Great Britain any orders for goods, and to direct the execution of all orders already sent to be delayed or suspended until the sense of the Congress on the means to be taken for the preservation of the liberties of America should be made public.

On the 27th of September the Congress unanimously resolved that, from and after the 1st day of December, 1774, there should be no importation into British America, from Great Britain or Ireland, of any goods, wares, or merchandise exported therefrom; and that they should not be used or purchased if imported after that date. On the 30th of September it was further resolved that, from and after the 10th of September, 1775, the exportation of all merchandise, and every commodity whatsoever, to Great Britain, Ireland, and the West Indies, ought to cease, unless the grievances of America should be redressed before that time. On the 6th of October (1774) it was resolved to exclude from importation, after the 1st of December following, molases, coffee, or pimento from the British plantations, or from Dominica, wines from Madeira and the Western Islands, and foreign indigo.

On the 20th day of October, 1774, the non-importation, non-consumption, and non-exportation agreement was adopted and signed by the Congress. This agreement contained a clause to discontinue the slave trade, and a provision not to import East India tea from any part of the world. In the article respecting non-exportation, the sending of rice to Europe was excepted. In general, the association expressed a determination to suppress luxury, encourage frugality, and promote domestic manufactures. The agreement was dated the 24th of October,

On the 17th of May, 1775, it was unanimously resolved that all exportations to Quebec, Nova Scotia, the Island of St. John's, Newfoundland, Georgia (except the parish of St. John's), and to East and West Florida, immediately cease, and that no provisions of any kind, or other necessaries, be furnished to the British fisheries on the American coast until it be otherwise determined by the Congress. At the same time (July 31, 1775) it was made the duty of a committee in the recess of Congress, to inquire into the cheapest and easiest methods of making salt in the country, and to make inquiry after virgin lead and leaden ore, etc.

On the 1st of August Congress adjourned to the 5th of September, 1775, having first passed a resolution declaring the non-exportation and non-importation association to comprise the islands of Jersey, Guernsey, Sark, Alderney, and Man, and every European island and settlement within the British dominions, as well as all the West India Islands, British and foreign, to whatever state, power, or prince belonging, or by whomsoever governed; and also Somers's Islands, Bahama Islands, Berbice, and Surinam, on the Main, and every island and settlement within the latitude of the southern line of Georgia and the equator.

On the 21st of March, 1776, Congress recommended to the several provincial assemblies to exert their utmost endeavors to promote the culture of hemp, flax, and cotton, and the growth of wool in the United Colonies; to take the earliest measures for erecting and establishing in each colony a society for the improvement of agriculture, arts, manufactures, and commerce; and forthwith to consider of the ways and means of introducing and improving the manufactures of duck, sail-cloth and steel.

But while the one great purpose of the people of the colonies was to establish industrial independence-the other being political independence-it is a most remarkable historical fact that the fruits of the victory in this respect achieved by the success of the Revolution were not only not preserved by the Articles of Confederation, but, on the contrary, actually frittered away, and in so far as the confederation of the States was concerned forever lost, by the failure to confer on Congress the power to regulate trade and commerce with foreign nations. This right by the Articles of Confederation was reserved to the States respectively, but unfortunately denied to the Congress. It was a fatal mistake-one resulting from that fearful fallacy of according to the several States of the Confederacy powers which alone should have been conferred on the General Government. The economist Young, in discussing this subject in his work on National Economy, says:

Although the States were politically independent, it was impossible to countervail the policy of other nations. Each State having, under the Confederation, the right to regulate its own trade, it imposed upon foreign productions, as well as those of its sister States, such duties as its own interests seemed to dictate. The States attempted by their separate navigation laws to secure their trade to their own vessels; and the selfish policy of some States counteracted the efforts

of others. As the Congress had no power to lay duties or regulate trade, and as the States could not agree npon a uniform rate of duties, foreign nations passed such laws as they judged most likely to destroy our commerce and extend their own.

Especially was this the policy of Great Britain. Our trade with her West India colonies was prohibited; and, by the enforcement of her navigation acts, our navigation was nearly destroyed. Foreign vessels and goods being freely admitted into the States, while ours were burdened with heavy duties in foreign ports, both the prices of goods imported and the prices of our exports were subject to the will of foreigners; and the money of our citizens was rapidly passing into the pockets of British manufacturers and merchants. In describing the state of the country at that time, a distinguished American statesman thus remarks:

"In the comparative condition of the United States and Great Britain, not a hatter, a boot or shoe maker, a saddler, or a brass founder could carry on his business, except in the coarsest and most ordinary productions of their various trades, under the pressure of this foreign competition. Thus was presented the extraordinary and calamitous spectacle of a successful revolution wholly failing of its ultimate object, The people of America had gone to war, not for names, but for things. It was not merely to change a Government administered by kings, princes, and ministers for a Government administered by presidents, and secretaries, and members of Congress; it was to redress their own grievances, to improve their own condition, to throw off the burden which the colonial system laid on their industry. To attain these objects, they endured incredible hardships, and bore and suffered almost beyond the measure of humanity. And when the independence was attained, they found it was a piece of parchment. The arm which had struck for it in the field was palsied in the workshop; the industry which had been burdened in the colonies was crushed in the free States; and, at the close of the Revolution, the mechanics and man- · ufacturers of the country found themselves, in the bitterness of their hearts, independent-and ruined."

