the nature of the article imported, it is not subject to a specific duty. Our own experience has taught us a lesson on this subject which we ought not soon to forget. I cannot refrain from adverting to some of many reasons for this opinion.

“Our ad valorem system has produced great frauds upon the revenue, whilst it has driven the regular American merchant from the business of importing, and placed it almost exclusively in the hands of British manufacturers."

،،، Again, ad valorem duties deprive the American manufacturer of nearly all the benefits of incidental protection."

"Let us, then, abandon the idea of a uniform horizontal scale of ad valorem duties; and, whether the duties be high or low, let us return to the ancient practice of the government. Let us adopt wise discriminations; and, whenever this can be done, impose specific duties."

Webster produced the valuable correspondence of Secretary Wm. H. Crawford and the House of Representatives, in 1818, and went on :

"Now, Sir, what is the great fact that makes ad valorem duties unsafe as a general principle of finance? I must confess my utter consternation when I heard, the other day, the honorable chairman of the Committee of Finance say that he did not believe that a case of fradulent undervaluation had ever been made out! Why, it is the notoriety of a thousand such cases occurring every year, in this Government, and in all governments where the system of ad valorem duties in any degree prevails, and the value is ascertained upon the invoices on proof from abroad; it is the notoriety of a thousand such cases of fraud that has led to the adoption of this general rule, and raised it even into a principle, as I have shown. My friend from Maine (Evans) must have satisfied the honorable chairman, and the Senate, as well as everybody else, of the number and the notoriety of the cases of fraudulent undervaluation, because he enumerated instances, and hundreds of instances, in which goods have been seized and forfeited for undervaluation. The cases are numberless; and, Sir, since the subject has come up, and since persons out doors have heard the declaration of the honorable chairman, my desk has been laboring under the weight of facts communicated from various portions of the commercial community. I will state only a few out of many."

"Can any man gainsay the truth of this? Is there a merchant, foreign or American, in the United States, who will express any contrariety of opinion? Is there a man, high or low, who denies it?

I know of none; I have heard of none. Sir, it has been the experience of this Government, always, that the ad valorem system is open to innumerable frauds. What is the case with England? In her notions favorable to free trade, has she rushed madly into a scheme of ad valorem duties? Sir, a system of ad valorem duties is not free trade, but fraudulent trade. Has England countenanced this? Not at all; on the contrary, on every occasion of a revision of the tariff of England, a constant effort has been made, and progress attained, in every case, to augment the number of specific duties, and reduce the number of ad valorem duties." "In this British tariff, out of seven hundred and fourteen articles, six hundred and eight are subject to specific duties. Every duty that from its nature could be made specific, is made specific.”

At Faneuil Hall, before Taylor's election, in 1848, Webster made one of his last tariff speeches.

The Tariff of 1846 in Review.

[Faneuil Hall, October 24, 1848.]

"The tariff of 1846 is a measure new to the history of the commercial world in modern times. It is a tariff of duties altogether ad valorem, with no specifications, with no just discrimination in favor of domestic industry and products. If anybody can find a tariff like that, let it be produced. When under discussion in the Senate, we said all we could against it, and we said some pretty provoking things, but there was not a word uttered in its support. Its friends maintained a most judicious silence. One of them arose, and by an almost unnatural force of speech cried out, The tariff will vindicate itself,' and sat down.

“And now, let me ask, after an experience of two years, who is helped by this tariff of 1846,—what portions of the country? It is, in fact, a measure dictated by South Carolina; it is a measure in which the South took the initiative, and led off, and the North, as has been too much its wont, followed. There are men in the North who see the sun in the South, and they think they see all other light there. Now, is South Carolina any richer for this tariff? Now that the tariff is passed, now that we have free trade, said these friends of the new tariff, we shall see Carolina looming up like one of the Southern constellations. She will become rich; she is enfranchised and set at liberty; hereafter, she will take a great lead, and her cotton will enrich her people.

“Pray, what has been the result? When these glowing sentences were on the lips of her eloquent men, her cotton was from ten to

eleven cents a pound. Those words had hardly cooled, when, under this protection by free trade, and under this admirable tariff of 1846, which put down all other abominable tariffs, her cotton is down to five and a half and six cents a pound."

"This tariff and sub-treasury have protected them (Pennsylvania) by depressing the price of their main commodity at least one-third." "A respectable gentleman, well known to you, this afternoon placed in my hands a statement, according to which forty woolen mills, known to him, have, within the last four months, all stopped working, from the pressure of the money market and the influx of foreign manufactures, and they have discharged nearly three thousand hands, and greatly reduced the wages of the remainder."

"The tariff, such as it is, is and must be destructive to the great interests of the whole people whether manufacturers or not. I say that, because I see that we cannot stand for any length of time this overwhelming importation of foreign commodities, without an utter derangement of the currency of the country."

