in favor of a judicious examination and revision of it; and so far as the tariff bill before us embraces the design. of fostering and protecting, preserving within ourselves the means of national defence and independence, particularly in a state of war, I would advocate and support it. The experience of the late war ought to teach us a lesson, and one never to be forgotten. If our liberty and Republican form of government, procured for us by our Revolutionary Fathers, are worth the blood and treasure, at which they were obtained, it is surely our duty to protect and defend them. This tariff-I mean a judicious one-possesses more fanciful than real danger. I will ask: What is the real situation of the agriculturist? Where has the American farmer a market for his surplus products? Except for cotton, he has neither a foreign nor a home market. Does not this clearly prove, when there is no market either at home or abroad, that there is too much labor employed in agriculture, and that the channels for labor should be multiplied? Common sense points out the remedy. 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 benefit to the country. Take from agriculture in the United States six hundred thousand men, women and children, and you will at once give a home market for more breadstuffs, than all Europe now furnishes us. In short, Sir, we have been too long subject to the policy of British merchants. 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 should be rendered paupers ourselves."

And in his second annual message to Congress, December 7, 1830, he closes an argument in favor of the Constitutional right to adjust the custom duties, as to encourage domestic industry with these words:

"In this conclusion I am confirmed as well by the opin

ions of Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, who have each repeatedly recommended the exercise of this right under the Constitution, as by the uniform practice of Congress, the continual acquiescence of the States, and the general understanding of the people."

But, not only has this principle of protection to domestic industry been advocated by the most illustrious of our American statesmen, but it has been received and acted on by every civilized nation on the Earth. It has been the steady policy of France since the days of Colbert, enforced more strongly and consistently by the first Napoleon, and (notwithstanding all that has been said about the "French treaty") steadily maintained by the present Emperor. In England for five centuries the policy has prevailed since the days of Edward the Third, and if twenty-five years ago she thought it practicable to relax the restrictions she had placed upon the importation of foreign manufactures, she is now aware of the mistake, and awaking to a sense of the fatal danger she incurred, and already her discontented operatives are demanding the restoration of protection against the cheaper labor of their continental rivals, and her farmers are claiming a prohibitory duty on foreign cattle, imported into the country. In Russia, that land so like our own in the magnitude of its undeveloped resources, the wisdom and necessity of fostering domestic production is understood and acted on. And in the history of the German Zolverein for the past five and thirty years is found at once the evidence and illustration of the wisdom of protection to home industry among a people, where all property is measured by a uniform standard.

THE TARIFF LEGISLATION OF THE UNITED STATES.

You give, Sir, in a condensed form, what you design as a history of the tariff legislation of the United States for the last fifty years. I do not regard it either as accurate or specific, as such a statement would need be for any safe

purpose of argument, and as I think, that exact information. on this subject is of great importance, I take the liberty of quoting a passage from a letter of Mr. Henry C. Carey, which is valuable for the historical evidence it affords, that Governmental interference, on behalf of manufactures, has always produced general national prosperity, and that the withdrawal of that interference has as invariably resulted in industrial distress and commercial disaster:

"Fifty years since, the second war with Great Britain came to a close, leaving our people well provided with mills and furnaces, all of which were actively engaged in making demand for labor and for raw materials of every kind. Money was then abundant, and the public debt was trivial in amount.

Two years later we entered upon the British free trade system, and at once all was changed. Mills and furnaces were closed; labor ceased to be in demand; and our poorhouses were everywhere filled. Money becoming scarce and interest high, land declined to a third of its previous price. Banks stopped payment. The sheriff everywhere found full demand for all his time, and mortgagees entered everywhere into possession. The rich were made richer, but the farmer and mechanic, and all but the very rich, were ruined. Trivial as were then the expenses of the Government, the Treasury could not meet them. Such was the state of things, that induced General Jackson to ask the question, 'Where has the American farmer a market for his surplus produce?'

To the state of things here described were we, in 1828, indebted for the first thoroughly national tariff. Almost from the moment of its passage, activity and life took the place of the palsy, that previously existed. Furnaces and mills were built; labor came into demand; immigration increased, and so large became, the demand, for the products of the farm, that our markets scarcely felt the effect of changes in that of England; the public revenues so rapidly increased, that it became necessary to exempt from duty

tea, coffee, and many other articles; and the public debt was finally extinguished.

The history of the world to that hour presents no case of prosperity so universal as that, which here existed at the date of the repeal of the great national tariff of 1828. Had it been maintained in existence, we should have had no secession war, and at this hour the South would exhibit a state of society, in which the land owners had become rich, while their slaves had been gradually becoming free, with profit to themselves, to their owners and the nation at large. It was, however, repealed in 1833, and the repeal was followed by a succession of British free-trade crises, the whole ending in 1842 in a state of things directly the reverse of that above described. Mills and furnaces were closed; mechanics were starving; money was scarce and dear; land had fallen to half its previous prices; the sheriff was everywhere at work; banks were in a state of suspension; states repudiated payment of their debts; the Treasury was unable to borrow a dollar, except at a high rate of interest: and bankruptcy among merchants and traders was so universal, that Congress found itself compelled to pass a bankrupt act.

Again, and for the third time, protection was restored by the passage of the Tariff Act of 1842. Under it, in less than five years, the production of iron rose from two hundred and twenty thousand tons to eight hundred thousand tons; and so universal was the prosperity that, large as was the increase, it was wholly insufficient to meet the great demand. Mines were everywhere being sunk. Labor was in great demand, and wages were high, as a consequence of which immigration speedily trebled in its amount. Money was abundant and cheap, and the sheriff found but little to do. Public and private revenues were great beyond all previous precedents, and throughout the land there reigned a prosperity more universal than had, in the whole history of the world, ever before been known.

Once more, in 1846, however, did the Serpent-prop

erly represented on this occasion by British free-tradersmake his way into Paradise, and now a dozen years elapsed, in the course of which, notwithstanding the discovery of California mines money commanded a rate of interest higher, as I believe, than had ever been known in the country for so long a period of time. British iron and cloth came in and gold went out, and with each successive day the dependence of our farmers on foreign markets became more complete. With 1857 came the culmination of the system, merchants and manufacturers being ruined, banks being compelled to suspend payment, and the Treasury being reduced to a condition of bankruptcy, nearly approaching that, which had existed at the close of the freetrade periods, commencing in 1817 and 1834. In the three years that followed, labor was everywhere in excess; wages were low; immigration fell below the point, at which it had stood twenty years before; the home market for food diminished, and the foreign one proved so utterly worthless, that the whole export to all the manufacturing nations of Europe, as I have already stated, amounted to but little more than $10,000,000."

The losses, brought on our country by a failure on the part of the Government to steadily protect the great industries of the nation, ever strikingly manifest by the loss to the whole country of a steam marine, which was won for us by men, who deserved a better fate than they received. It was for the want of a few paltry millions to protect a steam marine, so nobly won and of such inestimable value to our country-it was because of the failure of our Government to protect its "child"—that England was permitted, by her protective policy to her own steamships (at but a small cost) to distance us in a race for supremacy in ocean steam navigation, and take from us a steam marine, that would have been worth thousands of millions to our country, and would possibly have saved us from the terrible war through which we have passed.