On July 6, 1852, Abraham Lincoln rose to eulogize a man he had called his “beau ideal” of a statesman.The young Illinois congressman who would one day save the republic stood before a Springfield crowd and reached for language adequate to express the loss of a man he had come to model in thought, word, and deed.

What Lincoln said that day is worth revisiting.

Lincoln understood something that most of Clay’s eulogists missed.

Clay was not merely a statesman or a compromiser or a creature of the Senate chamber. He was, above all things, a builder. He was a man who had looked at the young republic and saw not just what it was: but what it could become. Always pragmatic, he did not sit daydreaming. He worked to organize the political economy of the nation to bring his vision about.

The grief in Lincoln’s voice that day was not just for a mentor and a political hero. It was for a man that represented the best ambition of the Nation itself.

Even Clay’s rivals deeply mourned his passing.

Lincoln reminded his audience of something easy to forget. Henry Clay had been born in 1777 — the first year of American independence — an obscure child of undistinguished parents in a Virginia backwater, entering the world at the very moment the nation itself was fighting for its life.

The infant republic and the infant child began the race of life together. For seventy-five years they traveled hand in hand. The nation passed its perils and emerged free, prosperous, and powerful. The man reached his manhood, his middle age, his old age, and died. As Lincoln put it simply: "In all that has concerned the nation the man ever sympathised; and now the nation mourns for the man."

But Clay’s death and legacy symbolize not the end of the Republic, but the foundations upon which our Nation grew and became a great power. His spirit lives on through that vision of the American System he envisioned and worked to build, and what this generation is being called to finish.

The Architecture of Greatness

To understand what Clay attempted to build with his “American System” you have to understand the crisis he was answering. In the years after the War of 1812, the young American republic faced an existential economic threat that its founders had not anticipated.

British manufactured goods, cheaper and more refined than anything American workshops could produce, flooded the domestic market. Nascent industries folded. The political independence won at Yorktown was revealing itself to be economically hollow. A nation that could not make its own cloth, its own iron, its own tools, remained in every meaningful sense a colony.

While the American revolution had won the former colonies the rights to their own representatives and systems of Government, its dependence remained on the empire and old world it had ostensibly left. As we explored in our review of Lindsay Schakenbach Regele's Manufacturing Advantage, this was not merely an economic embarrassment but a substantial national security crisis. American troops had begun the War of 1812 practically unable to clothe or arm themselves. The crisis of dependency was not theoretical. It had been written in blood.

Clay’s answer was architectural. The American System rested on three pillars that were designed not as separate policies but as a single coherent structure.

Protective tariffs would strengthen the domestic market and create an atmosphere safe for the development and thriving of national industries. A national credit architecture, then represented by the Second Bank of the United States, would work to direct capital toward productive development and the American System's third pillar, internal improvements. Internal improvements, as we explored in our review of Daniel Walker Howe's Political Culture of the American Whigs, meant something far broader to Clay and the Whigs than roads and canals. They were projects that would bind the domestic market together, shortening the distance between farmer and manufacturer, between raw material and finished good, and between regions that might otherwise remain strangers to each other. They were seen as a critical ingredient for unifying the different sectional interests so prevalent in the early republic, where state and regional identities often took precedence above national ones.

These three legs held each other up. The tariff generated revenue for improvements. The improvements deepened the domestic market that the tariff was protecting, and made the nation more productive and unified. The credit institution financed both. Remove any one and the structure weakened. Remove two and it collapsed.

What Clay understood, and what his successors consistently failed to fully realize, was that the American System was not a menu of policies from which a legislator could order selectively. It was an integrated vision of how a free republic deliberately builds the economic foundations of its own greatness, and how a democracy binds a people together.

The Incomplete Revolution

The American System did not fall to better arguments. It fell to the structural contradictions of the republic it was trying to build.

The southern economy was not simply hostile to Clay’s vision but rather in its own logic, rationally wary of it. The plantation system depended on the free export of cotton and tobacco to British and European markets, and on the cheap importation of the manufactured goods that southern planters needed but did not produce. A protective tariff raised the price of those imports.

Internal improvements, financed by tariff revenue, were seen as primarily benefiting the manufacturing regions of the North and West. And a national bank, with its power concentrated in the north with figures such as Nicholas Biddle, was treated as extremely suspect from southerners.

