was emphatically and impressively 
 illustrated by the fact that Washington wore 
 a coat of domestic cloth on the day of his in- 
 auguration, “giving,” as a New York journal 
 of the day said, “ to his successors and to le- 
 gislators of after time, an indelible lesson 
 as to the means of promoting national pros- 
 perity.” 
 
 Our first tariff bill was approved by General 
 Washington on the 4th July, 1789, sixty-five 
 days after the organization of the first Con- 
 gress. The preamble to the Act reads thus : 
 “Whereas it is necessary for the support of 
 Government, for the discharge of the debts of 
 the United States, and the encouragement and 
 protection of manufactures, that duties be laid 
 on goods, wares, and merchandise imported,” 
 &c. The duties of this Act were in but few in- 
 stances above ten per cent. ; the coal of Vir- 
 ginia getting a protection of two cents per 
 bushel, hemp sixty cents per cwt., and twine and 
 pack-thread made of it, two dollars per cwt., 
 snuff ten cents per lb., and cigars five percent. 
 These rates were inadequate for any of the 
 purposes enumerated in the preamble to the 
 Act. Another tariff, passed on the 10th Au- 
 gust, 1790, by the same Congress, recites the 
 preamble of the first Act, adding, — “And 
 whereas the support of Government and the 
 discharge of the said debts renoer it necessary 
 to increase the said duties,” &c. It added to 
 the rates of the first in the majority of articles 
 twenty-five, fifty, and one hundred per cent. 
 The happy results of these provisions for the 
 public welfare became immediately apparent — 
 instantly, indeed, because the confidence of 
 security and success has the power, through 
 
22 
 
 the operations of a -well-based credit, to antici- 
 pate time. In October, 17U1, Washington, 
 writing to La Luzkkne, holds this langnage: 
 “In my tour 1 confirmed, by observation, the 
 accounts wliich we liad all along received of 
 the happy effects of tlie General Government | 
 upon our agriculture, commerce, and industry, j 
 The same effects pervade the Middle and 
 Eastern States, with the addition of vast pro- 
 gress in themost useful manufactures.” Only I 
 two years before, industry, commerce and 
 credit had well nigh perished, but, und*^r the 
 touch of a master hand, they had already as- 
 sumed the vigor of health and the cheerfulness 
 of hope. 
 
 Hamilton was a protectionist, but not an 
 extremist ; with the finest speculative powers 
 ever conferred upon any man for the conduct 
 of public affairs, he was the safest, most cau- 
 tious, and best informed of practical states- 
 men. His policy of commerce, navigation, 
 agriculture, currency, and manufactures were 
 all alike and equally, the expression and the 
 means of actualizing the grand national pliilo- 
 sophy expressed in one of the numbers of the 
 “Federalist,” when he was urging upon the 
 American people the unity of empire, under a 
 Federal Government; “Let the thirteen 
 States, bound together in a great indissoluble 
 Union, concur in erecting one great Ameeican 
 System, superior to the control of trans-Atlan- 
 tic force or influence, and able to dictate the 
 connection between the Old and New World.” 
 
 HISTOKY, EFFECTS OF WAE, PEACE AND PAPEE 
 MONEY. 
 
 In 1793, the wars of England and her allies 
 with France, which were to last, with slight 
 remissions, until 1815, began to operate as 
 protection to American manufactures. For 
 twenty-two years western Europe, and especi- 
 ally England, then already the work-shop of 
 the world, was engaged in the work of con- 
 Buming and destroying the products of indus- 
 try, and their prime laborers in the business 
 of cutting each other’s throats. The resulting 
 embarrassments of maritime trade operated in 
 the same way. The Bank of England sus- 
 pended specie payments early in 1797, not to 
 resume them again till 1817, partially, and 
 completely in 1821. Prices of all commodi- 
 tie.s, under these circumst.ances, ruled very 
 Jjigh in Furo[)e, with all the benelit to Ameii- 
 caj) pj’oduclion that eijuivalent )>roteclive du- 
 ties could have remdered. Neve,rlhel(?ss, our 
 financial nticessilies were ])ressing; the cus- 
 toms were ina<le(iua(e, aiul Congre.ss, by four 
 HuccesKiv<! tariffs, raised (he diiiies ol' (ho tvet 
 of 1 790 (o (juite an average of Hovtuheen ])er- 
 oe.nt. (id vitlonm, or, perhaps, (o Ivventy, if 
 the sjieeifie vyerc; inebideil in llu! es(iniu(e. 
 'J'his point, wafl reach(*(l by the act of 180 1. 
 
 'l'lie-i(; rales wouhl not. hav(! Iieen snlfudenl 
 of I heiiis(!l V(‘H, bill (he enibarg(» of 1807, (Ik* 
 n<m-j til ercoursi’ wilh Grcal Ib ilain of 1809, and 
 finally llio war of 1812, gavc^ lull play lo our 
 yming enl (*r|)ri.u!, and aeeordiii); ly, during llie 
 War of 1812, manufaci tiring indusliy received 
 such an ttxl raordinary inijuilsc, dial we nut 
 
 only met the home demand, but were able to 
 furnish some surplus for exportation. A ('on- 
 gressional report in 1815 puts our cotton and 
 woollen manufactures at more than sixty mil- 
 lions per annum, with altove one hundred 
 thousand Avorkmen employed. Thirty years 
 afterwards, Secretary Walker estimated the 
 products of these two branches of mtinu Pic- 
 ture, in the United States, at no more than 
 eighty-nine millions, or less than fifty per cent, 
 increase. 
 
 England, in that thirty years, increased the 
 exports of her products from forty-two millions 
 of pounds sterling to one hundred and thirty- 
 five millions, official valuation, or three hun- 
 dred and tAventy per cent. As in the case of 
 the War of Indciiendence, that of 1812 liad the 
 effect to extend our manufacturing industry by 
 excluding foreign competition, tind (here was 
 a rapid increase in all values, as Avell of raw 
 materials as of manufactured goods, labor, 
 and real estate; thus giving a Avell-distributed 
 prosperity to Avorkmen, land-holders, and to 
 internal commerce. 
 
 But after the battle of AVaterloo and the gen- 
 eral pacification of Europe, England, France, 
 and Germany Avent to Avork, and the duties of 
 the tariff of 1810 proved to be much more cal- 
 culated to increase the customs than to protect 
 our manufactures. Our prosperity went down 
 under an inundation of foreign imports. The 
 total imports shot up from 12 millions in 1814 
 to 113 millions in 1815, and 147 in 1810. The 
 glut in our market reduced (hem to 99 millions 
 the next year, but in 1818 they rose again to 
 121 millions — ^a figure Avhich they never touched 
 afterwards until the year 1884, the first of tlie 
 compromise reduction of duties. For although 
 there was nothing restrictive of trade in the 
 tariff, from 1810 to 1824 a ruinous and paralyz- 
 ing depression of our monetary affairs liad 
 the effect of checking imports, until the tariffs 
 that intended protection came in to hold them 
 in due moderation. 
 
 Thus, after the country had a second time 
 enjoyed during war the benefits of peace, it 
 suffered for the second time the usual evils of 
 war in time of peace. 
 
 But to help the foreign competition to break 
 doAvn our home industry, another cause Avas 
 tit Avork. Hi 181 5-1 ()-l 7-18 prices Avcrc kept 
 up here, artificially, to the Avar standard, Avhile 
 in Furope they Avere rapidly falling to (he 
 rjitcs of ])eace. England began at the earliest 
 moment to resume specie payments, and Ave 
 Avent to AVOrk to suspend and jiostpono 
 them. 
 
 In 1812 Gongress began to carry on the Avar 
 with Great Uritain upon loans of hank credits 
 tind bank notes. In 1813 the banks ol the 
 middle Slates lent liberally to (he Government, 
 tniil, Jis a consetptence, increased (heir issues 
 proporl ionately. 'I'hey mtnlinued (his line ot 
 loans (lirongh 1811, until in AugnsI (hey wevo 
 oliliged to suspend specie ptiymenls ; and s]tecio 
 bore a preniinni of M to 2d percent. In i815, 
 the Government recteiving their ineon verl ible 
 |)aper in jtiiyim'iit of public dues, (he\' ex .ended 
 their issues still further. 
 