And what was the lamentable result that followed this failure upon the part of the colonists to securely garner in the formation of their new Government the fruits of their successful revolution in respect of industrial freedom and industrial protection, and in the right to compel protection to home industries and home labor? For six years following the declaration of peace the States, not acting in concert in levying imposts on foreign importations, and Congress being powerless in the premises, our ports were virtually free to the importation of all foreign countries; and England, smarting under defeat, and seeing an opportunity to recover from her rebellious but victorious children some of the millions expended in her vain efforts to compel submission through the instrumentality of war, flooded this country with every conceivable form of foreign product.

During the first two years succeeding the close of the war (1784 and 1785), the importations from England alone were of the value of over $30,000,000, while our exports during the same time were less than $9,000,000, and the result was that every American industry was prostrated. The country was drained of its specie to pay for foreign importations. The circulating medium of the country was thus necessarily contracted; the price of labor and of farms and farm products, the inevitable result of excessive importations and currency contraction, was depressed, and financial ruin and universal discontent and bankruptcy reigned supreme throughout the confederated States from one end of the land to the other. Free trade in all its disastrous consequences ran riot and reigned supreme, and its blighting influences filled the land with desolation.

Hildreth, in his History of the United States, in speaking of this era,

says:

The fisheries, formerly a chief resource of New England, broken up by the war, had not yet been re-established. The farmers no longer found that market for their produce which the French, American, and British armies had furnished. The large importation of foreign goods, subject to little or no

duty, and sold at peace prices, was proving ruinous to all those domestic manufactures and mechanical employments which the non-consumption agreements and the war had created and fostered. Immediately after the peace the country had been flooded with imported goods, and debts had been unwarily contracted for which there was no means to pay. * * * The excessive importation of foreign goods had drained the country of specie.

Belknap, in his History of New Hampshire, in speaking of this epoch and of the disastrous effects of unrestricted free trade, says:

Silver and gold which had circulated largely in the latter years of the war were returning by the usual course of trade to those countries whence large quantities of necessary and unnecessary commodities had been imported. Had any general system of imposts been adopted some part of this money might have been retained and some part of the public debt discharged; but the power of Congress did not extend to this object; and the States were not united in the expediency of delegating new and sufficient powers to that body. The partial imposts laid by some of the States were ineffectual as long as others found their interests in omitting them.

Massachusetts, Rhode Island, South Carolina, and other States of the Confederation were driven into the passage of acts making cattle and other species of property a legal tender for the payment of private debts, while in some of these States open revolt assumed material shape as well as formidable proportions, and the spirit of anarchy was abroad in the land. In New Hampshire the members of the Legislature were met and held prisoners by armed mobs who demanded that certain legislative action be taken in the interest of the people before they were released. Shay's rebellion in Massachusetts drenched the historical fields of that great State with blood. Belknap in his History of New Hampshire, after speaking of the troubles in New Hampshire just referred to, speaks of the laws passed by the Legislature of the State of Massachusetts in these words:

Similar difficulties at the same time existed in the neighboring State, Massachusetts, to remedy which among other palliatives a law was passed called a "tender act," by which it was provided that executions issued for private demands might be satisfied by cattle and other enumerated articles at an appraisement by impartial men under oath.

Similar laws were passed in South Carolina and other States. Ramsay, in his History of South Carolina, (volume 2, page 428), among other things, says:

Laws were passed in which property of every kind was made a legal tender in the payment of private debts, although payable according to contract in gold or silver. Other laws installed the debt so that of sums already due only a third, and afterwards only a fifth, was annually recoverable in the courts of law.

Mathew Carey in discussing the history of these times and the effect upon the prosperity of the country of this system of unrestricted free trade, says, on page 45, in The New Olive Branch:

The ports of this country, I repeat, were open to the commerce of the whole world, while with an impost so light as not even to meet the wants of the Treasury, the consequences followed which have never failed to follow such a state of things. Our markets were glutted. Prices fell. Competition on the part of our manufacturers was at an end. They were beggared and bankrupted. The merchants whose importations had ruined them were involved in the calamity and the farmers who had felicitated themselves on the grand advantage of "buying foreign merchandise cheap" sunk likewise into the vortex of general destruction.

So, Mr. President, it will be seen that in the opinion of nearly every historian of these troublous times the period of free trade under the Confederation-the six years following the declaration of peace, the period between the date when the Revolution succeeded and the Constitution was adopted-the one great cause assigned for the financial and industrial disasters that overtook the people of the new Government, was the lack of power upon the part of the Confederate Congress to

DOLW

regulate trade and commerce with foreign nations, and by reason of which this country was flooded with foreign importations, thus crushing out the life-blood from American enterprise, American industries, and American labor, and bringing paralysis on the arm, and energies, and heart of the whole country.