From inside the plantation economy, the American System could look less like national development and more like a northern program being imposed on a southern way of life at southern expense. That perception was not entirely without foundation, the American system did threaten the agrarian slave system, but ultimately the System’s architects believed sincerely, and rightfully, that its benefits would ultimately flow to every region.

John C. Calhoun — who had once been among the System’s most eloquent advocates — pivoted to become its most dangerous opponent after James Madison’s veto of the Bonus Bill in 1817 denied federal funding for the internal improvements Calhoun himself had championed. That veto was, in retrospect, the original sin. Without the binding infrastructure that internal improvements would have provided, the System’s ability to demonstrate concrete benefits to the South evaporated. What remained looked, to southern eyes, like taxation in service of northern industry. The structure was severed before it could prove itself whole. And after the tariff of 1828, commonly referred to as the “tariff of abominations” was passed, Calhoun would lead opposition against the tariff in South Carolina, becoming the first Vice President to resign.

When South Carolina threatened to secede due to the tariff, Andrew Jackson sent federal troopers to enforce its collection. But on the question of the bank, Jackson would choose differently. The Bank War of the 1830s dismantled the credit architecture. The great democratic populist who styled himself the champion of the common man against the moneyed elites succeeded primarily in destroying the one institution capable of directing national capital toward national development.

Abraham Lincoln came closest to the complete vision. With the Morrill Tariff, the transcontinental railroad, the land grant colleges, the Homestead Act, the Republican program of the 1860s was the most serious attempt to implement the American System. For the first time the three pillars stood together, however briefly, and the results were historic. The United States industrialized at a pace the world had never seen. But even Lincoln’s achievement was incomplete.

The alleged and often overstated corruption of the Grant era, much of it tied to railroad financing, poisoned the well of internal improvements for a generation. And without a permanent architecture of national investment — without something like the Bonus Bill Clay and Calhoun had originally imagined — the System’s productive gains flowed upward into the great industrial trusts rather than outward into the national community.

When the progressive critique of concentrated industrial power arrived at the turn of the century, the protectionists struggled to adapt. They had built the tariff. But they had never finished building the American system. And so free trade orthodoxy landed its killing blow not by winning an argument but by pointing at the wreckage: You said protection builds civilization. You built Standard Oil.

The Experiment That Failed

Manchester liberalism won the universities after that, and it held them for a century. But it did not win policy immediately.

The Republican Party of the 1920s maintained the protective tariff tradition, passing the Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922 and later the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930. American industry remained substantially protected. What these administrations could not do, and largely did not attempt, was revive the internal improvements architecture that the corruption of the railroad era had discredited. The tariff stood. The binding infrastructure did not. And without it, the System's productive gains continued flowing upward into concentrated capital rather than outward into a deepened national market. When the Great Depression arrived, free traders had their weapon. They blamed Smoot-Hawley, absolved the financial system, and used the wreckage to write protection out of respectable economic thought entirely. The indictment was always more convenient than it was accurate. But it stuck.

The Washington Consensus of the 1990s was Manchester liberalism’s culmination — a global bet that deep economic integration would liberalize rivals, flatten geopolitical competition, and deliver prosperity through comparative advantage. Factory by factory, supply chain by supply chain, the American industrial base was allowed to migrate abroad on the theory that what replaced it would be better. The economists had models. The models said it would work.

It did not work. The communities hollowed out by deindustrialization did not transition smoothly into the knowledge economy. The geopolitical rival that was supposed to liberalize under the civilizing influence of trade became instead the world’s dominant manufacturer and a systematic adversary. The supply chains that undergird American military and technological power now run through that adversary’s territory. The political independence maintained at enormous expense since 1945 has become, again, economically contingent.

Henry Clay saw this coming. Not because he was a prophet, but because his intellectual tradition had worked out, with considerable precision, exactly why external market orientation produces dependency rather than development. The road to national greatness runs through the depth of the domestic market, not the breadth of global trade.

The American School of economics — Clay, Hamilton, Henry Carey, Friedrich List, Erasmus Peshine Smith — built a complete and coherent theory of how nations actually develop. They were defeated not by better arguments but by sectionalism, by the Bank War, by the corruption of the railroad era, and ultimately by the cultural capture of American universities by a tradition that had begun as a British export.

They were right. We can demonstrate now, with the hindsight of a globalization experiment that has run its course, that they were right. And that changes everything about what this moment requires.