23 
 
 In 1816 tlie Bank of England was preparing 
 to redeem its notes ; the other nations of Eu- 
 rope were also endeavoring to replace their 
 paper currencies with specie. We were a debt- 
 or-trader with the trans- Atlantic world, and a 
 heavy drain of our small supply of specie com- 
 menced, specie standing in Philadelphia at IG 
 to 17 per cent, premium. Some reduction of 
 the paper circulation occurred towards the 
 close Of this year, and in 1817 there was a 
 partial resumption of specie payments ; but at 
 the close of the year there was as much paper 
 in circulation as at the beginning. In the 
 spring of 1818 the local bank mania reached 
 its height. More than two hundred banks 
 were projected in various parts of the Union. 
 In the middle of the year 1819 the banks com- 
 menced contracting and breaking ; property 
 depreciated immensely, and multitudes of in- 
 dividuals went into insolvency. Towards the 
 close of the year 1820 the banks settled down 
 into what was called a “state of regularity,” 
 which meant lying on their oars, by the few 
 that had not swamped. In 1815 their circula- 
 tion had reached a hundred millions, we know 
 not how much more in 1818, but now it had 
 gone down to forty-five millions ; and a mer- 
 chant of the interior was obliged to carry what 
 specie he could raise to the sea-ports, because 
 he could not get hold of an Eastern specie- 
 paying bank-note. The business history of 
 1820-21 may be remembered, but it would be 
 hard to put it on paper. A State of sutFering 
 prevailed which beggars all description ; and 
 an anti-bank sentiment spread throughout the 
 laud which has distracted the reasonings of 
 politicians to such an extent, that they have 
 never been able to trace a revulsion of our 
 monetary and business affairs to any other 
 cause from that day to this. 
 
 The fact is overlooked that at the beginning 
 of the “ late war” there was not more than 
 fifteen millions of specie in all the banks, and 
 perhaps half that amount in general circula- 
 tion ; that the embargo of 1807, which pre- 
 vented the export of our produce, had com- 
 pelled the export of specie instead ; that in 
 1808 the invasion of Spain by NapolUon threw 
 her and her specie yielding colonies into the 
 arms of Great Britian, taking their treasure 
 and their traffic in the same direction ; and 
 that about this time the South American mint, 
 which had been yielding fifty millions, de- 
 clined to about twenty-seven millions a year. 
 
 In this state of things the war of 1812 burst 
 upon the country. The treasury was empty ; 
 the specie in the country amounted to two or 
 three dollars a head for the whole population ; 
 and the Government, in its desperation, chose 
 to pay out bank paper to meet the war ex- 
 penses ; perhaps in failure of any better way 
 of using its own credit, but certainly with the 
 direct effect of inducing issues which put hosts 
 of corporations into the position of redeeming 
 a debt on demand, which had been contracted 
 in behalf of the great debtor behind whose 
 bonds had twenty years to run. It was the 
 Government that broke the people that time, 
 and then left them in despair to break them- 
 
 selves still worse, in the tain hope of retriev- 
 ing their affairs, by increasing their debts 
 which, however, would not be postponed 
 through the aid of bank credits long enough 
 to enable the people to meet them. 
 
 The receipt of inconvertible paper for public 
 dues was prohibited after the 20th February, 
 1817. A large part of that paper was as much 
 a Government promise to pay as if it had been 
 in the form of treasury notes. It had been 
 received in sheets and quires from the banks 
 by the treasury and paid out to the public for 
 good. New England, not liking the war, her 
 banks lent sparingly, most of them northing at 
 all, to the Government ; they escaped the sus- 
 pension of 1814; in 1818 the ports of Boston 
 and Salem alone exported five millions of 
 specie within twelve months. They had been 
 all the while draining the other States, who 
 were playing pay-masters for the treasury, and 
 they had the cash to spare when nobody else 
 had any for use. The banks went still wilder 
 after the Government dropped them, just as a 
 tipsy gentleman will go fi-nm the dining table 
 of his friends to a tavern to- finish the frolic. 
 AVhen his headache is to be accounted for the 
 next morning, the dinner party ought not te 
 be overlooked. He ought not to have got 
 drunk, to be sure, but he was not sober when 
 he did it, and his honorable host has that 
 much to account for. The truth is, tlnit the 
 credit of the country was dead-broke at the 
 close of the war, and the only question was, 
 how must it fall to pieces. Eighty-millions 
 of the national debt w'as immediately due and 
 payable by the banks and the people, and they 
 had no money to pay it with. So they issued 
 new notes for the old ones, until nobody would 
 touch them, and then the whole concern Avound 
 up in bankruptcy. 
 
 On looking over the tables of the tariff of 
 1816, 30 percent, rates occur so frequently and 
 the schedules at 25 and 20 respectively, are 
 so well advanced upon the previous tariffs, a7id 
 compare so nearly Avith the duties of 1824, 
 that there is no accounting for its entire failure 
 to guard our home industry moderately Avell, 
 except by looking to the circumstances of that 
 great crisis in the affairs of the trans-Atlantic 
 world. Bonapaute was now safe at St. He- 
 lena, and the millions of men Avhom he had so 
 long kept otherwise employed, and the millions 
 of capital occupied in the maintenance of 
 the troops, were all suddenly turned to pro- 
 duction, glutting the markets of Europe so 
 that the prices of their products in America 
 were a mere matter of relief, not of profit, to 
 the enterprise that produced them. The ad 
 valorems of that bill, of course, went down 
 with the first cost price on our Avharves, and 
 even the specific duties had but a partially 
 protective effect, though rolled, bolt, and bar 
 iron was charged thirty dollars per ton. The 
 greatly depreciated paper currency, and the 
 extreme scarcity of coin, put up home prices 
 extravagantly, and so the tariff of 1816 disap- 
 pointed the country. But that the intention 
 was sound and right is apparent enough. All 
 the schedules and rates would have been mod- 
 
24 
 
 erafely protective, perhaps sufficiently so, if 
 things had been more nearly equal in Europe 
 and America — the respective tlieatrcs of the 
 competition for our own market. 
 
 HISTORY — THE COTTON STATES SUPPORT PRO- 
 TECTION WHILE “IT pays” their DERT, 
 
 Mr. Calhoun voted and spoke for the tariff 
 of 1810. Jlis understanding of its spirit and 
 provisions is indicated by a passage between 
 him and Mr. Clay in the Senate chamber in 
 18o2. “When you and I, sir,” said Mr Clay, 
 “ contended side by side for the tariff of 1810, 
 and you, with at least equal zeal, and certainly 
 greater ability than I, the constitutionality of 
 protection was not doubted.” Mr Calhoun 
 replied; “The constitutionality was not then 
 debated.” “ No, sir,” said Clay, “ it was not 
 then debatable — that is a quite modern dis- 
 covery.” 
 
 The debt of the two wars and the current 
 expenses of the Government were then to be 
 provided for ; and it is almost a shame to think 
 that, under tliat necessity, the cotton States 
 would favor a policy by which they should es- 
 cape half their share of the patriotic burden, 
 and so soon as they were afterwards wholly 
 relieved of the incubus, turn and strike 
 down the industries that had been built upon 
 their fairly implied faith. Protection in South 
 Carolina turned to nullification, so soon as the 
 special ends of South Carolina were served. 
 She could quarrel with us on a matter of trivial 
 percentages, so soon as she could not see the 
 proceeds passing as a gift to her account. 
 
 REVULSIONS, THEIR CAUSE AND CURE. 
 
 Dr. Hugh Williamson, describing the dis- 
 tresses and disorders of the year 1780, says: 
 “The scarcity of money is so great, and the 
 difficulty of paying debts has been so common, 
 that riots and combinations have been formed 
 in many places, and the operations of civil 
 government have been suspended.” Marshall, 
 in his “Life of Washington,” of this crisis 
 generally, and particularly of the causes which 
 led to Shay’s llebellion, says: “On opening 
 their ports, an immense quantity of foreign 
 merchandise was introduced into the country, 
 and tliey were tempt c<l by the sudden cheai)- 
 ness of imported goods, and by their own 
 wants, to piu’chasc beyond their capacity for 
 payment.” The conseciucnces, so soon as they 
 liad tinu! to work themselves out, he thus de- 
 scribes: “ 'J'he bomls of men, whose compe- 
 tency to pay their debts was umpiestionable, 
 conhl not be negotiated but at a discount of <‘50, 
 }() and -^)0 pel- centum; real properly was 
 ^caicely vendible; and sales of any article for 
 ready moiuiy could b(^ made only at a ruinous 
 loss.” IIamsey’h History of South Carolina, 
 and I’.Ei.K NA r’s History of New Hampshire, 
 how that the distress was as general as in- 
 tense, and that it displayed itsedf in “a dispo- 
 sition every wherc^ to resist tlui laws.” 
 
 d'his piclnrir is touche<l with even deeper 
 ‘•hading : than that, of t he corresponding crisis 
 tiuit Ibllowc'l the war of 1KI2, although the 
 < IHI'j and 1820 wont as near touching 
 
 the lowest point of depression as one can well 
 imagine. 
 