And then it was, moved irresistibly on to remedy the great evil which overwhelmed them as they were compelled originally to resist the trade aggressions, as also the political tyrannies of the English king, the people of the several States of the Confederation in constitutional convention assembled made the famous declaration that

We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America

And educated by the bitter experience of the past, the men who framed that immortal instrument, and the Legislatures of the States respectively, that breathed into it the breath of national life, were determined that the Congress of the new nation, unlike that of the Confederation, should not be left powerless, or the people who lived under it remediless against the disastrous and withering consequences of British free trade; and hence it was provided in that great fundamental charter that the Congress should bave power not only "to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States," but should also have power "to regulate commerce with foreign nations," as well as among the several States.

And will it now be said in view of the historical facts to which attention has been directed that all that is meant by these provisions of the Constitution is that Congress shall have power simply to lay and collect duties and imposts solely with a view of raising revenue to meet the wants of the Government? Can it in view of what has been said be successfully contended that there is in these provisions no power in the American Congress to so levy customs duties as to restrict foreign importations and thus afford encouragement and protection to the industries and labor of this country? How did the statesmen of that day and of subsequent years regard the new Constitution considered in relation to the subject of the principle of protection? Daniel Webster, in his speech at Buffalo, in June, 1833, among other things, said: The protection of American labor against the injurious competition of foreign labor so far as respects general handicraft production is known historically to have been one end designed to be obtained by establishing the Constitution.

But still further, and I quote from Mr. Daniel H. Mason's valuable Tariff History of the United States, page 67, as I have made other quotations from that valuable work, as follows:

Mr. Webster gave forth his views with more emphasis, directness, and detail in his speech at the Albany mass meeting, August 27, 1814. He then said: "The terms (regulation of commerce) were well understood in our colonial his. tory, and if we go back to the history of the Constitution and of the convention which adopted it we shall find that everywhere, when masses of men were assembled and the wants of the people were brought forth into prominence, the idea was held up that domestic industry could not prosper, manufactures and the mechanic arts could not advance, the condition of the common country could not be carried up to any considerable elevation, unless there should be one government to lay one rate of duty upon imports throughout the Union, from New Hampshire to Georgia, regard to be had in laying this duty to the protection of American labor and industry. I defy the man in any degree conversant with history, in any degree acquainted with the annals of this country from 1787 to the adoption of the Constitution in 1789, to say that this was not a

leading, I may almost say, the leading motive, South as well as North, for the formation of the new government. Without that provision in the Constitution it never could have been adopted."

Mr. Mason further quotes from Mr. Rufus Choate on this subject, who, in his great speech in the Senate of the United States, delivered March 14, 1842, among other things, said:

A whole people, a whole generation of our fathers, had in view as one grand end and purpose of their new government the acquisition of the means of restraining, by governmental action, the importation of foreign manufactures, for the encouragement of manufactures and of labor at home, and desired and meant to do this by clothing the new government with this specific power of regulating commerce.

But not the least conclusive argument in favor of the construction now claimed for the provisions of the Constitution under consideration is the fact that one of the first great measures adopted by the Congress after the adoption of the Constitution was a tariff act based upon the purpose and founded on the lines of protection to American industry and American labor. It was in the discussion of that bill in the national House of Representatives in 1789 that Representative Fisher Ames used these significant words:

I conceive, sir, that the present Constitution was dictated by commercial necessity more than by any other cause. The want of an official government to secure the manufacturing interest and to advance our commerce was long seen by men of judgment and pointed out by patriots solicitous to promote our general welfare.

Scarcely had the present Government been inaugurated until the new Congress was flooded with petitions from all sections of the country praying the enactment of tariff laws based upon the theory of protection. From among others these petitions came from the tradesmen, mechanics, and others of the town of Baltimore; from the mechanics, shipwrights, and laborers of the city of Charleston, in South Carolina; from the manufacturers and laboring classes of the city of New York, and from those of Boston, Providence, and other New England cities. These petitions felicitated Congress and the country on the fact that by the change from the Confederation to the Union a happy effect had been realized and a new era had dawned wherein the interests of the manufacturer, the laborer, the producer as well as the consumer in this country were no longer imperiled by being subject, in so far as protection against excessive importations and restrictive foreign trade laws were concerned, to the will of the Legislatures of the States respectively, but that all these sacred interests were now committed to the protecting care and guardianship of one sovereign legislature, the Congress of the United States, possessed of the sole and exclusive power to levy duties on imports.

It was in response to these resolutions and the universal wish of the leading statesmen of the country that James Madison in the very morning of the new Union made the subject of tariff legislation on the lines of protection the first and main topic of consideration in the American Congress, and among other things, while advocating this measure in 1789, Mr. Madison said:

While

The States that are most advanced in population, and ripe for manufactures, ought to have their particular interests attended to in some measure. these States retained the power of making regulations of trade, they had the power to protect and cherish such institutions. By adopting the present Constitution they have thrown the exercise of this power into other hands; they must have done this with an expectation that those interests would not be neglected here. (See Gale & Seaton's Debates, O. S., volume 1, page 116.)

A study of the history of those times will show conclusively that all