The Revolution Unfinished

Over the next nine days, leading to Henry Clay’s birthday on April 12th, this publication will make that case in full. We will trace the intellectual foundations of the American System from Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures through Carey’s demolition of Ricardian free trade doctrine. We will examine why the System was never completed and what that incompleteness cost. We will reckon honestly with the objections of the System’s critics and give their strongest arguments their due before dismantling them.

And on April 12th, we will attempt something more ambitious: a full account of what the 21st Century American System looks like. Not as nostalgia. Not as a revival of 19th century policy instruments. But as a coherent program adequate to the conditions of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The tariff is back. But tariffs alone were never the point. The internal improvements, the binding infrastructure of national productive capacity, were always the deeper argument. In the 21st century, that means fusion energy and AI infrastructure and transcontinental water systems and the deliberate expansion of the American productive frontier in ways that Clay himself would have recognized instantly, even if the technologies would have astonished him.

The boy was born with the republic. The man spent his life trying to build it into something worthy of its own promise. The tradition he founded was defeated before it could be completed. But incomplete is not the same as wrong. And 2026 is not 1852.

Clay’s revolution is unfinished. It is time to finish it.

This is Day One of Ten. Each day through April 11th, APTL will publish a new piece in this series, biographical, theoretical, historical, polemical, all building toward the April 12th capstone: a full account of the 21st Century American System.

Subscribe to follow the series as it unfolds.

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Something unusual has been happening on Twitter lately. Americans and Japanese are finding each other, talking to each other, celebrating each other’s cultures across the language barrier with nothing but an autotranslation feature and genuine goodwill. It is a small thing, perhaps. But it points toward something real: a friendship between two nations that runs deeper than most people realize, deeper than treaties and trade agreements and diplomatic communiqués. It runs all the way back to 1871, to a Rochester lawyer named Erasmus Peshine Smith who boarded a ship for Tokyo and carried with him a set of ideas that would help transform Japan into one of the great industrial powers of the modern world.

Almost no one has heard of him. That is worth correcting.

A Man of the American School

Erasmus Peshine Smith was born in New York City in 1814, the descendant of Puritan and Huguenot settlers who had fled Europe under religious persecution. His family moved to Rochester when he was still a child, and Rochester would remain his home for most of his life. He graduated from Columbia College in 1832 and took his law degree at Harvard in 1833, where he sat beside a fellow student named William Henry Seward. That friendship would eventually shape the course of his career, and through his career, the course of a nation on the other side of the world.

After Harvard, Smith returned to Rochester and began practicing law. He joined the firm of his old classmate Seward, by then already a prominent Whig politician. The Whig world of mid-nineteenth century America was an intellectually serious place. It took ideas about national development, manufacturing, and economic sovereignty with a seriousness that has largely vanished from American public life. Smith was thoroughly at home in it.

The pivotal intellectual encounter of his life came in 1850, when he read Henry Charles Carey’s The Past, The Present, and the Future. Carey was Philadelphia’s great economist, the most formidable American challenger to the British school of political economy, and the intellectual architect of what his contemporaries called the American System. Where the British school, descending from Adam Smith and David Ricardo, preached free trade as universal law, Carey argued that the development of national productive power required active protection. A young nation that opened itself to the flood of cheap manufactures from an already-industrialized England was not practicing sound economics. It was practicing surrender.

Smith read Carey and was immediately convinced. He wrote a review praising the book in Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine and sought out Carey directly. The two men became close collaborators. When Smith published his own major work in 1853, A Manual of Political Economy, it was in the tradition Carey had established, and Carey himself recognized it. In his 1858 Principles of Social Science, Carey wrote warmly of his friend’s work, calling the Manual an “excellent little” treatise and drawing on it extensively. Smith had described British political economy, with its Malthusian doctrines of inevitable scarcity and cheap labor, as “the Dismal Science,” and contrasted it with what he called, pointedly, “a science of Progress and Hope.” That phrase captures something essential about what the American School believed: that the economy is not a fixed mechanism producing winners and losers according to iron laws, but a productive system that can be consciously built, developed, and directed toward the prosperity of an entire people.