 The things to be noticed in the affairs of the 
 period from 178.” to 1780 are, first, that there 
 were then but t hree banks in the United States 
 — the Bank of North America, charterisl in 
 1781, and the Bank of Massachusetts and the 
 Bank of New York, both charter-ed in 1784; 
 neither of them having more than $100,000 of 
 capital. Their paper was not suspected of in- 
 tlating prices, which were indeed at the very 
 lowest ebb. And, second, that absolute free- 
 trade prevailed from the peace of Paris till 
 July, 1780. The rates of duty in Pennsylvania 
 were only two and a half per cent., and even 
 this mere nothing was made totally nugatory. 
 New Jersey established a free port at Burling- 
 ton, where goods intended for Philadelphia 
 were entered and clandestinely carried over 
 the Delaware. The same thing was done in 
 other States, so that trade had at that time a 
 run of six years of entire freedom. It did its 
 work in half the time. No sooner were our 
 ports opened than almost every nation in Eu- 
 rope made large shipments to the new El Do- 
 rado. The wharves were crowded ; house rent, 
 for storage purposes, rose to double and treble 
 prices. The importers made great profits, and 
 tlie purchasers captivating bargains, till the 
 French crowns that had been left by our allies 
 among the people were gone, and then — im- 
 porters and purchasers found themselves in the 
 situation already described. The policy of 
 buying cheap manufactures from abroad, re- 
 gardless of the ruined industry that could have 
 produced them at home, never had so fair a 
 trial, and, accordingly, never did quite so 
 quickly run into its inevitable catastrophe. In 
 this case, besides going very far in the demor- 
 alization of the people, it very nearly dissolved 
 the frame of the political government, with 
 the loss of political liberty in its train of con- 
 sequences. 
 
 Five years of similar experiences, after the 
 war of 1812, resulting really from the same 
 causes, led the nation to reflection, and helped, 
 doubtless by the extravagant legislation of 
 England upon the subject of her corn laws, the 
 agricultural INIiddle, Northern and Western 
 States, joined with the manufacturers as in a 
 common object, with some difl’erence of impulse, 
 to impose higher duties on imports, and the 
 tariff of 1 824 was passed. There was, however, 
 a little too much of the spirit of countervailing 
 duties ill this act, and something too little of 
 the sound expediency which should have gov- 
 erned it. 
 
 15ut the subject had undergone a pretty 
 thorough discussion. A Democratic Congress 
 in 180'.) had ordered the republication of IIam- 
 II, ton’s rejiort of 171)1 on manuraetures, and 
 the retied ing jniblic had formed the opinion 
 that it. was better entitled to be called “An In- 
 (iniry into the Nature and Cause of the Wealth 
 of Nations,” than Adam Smith’s treatise, in 
 t wo volumes, with that title. It was felt that 
 no country had been so misjudged as to her 
 economical policy and iminifest dest iny as North 
 America, both by mere theorists and tliat sort 
 
25 
 
 of practical men who do all their thinking 
 without any theorizing. Adam Smith and J. 
 B. Say had announced that the United States 
 were to be devoted to agriculture, like Poland. 
 But the country had been studying, through 
 its suflFerings, the theory of free-trade, and the 
 model Republic rapidly fell from its exemplary 
 position in the regards of the theorists of Eu- 
 rope. They were disgusted that, while Eng- 
 land, which had already obtained all that pro- 
 tgction could possibly do for her, was rapidly 
 verging toward their philanthropic system, 
 this new people were retrograding to the sys- 
 tem which their science had so clearly refuted. 
 
 To the argument founded upon the great 
 quantity of fertile lands yet uncultivated, it 
 was replied, that the vastness of the national 
 domain was no reason why particular parts of 
 it should not be governed by the policy wisest 
 and best for them ; that there was nothing in 
 the unpeopled solitudes of the West which 
 could complain if the Atlantic States should 
 take judicious care of their own welfare ; and 
 that there could be no reason why the coast 
 States must postpone the diversification of their 
 labor and the development of their resources, 
 till the whole continent should have a redund- 
 ancy of labor. They were unwilling, moreover, 
 to bear the drain of population and material 
 and intellectual power, which an exclusively 
 agricultural system would compel, with the 
 additional evil of converting all that surplus 
 into competitors which they required for con- 
 sumers. They would not interfere with the 
 interests of the West, but they would not be 
 checked in their own proper growth ; more- 
 over, they held that a young agriculture above 
 all things needs the immediate neighborhood 
 of maturer industries, under the same political 
 government, and protected from all restrictions 
 and embarrassments. England would not 
 charge herself with the opening of canals and 
 railroads between the east and west sides of 
 the Alleghenies, but Pennsylvania and New 
 York would be impelled to it by every consid- 
 eration of their interest in a reciprocal system 
 of exchanges. 
 
 The argument, that where wages are high 
 for agricultural labor, manufactures cannot be 
 sustained, was met by a denial of the assumed 
 truth of facts in the proposition ; by their tri- 
 viality, if they were true ; and further, that, 
 so far as they could be supposed to have any 
 bearing upon the point, they applied only to 
 articles of small bulk and weight, which are 
 chiefly the product of hand labor, but had no 
 application whatever to those, the price of 
 which is but little influenced by the rate of 
 wages, being mainly the product of machinery, 
 and are still further helped by a very small 
 cost of transportation, the cheapness of the 
 raw material and of food, and the abundance 
 and cheapness of fuel and water-power ; and 
 finally, by moderate taxes and energetic and 
 skillful labor. 
 
 They had something to claim, too, for them- 
 selves, and to urge upon the consideration of 
 their opponents, in the fact that populous, cul- 
 tivated, and prosperous States were first formed 
 
 on the shores of the Atlantic ; that there was 
 the cradle of our maritime fisheries, our coast- 
 ing trade, and of our navy; that there inde- 
 pendence was achieved and the confederation 
 founded ; that through them our national com- 
 merce was carried on, and the European sur- 
 plus of population, and material and moral re- 
 sources were derived ; and that upon them the 
 welfare of the whole nation, witli its national 
 independence, mainly depended. They justly 
 argued that no agricultural people could have 
 or maintain a navy ; its commerce must be in 
 the hands of its wealthy customers, and its 
 coasts defenceless ; that nothing can counter- 
 vail the selfish policy of nations industrially 
 dominant, but such an approach to self-supply 
 of the commodities of necessary consumption 
 as would hold them in wholesome check ; and, 
 especially, that the agricultural surplus of a 
 people must submit to the regulations of a for- 
 eign consumer if it cannot choose but depend 
 upon a single market. In a word, that a na- 
 tion which has but one market to sell and buy 
 in, with the power in the customer to fix the 
 prices of both, is exactly in the business condi- 
 tion of a chattel slave, whose master is the 
 only man with whom he may deal. 
 
 It was perceived and urged that the agricul- 
 ture of the coasting States must decline, unless 
 sustained by a liberal home market. The pro- 
 ducts of the cheaper and more fertile lands of 
 the West, transported by canals and railways, 
 would undersell them, and a general and cer- 
 tain and permanent impoverishment would 
 quickly follow, and the whole country would 
 have nothing to export but what the least civ- 
 ilized nations possess in abundance — heavy, 
 poorly-paying products, not always wanted, 
 and never holding a commanding position in 
 the markets of manufacturing nations. 
 
 But the existence of extensive manufactures 
 in the Eastern States promised, with absolute 
 assurance, such results as the following : Popu- 
 lation, capital, skill and intellectual force flow 
 in abundance from the countries of Europe ; as 
 food and raw materials come from the West, 
 the demand for the manufactures of those 
 States increases ; the population, the number 
 and wealth of their cities augments in propor- 
 tion to the progress of culture in the Western 
 regions; the increasing population promotes 
 their own agriculture by an enlarged demand 
 for its most varied and best-paying products ; 
 an increased demand for the yield of the mari- 
 time fisheries ; the coasting trade has the ben- 
 efit of transporting their required supplies of 
 coal, timber, food and raw materials ; their 
 manufactures supply a multitude of articles 
 for export to a large portion of the world, 
 serving directly, or through exchanges instead 
 of money, in the purchase of tropical commodi- 
 ties ; and all with the beneficent general effect 
 of building up the fisheries, the general ship- 
 ping interests, the navy, and with them, the 
 securities of national independence. 
 