" Who is benefited by it? It is all from the unwillingness of party men to acknowledge themselves in error. I appeal to you. You are all acquainted with the state of commerce and business. Do you know twenty men, active in business, sensible men, who do not wish the sub-treasury anywhere but where it is? Do you know twenty mechanics and manufacturers, men of sense and industry, who do not wish the tariff of 1846 had never been born? What is it that keeps it in being but prejudice, party pride and obstinacy? Gentlemen, I have no right to speak here to members of a party to which I do not belong; but yet I would venture to beseech them to consider whether there may not be some considerations-whether our own daily business, the maintenance of our wives and families, the securing of a competence for a comfortable old age, whether these considerations may not be of more importance than that we should learn by rote, and recite by rote, every dogma of the party to which we are attached?"

Such were Webster's great utterances on the protective policy. These are only specimens, fine but fair. There is nothing which runs counter to them in anything Webster said after 1824. Perhaps another score of similar passages could be produced from his published works and from other printed addresses. From the positions he assumed after he got the true Point de Vue of protection, there is no recession, no wavering. Insinuations in certain newspapers might lead their readers to imagine that Webster might have had moments of a return of predilection for some free trade notion or other, some swirl of a backward eddy; but I do not find them. He seems to have outgrown them utterly. I have gleaned carefully all his speeches accessible, and his letters accessible, and can find nothing which shows that he ever glanced back on the free trade on which in 1825 or thereabout he forever turned his back.

Three things strike us in Webster's final attitude on protection : 1. Webster had come to regard the protective policy in the same light as Henry Clay, as, next to the preservation of the Union, the paramount object of American statesmanship. His own expression is, "This question, as important, I will undertake to say, as any which has been discussed in Congress from the formation of the Constitution." Again, at Philadelphia, 1844: "Protection touches every man's bread. If ever, then, there was a subject worthy the attention of a public man or a statesman, it is this of protection." He grew to appreciate more and more how closely the welfare of the working classes was bound up in it. After paying a tribute to " a country of workingmen who are able, if necessary, to work fourteen hours a day," and "bid defiance to all tariffs," and can " stand upon the strength of their own character, resolution, and capacity," he goes on:

"Not, Sir, that there is one house in New England, at this moment, in which the proceedings of this day are not looked for with intensest interest. No man rises in the morning but to see the newspaper. No woman retires at night without inquiring of her husband the progress of this great measure in Washington. They ask about it in the streets. They ask about it in the schools. They ask about it in the shoemakers' shops, the machine-shops, the tailors' shops, the saddlers' shops, and, in short, in the shops of all artisans and handicrafts. They ask about it everywhere. And they will take whatever answer comes, as men should take it; and they will feel as men should feel, when they hear it."-Speech against tariff of 1846.

And Webster's tones take on the deepest solemnity of appeal, as when, on this same free trade bill of Walker, of 1846, he said:

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" I would beseech it (the administration) not to make this leap in the dark in the early part of its career. I would beseech it to stand firm on established ground, on the system on which our revenue now stands; and to lay aside all propositions for extensive and elementary change."

2. Webster occupies a peculiar position, an important position, as Defender of Protection, in one respect, which, so far as I am aware, no one has ever remarked. For a certain important period, Webster, of all the supreme, the Agamemnonian warriors on Protection, held the field alone, namely from the Compromise Act of 1833 to the new Tariff Act of 1842, and perhaps beyond. Calhoun had left the field, receding from his early tariff speech of 1816, one of the most comprehensive and weighty ever made, withdrawing into the swamps of free trade and nullification; and Clay, the "Great Pacificator," had sealed his cannons' mouths by the ten years' truce of his great Compromise. But Webster did not agree to that Compromise; he declared he would not respect it. And for the next ten years, he was, above all others, the one great tariff advocate. Citations are before us from a dozen notable speeches of Webster on the tariff, in the Senate and at mass meetings, between 1833 and 1846. This was by no means an unimportant period; Clay had cast up the Compromise Act of 1833, to resist the rush of the nullifying tide, and doubtless saved the protective policy from utter ruin; but it is not improbable, that behind the breakwater of that compromise, during the quiet of general acquiescence in that measure, if we should inquire carefully, we should find that Webster's vigorous championship of the tariff during this period was one of the great preparatives, and perhaps the greatest of all the preparatives, for that tariff of 1842, one of the most stimulating and effective which this country has ever seen. And for those three July days of 1846, against the injurious and iniquitous Walker Tariff, Webster stood like Gibraltar, conspicuous and formidable, with amply stored subterranean arsenal and magazine, and with long bristling lines of fulminating guns.

3. In conclusion, it may be truthfully said that none of the great tariff speeches of the present day-not even the master pieces of McKinley, Reed, Hoar, Lodge, Blaine or Dingley, though many of them are more comprehensive and complete, surpasses