These were not merely academic opinions. Smith spent years in public service shaped by these convictions. In 1854 he was appointed Deputy Superintendent of Public Instruction for New York State, praised by the New York Times as a man whose “enlarged views of national growth and prosperity” were clearly evident in his political economy. Later he became Reporter for the New York Court of Appeals. When Abraham Lincoln was elected and made Seward his Secretary of State, Smith was called to Washington. He spent the years from 1865 to 1871 at the State Department as a solicitor and examiner of claims, developing along the way an expertise in international law that would prove decisive.

It was that expertise, combined with his standing in the American System tradition, that put him on a ship to Japan.

The Invitation

The Meiji Restoration of 1868 was one of the most deliberate acts of national self-transformation in modern history. A small group of Japanese statesmen, watching what had happened to China under the pressure of Western imperial power, concluded that Japan had to industrialize and modernize or face the same fate. The question was how.

The answer they arrived at was not, as is sometimes assumed, simply to imitate the West wholesale. It was more precise than that. Japan’s leaders studied carefully the different economic models on offer, and a significant faction among them concluded that the American model, not the British one, was the right template. The British model meant free trade, open markets, and the free flow of British manufactured goods into every corner of the globe. That was the system that had kept India poor and deindustrialized. The American model meant protective tariffs, national banking, and the deliberate cultivation of domestic industry behind walls that gave infant manufacturers time to grow. That was the system that had turned a collection of agricultural colonies into an industrial power in less than a century.

Itō Hirobumi, who would later become Japan’s first Prime Minister, had been sent to the United States in 1870 specifically to study the American economic system, including its protective tariffs, credit policies, and taxation. He came back a committed advocate of the American approach. Wakayama Norikazu, a former English interpreter who became an official in the Ministry of Finance, had published a treatise on protectionist tariffs in 1870 that drew explicitly on Henry Carey’s historical examples of successful protection. Ōkubo Toshimichi, head of the Finance Ministry, supported protectionist policies. The intellectual ground was prepared.

What Japan needed was an American who could work from the inside.

In 1871, Mori Arinori, Japan’s representative in Washington, approached Secretary of State Hamilton Fish with a request: could the United States recommend someone to serve as an adviser on international law? Fish did not hesitate. The name that came to mind immediately was Erasmus Peshine Smith.

With the approval of President Ulysses S. Grant, Smith accepted the appointment. He became, at the age of fifty-seven, the first foreigner ever employed as an official of the Japanese government.

Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo

He arrived in Japan in 1871 and stayed for five years. He was given the title of Special Adviser in International Law to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But the scope of his work was considerably broader than that title suggests. He attended Cabinet meetings. He consulted on economic matters with Ōkuma Shigenobu and Ōkubo Toshimichi, the two men most responsible for designing Japan’s new economic architecture. He occasionally met with the Emperor. And at some point during his time in Japan, he adopted the custom of dressing in samurai attire, including the two traditional swords.

He had, in other words, gone native in the best possible sense. He was not a foreign expert issuing pronouncements from a comfortable distance. He was a participant.

His first great test came in 1872, and it was not about economics at all. It was about human freedom.

In July of that year, a Portuguese ship called the Maria Luz lay at anchor off Yokohama. Its cargo consisted of 231 Chinese men, recruited under false promises or simply kidnapped, destined for the sugar plantations of Cuba or the silver mines of Peru under conditions indistinguishable from slavery. One of the Chinese managed to escape twice onto a nearby British warship. Twice, the British returned him to the Portuguese.

On the recommendation of Erasmus Peshine Smith, Japan seized the ship.

The legal and diplomatic aftermath was complex. Peru, which had no treaty with Japan and stood to lose its supply of forced labor, threatened to send warships. Portugal’s captain sued for the return of his “property.” The United States, bound by diplomatic obligations, found itself in the uncomfortable position of officially representing Peru’s interests while privately opposing the coolie trade. Lincoln had signed legislation prohibiting American participation in that trade in 1862. The principle was not in doubt. The politics were messy.

Smith drafted all the legal briefs. He drafted all the correspondence. He drafted the final judgment, which grounded Japan’s position in “the broader issues of natural justice and equity which are of universal application” and cited American legal precedents regarding the status of human beings as property. None of the 231 Chinese chose to return to the Maria Luz. They were sent home to China. The matter was submitted to arbitration by Czar Alexander II of Russia, who had freed the Russian serfs a decade earlier and who ruled in Japan’s favor in 1875.

A month after the 1872 judgment, Japan issued its Emancipation Decree for Female Performers and Prostitutes, banning the sale of human beings and freeing all indentured servants from their contracts. In 1873, Peru officially outlawed the coolie trade.