 Such were some of the reasons that induced 
 the nation in 1824 and 1828 to limit the import 
 of foreign manufactured articles, and to pro- 
 tect their own manufactures. The success of 
 
26 
 
 these alms of the policy was absolutely perfect; 
 and, what was most surprising to the tlieorists 
 of the Opposition party at home and abroad, 
 the working of the measures adopted proved 
 just as favorable to the national finances as if 
 that had been the exclusive object of the poli- 
 cy. The tariff men of 1824 and 1828 did not 
 venture upon such a free list as their principle 
 demanded; they perhaps feared a failure of 
 revenue. An excess resulting entirely from 
 that error, not soon enough amended, did their 
 policy all the mischief that it afterwards en- 
 countered. In 1832 tea and coffee, and a large 
 amount, in variety and value, of foreign neces- 
 saries, were exempted from the burden of du- 
 ties ; but the whole national debt had been too 
 quickly reduced, the mass of individual and 
 general prosperity had been realized too sud- 
 denly, and the most fortunate people under the 
 sun were seized with the belief that their good 
 fortune would be soon entirely unmanageable 
 unless they took early measures to provide 
 against its overflow. We will see the result of 
 the change in our next. 
 
 NULLIFICATION — CLAY’s COMFROMISB TARIFF. 
 
 The Legislature of the State of South Caro- 
 lina, at its first session after the passage of the 
 tariff of 1828, set on foot its doctrine of nulli- 
 fication ; but a new Administration was about 
 to be inaugurated, and actual resistance to the 
 collection of the revenue was postponed in the 
 hope of a more peaceable remedy. Virginia 
 sanctioned the South Carolina doctrine, by a 
 vote of 134 to G8, and Alabama took nearly the 
 same ground. Georgia had previously taken 
 a similar attitude to the laws and authority of 
 the Federal Government, on her Indian ques- 
 tion. North Carolina gave a check to the 
 spirit of nullification ; holding an equal aver- 
 sion to the tariff with South Carolina, she, 
 nevertheless, declared herself opposed to all 
 violent opposition to it. The discussion of this 
 great question culminated in 1830, in the de- 
 bate between IIayne and Webster. 
 
 On the 14ih of July, 1832, Congress modi- 
 fied the tariff' of 1828, preserving its protec- 
 tive features in all the duty-paying schedules, 
 thougli reducing the rates in a great many in- 
 stances, and putting into tlie free list above 
 two hundred ailicles, wdiich previously paid 
 import duties — tin; first free list of any impor- 
 tance in t he history of our system of commerce. 
 It exeni})ted from duty all tropical products, 
 and rmjst of t he conmio<lit ies which the counti'y 
 could not [)roduce — an illustral ion of t he })resent 
 Freneh niinist(U’’K slatcmeut tlmt protection is 
 the rout(>. to fisu; tra<le; or, we miglit say fi-o;u 
 a deeper and hroadm- vi(*w of the subj('Ct, ))r()- 
 teetion in in itself tlu* poli(!y of free-trade; foi’ 
 its prinei))leH demand tlu* instant exomu-ation 
 of all propfM'ly foreign eoinmeree from the 
 burden of imposts, and liberate the home in- 
 • lu'itry, wlii'di in good time praelitailly tak(‘s 
 ofl'all dill ies from t !iat portion cd’ internal ional 
 trade wliieh is improper and illegitimate, by 
 di. pbirinu it ^vilh llie native product, 
 
 Ibil llie pir- age of the act of 1 Hi'2 was un- 
 derstood to indicate the HcUled policy of the 
 
 country, find the controversy was quickly 
 shifted from the theatre of debate to the field 
 of action. South Carolina prepared to resist 
 the law, and General Jackson issued his pro- 
 clamation of the 11th of December, 1832, and 
 forthwith ordered all the disposable military 
 force to assemble at Charleston, and a sloop- 
 of-war was sent to that port to protect the 
 Federal officers, in case of necessity, in the 
 execution of the revenue laws. »Soutli Carolina 
 now took the ground of masterly inactivity.-^ 
 Georgia reprobated the doctrine of nullification, 
 and Virginia entreated South Carolina to Wait 
 until she and the Federal Government could 
 be reconciled. The Union party had force 
 enough to make the nullifiers pause, and, on 
 the 31st January, 1833, at a meeting of the 
 leaders at Charleston, it ivas resolved t hat they 
 would adhere to their principles, but as Con- 
 gress was in session, and there was a prospect 
 of accommodation, all collision with the Federal 
 forces should be avoided, in the hope of a sat- 
 isfactory adjustment. On the 28th of Decem- 
 ber, 1832, Mr. Calhoun resigned his office of 
 Vice President, and went into tlie Senate in 
 place of Mr. IIaynk, who had been chosen 
 Governor of the State. In January, he repelled, 
 in the most earnest manner, tlie imputation of 
 any hostile feelings or intentions against the 
 Union, on the pari of South Carolina. The 
 State authorities, he asserted, had looked only 
 to a judicial decision of the question, until the 
 concentration of the United States troops at 
 Charleston and Augusta had compelled them 
 to make provision to defend themselves; and, 
 straightway, offered and supported a series of 
 nullification resolutions ! llelief came from 
 another quarter. Mr. Clay, on the 12th of 
 February, offered his Celebrated compromise 
 bill, for the “permanent adjustment of the 
 tariff.” It provided that, where the duties 
 exceeded twenty per cent., there should be 
 one-tenth of the excess deducted after Decem- 
 ber 31, 1833, and one-tenth each alternate 
 year until the 31st December, 1841, when one- 
 half of the residue was to be deducted, and 
 after the 30th of June, 1842, the duties on all 
 goods -wero to be reduced to twenty per cent, 
 on a home valuation, and to be paid in cash. 
 Mr. Calhoun expressed his approbation of the 
 bill. The signature of the President was given 
 to it on the 2d March, 1833. 
 
 THE MISCHIEFS ALL TRACED TO EXCESS OF 
 IMPORTS. 
 
 The history of the operation of this compro- 
 mise act will be found in the following facts; 
 Under the tariff' of 1828 the higlicst amount of 
 foreign goods imported fin’ consnnqition was 
 83A millions. In the year of the first reduction, 
 183 1, they w'cre 87 millions; in i83fi, 122 
 millions; in 183(1, luff millions — an .iverago of 
 122 millions a year for these flirt-e years, 
 against an average of 70 millions a year for 
 the live years of the taritf of 1828. At the 
 end of (he year 183(1 (here was a surplus in 
 (lu^ Treasury of 4(1.1 millions, but. this did not 
 come from the customs of this ('xces.-^ive im- 
 port aliotu Forty-four and a half millions of 
 
27 
 
 this gum came from the ^ales of the public 
 lands. They never before yielded more than 
 three millions in any one year. Now they 
 were afiording first in 1834 nearly 5 millions ; 
 in 1836 nearly 15 millions; and in 1837 within 
 a fraction of 25 millions. The revenue from 
 the customs for these three years was less than 
 it had been any year since 1825. 
 
 The banking history of these three years is 
 this: At the beginning of the yeav 1834, 
 (the date of the first reduction of the tariff 
 duties,) there were in circulation in the United 
 States ninety-five millions of bank notes ; the 
 loans and discounts of the banks amounted to 
 three hundred and twenty-four millions. At 
 the close of the year 1836 the bank circulation 
 had swollen to one hundred and forty-nine 
 millions ; and the loans and discounts to above 
 five hundred millions — an increase in each of 
 these particulars of above fifty per cent, in 
 three years. 
 
 In May, 1837, the banks suspended specie 
 payment universally. In September, the Trea- 
 sury having deposited but three instalments 
 of its surplus of forty-five millions with the 
 States, amounting to twenty-eight millions, 
 suspended the fourth instalment, and was 
 forced to issue ten millions of treasury notes 
 to carry on the operations of the Government. 
 The public lands still yielded for this year 
 (1837) nearly seven millions, but the customs 
 fell to eleven millions, or twelve millions be- 
 low those of the previous year, and quite thir- 
 teen below the average of the tariff' of 1828. 
 The import"' for consumption stood at one 
 hundred and fourteen millions, or about fifty 
 above the safe figure, for the second reduction 
 of the compromise tariff was now in operation. 
 What do these facts mean ? 
 
 This is the order of the facts : A sudden in- 
 crease of imports, amounting to seventy-five 
 per cent.; a sudden increase in the bank cir- 
 culation and discounts, amounting to above 
 fifty per cent.; a sudden increase of the sales 
 of public lands, equal to five hundred per cent., 
 or as forty-five millions to nine. 
 
 These facts mean this, and nothing else: 
 An increase of the imports called for the in- 
 crease of bank issues and credits, and the 
 labor and capital previously employed in manu- 
 factures in the Eastern States, crowded out by 
 the influx of foreign goods, were driven to 
 the West to seek investment and support. 
 