Japan had been a sovereign nation for only four years. With Smith’s guidance, it had stood up to the British Empire’s commerce in human flesh and won.

Building the Architecture

The Maria Luz case was important. But it was, as those who knew Smith’s work recognized, his economic advisory role that constituted his deepest legacy.

In 1873, with Smith’s advice, Ōkubo Toshimichi established the Ministry of Home Affairs and within it the Industrial Promotion Board, the kangyōryō. The function of this body was straightforward: to actively promote the development of Japanese industry. Not to wait for markets to spontaneously generate manufacturers, not to leave the field open to established foreign competitors, but to deliberately cultivate productive capacity as a matter of national policy.

On August 1 of the same year, the First National Bank of Japan opened for business. It was modeled, consciously and explicitly, on Alexander Hamilton’s First National Bank of the United States.

The parallel was not accidental. It was the whole point. Hamilton had faced a new republic with no money, no credit, and no established manufacturing base, hemmed in by a British commercial system designed to keep it dependent. He had solved the problem by treating the national debt not as a burden but as the raw material of a credit economy, channeling capital into productive enterprises rather than speculation. The result, over the following decades, was the industrialization of the United States.

Japan in 1873 faced an analogous situation. There was no significant specie reserve. The main medium of exchange was rice. What Japan had was a large feudal aristocracy, samurai and nobles holding their wealth in land and stipends that served no productive purpose. Ōkubo and Ōkuma converted that frozen wealth into capital. The feudal landholdings were returned to the nation. The aristocrats were compensated in government paper money, which the government then directed into the new national banks and nascent industries. The New Currency Act established the yen as a unified decimal currency, replacing the incompatible local currencies of the old feudal domains. The Banking Act of 1872 and its 1876 revision created a framework for national banks to circulate notes backed by government securities.

This was not, as modern free-trade economists would have it, reckless state intervention. It was the deliberate construction of the financial infrastructure that productive development requires. It was exactly what Hamilton had done for the United States, translated into Japanese circumstances by Japanese statesmen who had studied the American example carefully and by an American adviser who had spent his adult life thinking about why it worked.

The results were not long in coming. A generation later, a carpenter’s son named Toyoda Sakichi revolutionized Japan’s textile industry with his automated power loom, applying the principle he called Jidoka, the machine that stops itself when something goes wrong. His son Toyoda Kiichirō founded the automobile company that eventually became Toyota, now the largest car manufacturer in the world. That trajectory, from rice economy to Toyota, runs through the institutional architecture that Ōkubo, Ōkuma, and Erasmus Peshine Smith built in the early 1870s.

After Japan

Smith left Japan in 1876. He was sixty-two years old and had done the most consequential work of his life. He was almost entirely unknown in America.

His influence did not immediately depart with him. In 1877 and 1878, seventeen essays appeared in the Tokio Times under the heading “Notes on Political Economy Designed Chiefly for Japanese Readers.” No author was listed, but the essays bear every mark of Smith’s mind and method, and were in all probability written by him before his departure, to be published after he was gone. They were his parting gift to the country that had trusted him with its transformation.

He returned to Rochester and died there on October 21, 1882, at the age of sixty-eight, with plans for a new work on political economy that he never completed.

What Was Carried Across the Water

The friendship between the United States and Japan is often discussed in terms of the post-1945 relationship, the alliance and the reconstruction and the shared democratic institutions. That story is real and important. But it obscures an older connection.

In the decade after the Meiji Restoration, Japan’s modernizing leadership looked at the world’s competing economic systems and made a deliberate choice. They chose the American model over the British one. They chose protection over dependence. They chose to build productive capacity rather than remain a supplier of raw materials and a market for foreign manufactures. And in making that choice, they reached out and asked America to send them someone who understood the philosophy behind it.

America sent Erasmus Peshine Smith.

He arrived carrying the ideas of Henry Carey and Alexander Hamilton, ideas developed to answer a specific question: how does a new nation, facing the commercial power of an already-industrialized rival, build the productive capacity that makes genuine independence possible? The question Hamilton had answered for the United States, and that Carey had refined into a comprehensive system, was the same question Japan’s statesmen were asking. Smith brought the answer.