 The whole history of the United States, 
 without an exceptional instance, shows that, 
 whenever the Treasury is gorged by receipts 
 from customs and the proceeds of the public 
 lands, a monetary crisis is in full pressure 
 upon the counti*y, and that a general bank- 
 ruptcy of Government, banks, and people in- 
 evitably follows. No excessive bank issues 
 and credits ever once occurred, or could oc- 
 cur, under a protective tariff. No overdealing 
 in anything except foreign commodities can 
 greatly, or even considerably, shake the finances 
 of the nation and the people, because no other 
 sort of speculation or overtrading throws out 
 of employment the productive industry and 
 capital of the country. 
 
 We commend this proposition to the con- 
 sideration of those who are accustomed to 
 blame our revulsions upon an extravagant cre- 
 dit inflation, admitting that they know nothing 
 of the primary cause, by stating that these re- 
 vulsions are periodical, inevitable, and inex- 
 plicable. The proposition is worth the exami- 
 nation of those who really have no theory that 
 looks for causes, or will hold together, or cover 
 the facts of the case. 
 
 EXCESSES AND DEFICIENCIES OF PRICES AND OP 
 REVENUE, UNDER “REVENUE” TARIFFS. 
 
 The successive reductions of duty upon for- 
 eign imports, under the Compromise act of 
 1833, reached their level 20 per cent, rates on 
 the 30th June, 1842. The customs under it 
 sunk in 1837 to eleven millions, derived from 
 one hundred and thirteen millions of imports for 
 consumption, and rose again in 1839 to twenty- 
 three millions of revenue, from one hundred 
 and forty-six millions of imports. In 1841, 
 one hundred and fifteen millions of imports 
 yielded fourteen and a half millions of revenue. 
 The customs under the tariff of 1824 varied in 
 four years from twenty millions to twenty-three 
 millions ; under that of 1828 from twenty-two 
 and a half millions in 1829, to twenty-nine 
 millions in 1833. The consumption per head 
 of foreign imports from the year 1824 to 1833 
 rose gradually and steadily from ^5.05 to 
 $6.25. The consumption per head in 1834 
 was $7.09; in 1835, $8.64; in 1836, $10.93, 
 and in 1840 was down to $5.21. The loans 
 and treasury notes issued under the tariffs of 
 1824 and 1828 were five millions in 1825. — 
 Before they went out of operation the public 
 debt was provided for. Within four years 
 after the Compromise act began to operate the 
 Treasury began to borrow money, running up 
 the account of funded debt and treasury notes 
 outstanding to the sum of forty millions by the 
 time it jxpired. 
 
 The Operation of a tariff of duties below the 
 point of protection, with a run of nine years 
 for its developments, was, in this instance, 
 very fully manifested. 
 
 The first effect was to nearly double our 
 foreign imports in three years — from eighty- 
 three millions, in 1833, to one hundred and 
 fifty-nine millions, in 1836; the consumption 
 per capita Yx^mg from $6.25 to $16.93. This 
 had the effect, by reduction of prices and glut 
 of the market, of crushing our manufacturing 
 enterprises. Mills and Workshops were first 
 crippled and then closed ; the capital and labor 
 driven from them sought employment in agri- 
 culture ; the sales of public lands amounted to 
 more than seven fold the average quantity of 
 any period of ten years before or ten years 
 afterwards ; and the term wound up in a gen- 
 eral bankruptcy of the National Treasitry and 
 of the people, which brought wdth them a com- 
 plete political revolution, and compelled a total 
 change in the financial policy of the nation. — 
 The fluctuations of the revenue under this 
 tariff are marked and distinguished by the fact 
 that the income of the Treasury, from all 
 sources, never afterwards rose to within eight 
 
28 
 
 millions of that of 1830, until the year 1850- 
 61, and had not fallen so low as in the year 
 1841 since the year 1821. Its fluctuations in 
 five years touched both extremes of the revenue 
 of the nation experienced in thirty-four years 
 of change ; that is, the revenue had not been 
 so low for twenty-five years before 1841, nor 
 did it rise so high for fourteen years after 1830. 
 
 The business of the country felt these vicis- 
 situdes in tlie national finances, and answered 
 to them like their echo. Within a period of 
 six years, whilst this tariff was developing its 
 extremes of change — from 1830 to 1842 — the 
 highest and lowest prices of eighteen years 
 were touched. Cotton, flour, provisions, to- 
 bacco, commodities of all kinds, labor and real 
 estate, went up in price almost in the exact 
 ratio that importations increased, that is, to 
 nearly double the amount of 1833 in 1837 ; and 
 in 1842, the imports falling to one half, the 
 property, labor, and products of the country 
 stood at half the market value of five years 
 before. The bank circulation, by its necessary 
 connection with, and dependence upon, the 
 great disturbing cause, went to the enormous 
 height of 149 millions in the year after the 
 imports had reached their maximum, and fell 
 to 58^ millions the year after they touched 
 their lowest point in 1842. 
 
 Not an interest of the country, on which its 
 national and individual prosperity depended, 
 but had, in that brief period, undergone con- 
 vulsions unparalleled since similar causes had 
 resulted in the great business catastrophe of 
 1819-20. 
 
 Such is the history of the policy which 
 abandoned the revenue of the Government, and 
 the industrial interests of the people, to the 
 unrestricted control of foreign trade. That 
 low-tariff duties are responsible for excessive 
 foreign importations will scarcely be ques- 
 tioned. Gut our allegation is, that these aug- 
 mented imports induce excessive bank issues, 
 inflation of prices, and the gambling spirit of 
 speculation, which has so often disturbed the 
 general business of the country ; in a word, 
 that our frequent revulsions flow from inordi- 
 nate importations. In general support of -this 
 doctrine, let us appeal to the fact that these 
 cxj)ansions of imports, of paper circulation, 
 and of prices, never liave once occurred when 
 our tariffs were high enough to foster, but al- 
 ways when they were so low as to discourage, 
 home production, and to substitute foreign 
 Cf>tnmoditi(;s for <lomestic products in our mar- 
 ket. 'fhe particular facts upon whicli this 
 opinion I’csls s(!em to us conclusive. Let them 
 be caiad'ully examined. 
 
 J'IXJ;i) RATIO OF PAPMR MONMV AND PRICES TO 
 FORIIION IMPORTS. 
 
 In the following tabular slafeinent, derived 
 from tin; liseal reports of Hcicrelaries Guthrie 
 ami t'oiiii, lh(! )»oinlH are presentiMl as well as 
 our space and the shayie of our columns will 
 allow, 'flic docnmeiits arc; open to easy refer- 
 ence for such closer and more detaihal exami- 
 nation as our rmiclers may re(|nire. 'I'ho 
 amounts arc given in millions and decimal 
 
 fractions of millions of dollars, except in the 
 prices of flour, and the consumption of irnporte 
 2 ^cT capita, which arc in dollars and cents: 
 
 Years. 
 
 Imports for | 
 
 Consumption. 
 
 1 Consumption | 
 
 1 per capita, j 
 
 Bank 
 
 Circulation. 
 
 Export price 
 
 of Elour. 
 
 a 
 
 o 
 
 If 
 
 H 
 
 ,u d 
 
 ll 
 
 1810 
 
 1.30.0 
 
 $15 .30 
 
 70.0 
 
 $ 7..37 
 
 80.3 
 
 1.7 
 
 1821 
 
 48.7 
 
 4.14 
 
 45.0 
 
 4.25 
 
 13.0 
 
 1.2 
 
 1820 
 
 57.6 
 
 5.22 
 
 54.0 
 
 5.25 
 
 28.8 
 
 1.4 
 
 1880 
 
 49.5 
 
 4.39 
 
 01.0 
 
 7.25 
 
 21.9 
 
 2.3 
 
 1888 
 
 88.4 
 
 0.25 
 
 80.0 
 
 5..50 
 
 29.0 
 
 3.9 
 
 1885 
 
 128.0 
 
 8.64 
 
 108.0 
 
 6.00 
 
 19.4 
 
 14.7 
 
 18.30 
 
 159.0 
 
 10.98 
 
 140.0 
 
 7. .50 
 
 23.4 
 
 24.8 
 
 1887 
 
 118.0 
 
 7.58 
 
 149.0 
 
 10.25 
 
 11.1 
 
 6.7 
 
 1842 
 
 88.0 
 
 4.87 
 
 83.7 
 
 0.00 
 
 18.2 
 
 1.3 
 
 1848 
 
 76.0 
 
 4.20 
 
 58.5 
 
 4..50 
 
 9.3 
 
 1.0 
 
 1845 
 
 105.0 
 
 ,5.15 
 
 90.0 
 
 4.51 
 
 27.5 
 
 2.0 
 
 1840 
 
 110.0 
 
 5.42 
 
 105.5 
 
 5.18 
 
 20.7 
 
 2.7 
 
 1848 
 
 140.0 
 
 0.25 
 
 128.5 
 
 6.22 
 
 31.7 
 
 3.3 
 
 18.50 
 
 164.0 
 
 7.02 
 
 1.31.0 
 
 5.00 
 
 39.0 
 
 1.8 
 
 18,51 
 
 200.0 
 
 8.02 
 
 155.0 
 
 4.77 
 
 49.0 
 
 2.3 
 
 1854 
 
 270.0 
 
 10.00 
 
 204.0 
 
 7.88 
 
 64.2 
 
 8.ft 
 
 1855 
 
 2.31.0 
 
 8.79 
 
 187.0 
 
 10.10 
 
 53.0 
 
 11.5 
 
 18,57 
 
 388.0 
 
 11.82 
 
 214.7 
 
 6.28 
 
 03.8 
 
 3.8 
 
 1858 
 
 242.0 
 
 8.50 
 
 155.2 
 
 4.73 
 
 41.7 
 
 3.5 
 
 1859 
 
 318.0 
 
 10.46 
 
 193.3 
 
 5.00 
 
 49.5 
 
 1.7 
 
 The statistical statements from which this 
 table is compiled, support our proposition by 
 the clear establishment of the following facts : 
 
 Taking groups of four years each, under the 
 several tariffs, protective and unprotective, 
 respectively, we find the relation of the for- 
 eign imports to the bank circulation to stand 
 thus : 
 
 Under the tariff of 1828, for the years 1829, 
 ’30, ’31, and ’32, the imports for consumption 
 amounted to 262 millions — 65 millions a year ; 
 the consumption per capita $5.21 ; the bank 
 circulation 61 millions. Under the tariff of 
 1842, for the years 1843, ’44, ’45, and ’46, the 
 imports were 388 millions — 97 millions a year; 
 the consumption joer capita $4.95, and the bank 
 circulation at 105^ millions. 
 
 A CONTRAST WITH A LESSON IN IT. 
 
 Now let US contrast these with the results of 
 the unprotective tariffs : For the years 1815, 
 ’16, ’17, and ’18, the imports were 419 mil- 
 lions, or 105 millions a year; the consumption 
 per capita $12 ; and the bank circulation 
 seventy millions in 1816, and probably ninety 
 millions in 1818. Tlie population in 1818 
 being under nine millions; in 1846, above 
 twenty millions. 
 
 Under the Compromise tariff, for the years 
 1834, ’35, ’36, and ’37, the imports were 482 
 millions, or 120 millions a year; the consump- 
 tion capita $8.55, and the bank circulation 
 149 millions. 
 
 Under the tariff of 1846, for the years 1848, 
 ’49, ’50, and ’51, the imports were 636 mil- 
 lions or 159 millions a year ; the consumption 
 per capita, $6.85, and the bank circulation 155 
 millions. 
 
 for the years 1852, ’53, ’54, and ’55, the 
 imjmrts were 953 millions, or 238 millions a 
 year; flio consumption per capita $9.20, and 
 the bank circulation at 204 millions. 
 
 For the years 1856, ’57, ’58, and ’59, the 
 im])orts were 1,188 millions, or 297 millions a 
 
29 
 
 year; the consuirlption per capita at $10,42, 
 and the hank circ|ilation up to 214 millions. 
 
 Here in these groups of years we have a 
 constant increase 'of circulation accompanying 
 and corresponding to the increase of imports; 
 not in an exact mathematical ratio, for other 
 causes modify the results, but in such settled 
 connection and dependency, that the doctrine 
 we assert is clearly sustained, A detailed 
 gtatement for each successive year of our com- 
 mercial history affords even a closer and more 
 satisfactory proof of the proposition, as an ex- 
 amination of the table given above very fairly 
 intimates. It must be recollected that the fis- 
 cal year, and the calendar year for which the 
 bank reports are given, do not correspond ; 
 the one ending on the 30th June, and the other 
 on the 31st December. Besides, the imports 
 do not always display their effects upon the 
 bank credits issued to meet them, and cover 
 the expense of freight duty and payments by 
 the importers, and the loans made to first and 
 second-hand jobbers in the interior of the 
 country, until the fiscal year following their 
 arrival upon our wharves. Taking these 
 things into consideration, our case is well 
 made out, 
 
 CAUSES OF OUR REVULSIONS REDUCED TO RULE 
 AND MEASURE. 
 
 We have carefully compiled and collated the 
 facts and figures of our commercial and bank 
 history for the whole period stretching from 
 the year 1815 to 1859, inclusive. We cannot 
 give the tabular statement in the present 
 crowded state of our columns ; and we even 
 prefer that the students of the subject should 
 go through the satisfying process of calculating 
 them for themselves. Our inferences from the 
 facts as they stand before us are — that when 
 the consumption of foreign imports per capita 
 are less than six dollars, the finances of the 
 nation and the business of the people are safe 
 and prosperous. When our consumption of 
 imports, per capita, is at eight dollars, the 
 Treasury is beginning to overflow, and a busi- 
 ness pressure is severely felt in the community. 
 
 And that, when the imports amount to ten 
 and eleven dollars per capita, a revulsion im- 
 mediately ensues, and the Treasury and the 
 people go into general insolvency. 
 
 The connection between the imports and the 
 bank circulation stands thus ; 
 
 tn 1818, the imports per capita were $11.37, 
 bank circulation was $9 per capita. The 
 . n of 1819-20 followed. 
 
 In 1836, the imports were $10.93 per capita, 
 the bank circulation was $9.09. The crash of 
 1839 followed. 
 
 In 1851, the imports were at $8.02; the 
 bank circulation was $6.81. Both these items 
 steadily increased till 1854, and a pressure cor- 
 responding accompanied. 
 
 In 1857, the imports rose to $11.82 per cap- 
 ita, and the bank circulation to nearly $8. The 
 revulsion of September, 1857, followed. 
 
 Now look at the opposite side of the picture. 
 From 1821 to 1829 we have no reports of the 
 bank circulation. 1830 gives us imports for 
 
 consumption per capita, $4.39, and a bank cir- 
 culation of $4.76. The next year for which 
 we have bank reports is 1833. The imports 
 per capita were then $6.25, and the circulation 
 $5.67 per capita. This report embraces the 
 whole calendar year ; the Compromise act was 
 passed in May, and the mischief was brewing 
 that exploded in the four years next following. 
 
 The imports per capita for the years 1844-5, 
 and ’6, rose from $5.03 to $5.42, and the bank 
 circulation from $3.90 to $5.20 per capita. 
 
 There is nothing in the history of the last 
 forty-five years that disturbs these data, or af- 
 fects the conclusions which we draw from them ; 
 and we must be allowed here to repeat our 
 assertion that foreign importations,unrestrained 
 by duties adequately protective of our domestic 
 industry, has been at the bottom of all the re- 
 vulsions which we have suffered ; that such 
 excessive importations were the causes, in all 
 the instances, of a mischievous inflation of 
 our paper currency; that they have been, in 
 like manner, the cause of the wild spirit of 
 business speculation which has so frequently 
 visited us ; that these periodical overflows of 
 foreign merchandise in our market have pro- 
 duced the Treasury plethoras, and, by pros- 
 trating our home industry, have always occa- 
 sioned the never-failing revulsions in the reve- 
 nue of the nation and the business of the peo- 
 ple ; and last, not least, the drain of our gold 
 which has run up to an amount so enormous 
 during every period of excessive importation 
 to meet the balance of trade against us, is, and 
 always must be, one of the fatal consequences 
 of an unregulated foreign trade, and an unpro- 
 tected home industry. 
 
 THE MISCHIEFS TO COME. 
 
 Now let US apply the facts of our past expe- 
 rience, and the principles which they teach 
 to our present financial predicament. Mr. 
 Cobb’s last financial report estimates the re- 
 ceipts from customs for the current year — from 
 July, 1860, to July, 1861 — at sixty millions of 
 dollars. What amount of imports, and what 
 rate of consumption, per capita, will this 
 amount of revenue from duties under the 
 tariff of 1857 require? 
 
 The imports for consumption for the year 
 1859 were three hundred and eighteen millions 
 of dollars ; the consumption per capita was 
 $10.46. At the same rates of duty, and a cor- 
 responding amount of free goods imported, 
 sixty millions of customs require an import for 
 this year of three hundred and ninety millions, 
 and a consumption per capita up to $12.58. 
 This amount of consumption per head of the 
 population runs seventy-six cents higher 
 than that which immediately preceded the 
 revulsion of 1857, $1.65 higher than that which 
 preceded the crisis of 1837, and even $1.21 
 higher than that of 1819-20. 
 
 To meet the imports of 1859 and the inte- 
 rest on our foreign debt, we were obliged to 
 export in that year fifty-seven and a half mil- 
 lions of specie more than we imported. Our 
 total exports, exclusive of specie, for last year, 
 fell short of our total imports for consumption, 
 
30 
 
 exclusive of specie, full forty millions. If the 
 imports for consumption for the present year 
 must be increased seventy-two millions in or- 
 der to derive the required sixty millions of 
 customs, what will be the deficit in our export 
 account exclusive of specie? 
 
 Mr. Cobb leaves us the choice between a 
 heavy increase of our foreign debt to make up 
 the required amount of foreign imports, and a 
 large increase of our treasury debt if the cus- 
 toms shall fail to meet his estimates. 
 
 Our calculations, it will be observed, have 
 been made upon the estimates furnished by 
 Mr. Cobb’s last annual report. But while we 
 are writing, the neAvs from Washington informs 
 us that the Secretary has lately revised his es- 
 timates, and that the current year’s expendi- 
 ture will require seventy-tAvo millions, instead 
 of sixty, of last December’s statement. INIust 
 we have the 390 millions of imports increased 
 to 4G8 millions, or 78 millions above those of 
 last year, to provide the necessary revenues ? 
 Or is his system of finance a mere policy of 
 receipts and disbui’sements, with constantly- 
 groAving funded debt, and treasury-note bor- 
 rowings from the future, for its principal items 
 of income? 
 
 MR. COBB’S account CURRENT WITH THE 
 NATION POSTED. 
 
 He has expended a surplus in the Treasury 
 on the 1st July, 1857, of seventeen and three 
 quarter millions; a permanent loan of twenty 
 millions ; a temporary loan of twenty millions 
 in treasury notes outstanding, and has reduced 
 
 the public debt subsisting at^j the time ho took 
 ofiice, a little less than four | millions. Tlicse 
 items leave his account current with a balance 
 against him of fifty-tliree millions, less wliat* 
 ever sum there may be unappropriated in the 
 Treasury — say four or five millions. Forty- 
 nine millions of a deficit in the account of or- 
 dinary receipts and expenditures of the Gov- 
 ernment in three years and a quarter! To 
 Avhich it is now perfectly clear, twenty millions 
 more must be added for the unexpired nine 
 months of his administration; for this addi- 
 tional deficit is demonstrable from the data of 
 his recent revision of his estimates for the cur- 
 rent year. 
 
 A seventy million debt piled up in four years 
 under the tariff of 1857 even outstrips that 
 which grew out of the Compromise act, whose 
 level twenty per cent, duties did something 
 better for the Treasury than the average nine- 
 teen per cent, duties of 1857 with its greatly 
 enlarged free list, and the naturally increased 
 expenditures of the Federal Government, to 
 say nothing of its corruptions and extrava- 
 gance under the present Administration. 
 
 A PREDICTION WARRANTED BY EXPERIENCE. 
 
 Will the country bear this another year? 
 Will Congress give another year’s lease to this 
 atrocious system ? 
 
 As certainly as 1842 reversed the policy of 
 1833, so surely will 1800 or ’61 consign the 
 tariff of 1857, Secretary Cobb, and free trade 
 to political perdition. 
 
 12 
 
When ]Mr. Cob den negoti^ed with Napo- 
 leon III the free trade policy by which the 
 Emperor hoped to command English sympathy 
 and aid in any future event, it was stipulated 
 that the treaties should be “ denounced'’ si x 
 or twelve months before their termination. 
 M. de Bort, the late Minister of Agriculture 
 and Commerce, “ denounce d’’ these treaties as 
 he did merely in order to terminate their 
 inconv enience and loss at the first possible 
 instan t, and have them and all like them out 
 of the way when, at the close of this year, 
 new treaties more considerate of 
 terests are brought iorward. 
 variously represented as having this or the 
 other political significance. Tliereis no reason 
 for seeking any explanation beyond this, 
 v ^ilvU France is ridding herself 
 as fast as possible of the commercial 
 troubles bequeathed by the Empire, in 
 order to strengthen her own industries. The 
 English treaties have been known to weigh 
 upon recovery, and^because they did so, they 
 are being terminated as rapidly as possible. 
 It is hardly probable that an effect so remote 
 as the one contemplated will concern the 
 business of either country immediately. It 
 will give more courage to French industry. 
 It certainly will not inspirit that of ’ England, 
 which, suffering at home and in the British 
 colonies, Germany and Russia, and elsewhere, 
 now finds the French outlet closing. But the 
 act is one of intelligent self-interest and ne- 
 cessity, and it is hardly likely that the change 
 of portfolio will mean a change of policy in 
 this case. For, in fact, the decade is not run- 
 ning toward free trade, but leather against it. 
 
 rench in- 
 The act is 
 
 J 
 
1 
 
 \ 
 
 
 > 
 
 > V 
 
 
 ’ > 
 
 \ 
 
 vu 
 
 i 
 
 U 
 
 I 
 
 / 
 
A“Ti 
 
 mei-lcaa Goods In 
 
 Travelled Eriglislunan ” write.s IqftVle 
 London Standard in the lollowinj^ manner 
 as to the intrusion oi American goods on 
 the British markets: 
 
 How is it, I want to know, that my wife’s 
 maid, when she went at Aix les Bains, at 
 Homburg and at Florence to buy calico, 
 found in shops where two years ago nothing 
 but English goods were kept that the calico 
 or cotton in stock was of American manu- 
 facture? I am not a judge of this article 
 mysell, and I really do not pretend to know 
 whether the American goods are better or 
 worse than those formerly supplied Irom 
 the English markets. What I do know is 
 that in this, one of our own staple manu- 
 factures, we appear to have been lairiy 
 beaten out of the field upon the Continent, 
 and that in each case the shopkeeper, when 
 applied to lor an explanation, declared that 
 ho preferred American to English materials 
 because he got a larger profit upon the 
 
 former than upon the latter. ^ ^ 
 
 IIow is it, again, that here in England, if 
 I want tools lor my garden or my worksliop 
 I am constantly being invited by my iron- 
 monger to try new American “notions,” 
 in the shape of spades and hammers anu 
 saws and chisels and axes? Some months 
 a^-o I read a letter of Mr. Gladstone’s upon 
 a'subiect on which his authority can hardly 
 he contested. In it he gave his opinion 
 upon the common American woodman’s 
 axe. and described— as I happen to know 
 quite accurately— the difference between it 
 and the English article manulactured at 
 Sheffield. The comparison, I need hardly 
 say was all in favor of the Yankee produc- 
 tion. Sheffield is too conservative— in its 
 mauulactures, I mean, not in its politics 
 to make an axe of the best shape. fhe 
 sharp American comes in and wins. And 
 he does this not merely in axes and the 
 otlier tools I have mentioned, but in 
 locks, bolts, stoves, lamps and a thousand- 
 and-one other household requisites which 
 a dozen years ago were the peculiar 
 productions of this country. You have 
 only indeed to cast your eye over your own 
 liousGtiold, sir, in order to see to bow large 
 an extent the English manufacturer has 
 been beaten, even in articles of domestic 
 use. Nor is it in the hardware trade only 
 that we seem now to be getting flooded with 
 American goods. American leather comes 
 here to be made up into shoes; and our fa- 
 mous English carriages are, to a ^rge ex- 
 tent, built out of materials which have 
 crossed the Atlantic, and for which the 
 
 American has been duly paid. Glue, hair 
 and sand paper” are mentioned in a recent 
 copy of the Philadelphia Ledger as being 
 now among articles largely exported to 
 this country ; and even slates— shades oi the 
 Welsh magnates!— are now quarried in the 
 United Stales in order to roof in our Eng- 
 lish homes. , , ,, 
 
 Can any of your readers tell me how all 
 this is brought about? And is not the fact 
 alone suificient to account in a large mea- 
 sure for the present depression in o nr ma- 
 nufacturing industries ? Ido not grumble 
 because, if I want tomato sauce witli iny 
 cutlets at tb^ season, it is probably made 
 out of American iruit; nor can I complain 
 because rny grocer, my butterman, and 
 probably my butcher also, deals so largely 
 ill American goods of all kinds, for I treely 
 admit that as a source of food supply tne 
 United Hiates is naturally infinitely supe- 
 rior to our litnited and over-populated 
 country. But what i want to know is why, 
 in the special mauulactuies which were 
 once entirely ours and which only a few 
 years ago belonged to us more largely than 
 toany other country in tlie world, we now 
 seem to be running a bad second to the 
 United States. Why, sir, even the cigar- 
 ettes® hich I smokeare made in Richmond, 
 Va. ami the pen with which I write comes, 
 not’irom Birmingham, but from an Ameri- 
 can manufactory. 
 
Philntlclpliia, T«»esiln,y. Fet>. 4, 1870. j 
 
 zi" ' ; ‘ . ■ . ■ I 
 
 NO NKW THING IN ENGI.ANO. 
 
 For a professedly free trade people, the 
 nritish certainly jn-esent sonie remarkable 
 deviations. In other words, they constantly, 
 through various combinations of guilds, 
 unions and trade organizations, protect j 
 home products whenever it suits their 
 interests to do so, and that without any 
 relation to the laws of sui^ply and de- 
 mand, upon which the whole theory of 
 free trade is based. The Ledgkr has 
 reiieatedly shown that these so-called 
 natural law.s of demand and supply no 
 longer rule_supremp, but are checked and 
 qualified by other Intluenccs of modern ori- 
 gin that are quite as powerful. Even in the 
 heart of English free trade, the trades- , 
 unions, and employers’ unions, and combi- 
 nation of guilds, contrive, in some direc- 
 tions, to offset and hold the markets, and all 
 through the economic policy of England is 
 Interwoven the net-work of protection, in 
 spite of theories. This is curiously enough 
 Khown in regard to the two staple articles of 
 food. Not all the English barriers against a 
 free food supply were broken down when 
 the corn laws were repealed, but combina- 
 tions of local interests can still block 
 the prices from falling, even if desti- 
 tution and low wages among the people 
 to he fed on the one hand, and an abundant 
 Bujiply on the other, ought to bring in force 
 the most beneficent operation of the so-called 
 natural laws. Such perishable articles as 
 beef and fish, it seems, are still held in Eng- 
 land out of the reach of free trade considera- 
 tions, the one locally, the other as an im- 
 port. Testimony on these points comes from 
 two widely removed classes of witnesses. 
 Borne of them Americans and others being 
 Eritish mercantile men and newspaper edi- 
 tors; as, for example, the Newcastle Daily 
 Chronicle, a north of England journal. The 
 irregular,but frequently enormous, fish sup- 
 ply of England is virtually controlled, ac- 
 cording to an English statistician, by one 
 Bociety, which purchases along the coast 
 the greater part of every catch. The seaside 
 prices vary from one farthing to three half- 
 I)ence jier pound, but the distribution is so 
 ai’ranged that the ruling prices in London 
 and the townsare kept at uniform high rates. 
 Hixpence a pound, it appears, must be paid 
 for the coarser and plentiful kinds of fish, 
 tliat may cost but a farthing or so on the 
 co.'tst. The catch is calculated by telegrams 
 from tlu! larger dei)ots, as accurately as the 
 necessary ligurcs to complete an election re- 
 lurn In say Luzerno or liouisiana— and 
 wlia(ev«!r over amount would force the 
 market <lown, tloes not get to market. It is 
 jiioro prolltable to d(*s(roy a part of tiie 
 Block on hand than to let prices fall, hi this 
 control o( the llsli market, so that th Is food, 
 even when alnindant., does not come within 
 the reac-h of the poon'st. 
 
 So, too, I he 1 m noi lal ion of American beef 
 
,1, 
 
 carries the promise of an^indant supply 
 of cheap and good meat to England. This, 
 
 In the north of England alone, amounts to 
 a million and a half of pounds annual y. 
 But the local dealers and the near catUe 
 
 trade of Ireland, according to the Neivcastle 
 O/iromcZe, are growing hostile to the falling 
 prices, and some petty acts of the town 
 council are related to show the spirit of 
 English free trade. American beef con- 
 tinues to be sold as the “best British,” while 
 combinations of associations can keep up 
 the price of beef. Of course, this sort of 
 thing cannot last long, and will probably be 
 remedied when American agencies take the 
 matter in hand and sell directly to the 
 people. But it serves to show, even without 
 the other tendencies in England towards 
 protection for workshops and manufac- 
 turing interests, that the national policy of 
 free trade since 1832 is underpinned by 
 other laws, and those that bear the hardest 
 In their working upon the already limited 
 food-producing area of England. 
 
 oi .r also, that the only and ne- 
 
 <ie§sai’y remedy for the present condition of 
 things is “retaliation.” The Bradford 
 Chronicle, a joiiThttl iri'flie wmrkingnien’s dis- 
 trict, and in the conservative interest, while 
 rejecting the idea of ^absolute “protection,” 
 declares that — ■ 
 
 “America is certainly acquiring by degrees our 
 ‘commercial primacy.’ and if we continue to admit 
 her manufactured goods into our markets without 
 imposing any duty on them, in retaliation for the 
 high tariffs she charges upon the products of Eug- 
 land, she will perhaps be able to wrest from us those 
 industries which have added to the wealth and 
 jrreatness of this country.” 
 
 It is scarcely to he believed that the Eng- 
 lish legislature will do anything which would 
 tend, even in the remotest degree, to in- 
 crease the cost of production in that country, 
 but still it must not be forgotten that Lord 
 Beaconsheld, and the majority of the gentry 
 around him, are by education and tradition, 
 and perhaps by conviction, protectionists. 
 
SSfON 
 
 OF TllADE I}f 
 
 GLOOMY PROSPECfS — BALANCE 
 
 AGAINST ENGLAND — DECREASE 
 
 ENGLAND. 
 
 OF TRADE 
 OF EXPORTS 
 
 TO THE UNITED STATES — NEW TAXATION. 
 
 [by cable to the herald.] 
 
 Tx>ndon, Marcli 13, 1879. 
 
 The depressed condition of trade and manufac- 
 tures in Englnnd causes anxiedy in commer- 
 cial classes. ]\lr. David JMcIvcr, on(^ of the pi-opric- 
 tors of the Cunard line of steamships, and mem- 
 ber of Parliament for liirkenlu'ad, writes to the 
 Times declaring unhesitatingly tha.t from his ])e.r- 
 Bonol experience as a carrier he does not know of 
 any nation wht)se triule i)rospect.s at iwosent are 
 Bo gloomy as Great Britain’s. The de])vession 
 in the United ^States and <d§ewhere does not at 
 all approach the depression licre. The Britisli 
 exports P) the United States are coinparatividy 
 nothing, eitlier as n'gards volume or value. The 
 British food importations are steadily increasing, 
 and the balance of trade is so overwhelmingly 
 against Great Britain that ho sees nothing ex- 
 cept ruin in j)rospect for home • industries, 
 whether manufacturing or agricultrtral, if the 
 present state ot things is allowed to conlinue. 
 The export trade from Liverpool te the United 
 States is so small that whenever the restrictions 
 on the importation of United Stetes cattle 
 are removed gentlemen Avho are prepared to put 
 additional steamers into the trade deliberately 
 to nijik© the outward voyages with water , 
 ballast only, without joining in the scramble for 
 the little outward treight, which other owners-' 
 ha ve bcien recently carr^diig as ballast at merely 
 nominal rates.” 
 
 /2l 
 
 . 
 
 Ayfnerican Tmclo jind Britisli Ala^m. 
 
 Ihe motion made two djiys ago ifl the 
 House of Lords for a compilation of the 
 official returns of British trade with the 
 United States is a new proof of the 
 anxiety which pervades the public mind 
 of England respectihg the existing 
 prostration of business. There is a 
 large balance of American.^ trade against 
 England, and the purpose of the call 
 for statistics was to lay the foundation 
 for negotfations looking to a reciprocity 
 treaty. Great Britain has lost the American 
 market, heretofore the best and most valu- 
 able of all her markets. We doubt whether 
 any attempt to recover it will prove 
 successful. She attributes her loss of the 
 American market to our protective 
 tariff but we had quite as high a tariff 
 when her trade with us was most flourishing. 
 The loss is, in fact, due to the great prog- 
 ress of American manufactures. We no 
 longer take her iron and her textile fabrics, 
 because we have acquired the ability 
 to make better and cheaper ' of our 
 own. If she lays a duty', on our 
 cattle and our breadstuff's she will 
 merely increase the cost of living 'to her 
 artisans and thereby increase the expense 
 of production and give us further advantages 
 as her rivals in neutral markets. ' Her 
 trade suffers from a cause which a reci- 
 procity treaty coulti not remove. The letter 
 of Mr. David Mclvor, M, P., one of the pro- 
 prietors of the Cunard line of steamers, to the 
 London Times states, important facts in re- 
 lation to the trade between Great Britain 
 and the United States. The export trade 
 from Liverpool has dwindled to insignifi- 
 cance, the little outward freight that re- 
 mains being taken as ballast atmerelv nom- 
 inal rates,