The American School of political economy holds that sovereignty is not merely a legal condition. A nation that cannot clothe its soldiers, finance its own development, or build its own industries is not truly independent. It is merely tolerated. The Meiji statesmen understood this. They had watched what happened to countries that were merely tolerated. They chose a different path.

That path ran through American ideas, American institutions, and one American lawyer from Rochester who dressed in samurai clothes and drafted legal briefs that ended a slave trade and helped build a national bank.

The Twitter friendship between Americans and Japanese is a small and cheerful thing. But it stands on a foundation older and sturdier than most people realize. Before the alliance, before the occupation, before the peace treaty, there was a shared belief that nations deserve the tools to build their own futures, and that those tools can be passed from one people to another across the widest of oceans.

Erasmus Peshine Smith believed that. So did the Japanese statesmen who trusted him. The world they helped build is still with us.

William Hamilton is the editor of The Tariff Times and the founder of the American Protective Tariff League. The APTL is dedicated to recovering and republishing the intellectual tradition of the American School of Political Economy.

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Every Presidents’ Day, Americans remember George Washington as the general who won independence and the statesman who stepped away from power. Less often remembered is something equally important for understanding the early republic: Washington was a committed supporter of American manufacturing, and the first major economic act of the new government reflected that conviction. Without this commitment, the nation would not have survived.

His presidency began with symbolism that was anything but accidental.

A suit made in America

When Washington traveled to New York for his inauguration in 1789, he consciously chose clothing that carried political meaning. Influenced by a public call urging American leaders to wear domestically produced goods, he commissioned a suit made from American wool produced at the Hartford Woolen Manufactory in Connecticut.

The suit was not simply fashion. It was messaging.

At a moment when the new nation was economically fragile and heavily dependent on foreign manufactures, Washington chose to stand before Congress in material produced by American workers. This suit was a statement of national identity and self-sufficiency, emphasizing that Washington wanted to support domestic industry through personal example.

Historians often forget one of the greatest challenges that Washingtons army faced. Due to the tyrannical acts of the British government that drove the Americans to Revolution, (such acts as the Iron Act, the Wool Act, and the Hat Act), Americans were not legally allowed to develop their own products of iron, of wool, or even manufacture their own hats. Thus, during the war, American soldiers were woefully unclothed.

General Washington would never forget the horror of seeing his men die of exposure, shivering to death in the frosty winds of Valley Forge. The general was determined that as President, he would never allow the Nations troops nor its civilians to be dependent on another nation for their clothing.

Washingtons symbolic gesture came before the age of campaign branding or modern economics departments. Yet the message was clear: political independence required productive independence, and Washington stood with American manufacturers.

Washington himself expressed this sentiment directly, writing in 1789 that he would take pleasure in encouraging “the manufactures of my Country.”

The first act of the new government

After the administration of oaths, the new federal government quickly moved to establish itself financially. After establishing the law on the taking of oaths, the first act of the very First Congress was the Tariff Act of 1789.

Washington, determined to never see the nation dependent on foreign textiles again, signed this act on July 4, 1789. This tariff act served two primary purposes:

• It raised revenue for a government burdened by war debt

• It offered protection to emerging domestic manufacturers and established a path forward for the domestic procurement of textiles

Before the republic had a standing bureaucracy, before many executive departments even existed, Congress and the president agreed that revenue and industry had to be secured first. The tariff was the answer.

Thus the history is clear to us upon review. The early United States did not begin as a free trade experiment. It began with tariffs. It began with PROTECTION.

Washington, Hamilton, and the question of national development

Washington’s economic instincts aligned more frequently with Alexander Hamilton than with Thomas Jefferson when it came to building national economic capacity.

Hamilton argued for a strong national financial system, federal assumption of debts, and policies that encouraged manufacturing and credit formation. Jefferson preferred a more agrarian republic and was skeptical of what he saw as centralized economic power.

One of the clearest examples came in 1791, when Washington signed legislation creating the First Bank of the United States after intense debate within his cabinet. Jefferson opposed the bank on constitutional grounds, while Hamilton defended it as necessary for national development. Washington ultimately sided with Hamilton’s interpretation on this and other issues.

His decision was not merely technical. It reflected a broader philosophy that national strength required institutions capable of fostering commerce, industry, and stable public finance.

In other words, Washington repeatedly chose the path of establishing domestic political and economic institutions. These institutions would permit the way forward for the United States to realize and defend the independence it had just fought a bloody war to win.

A founding lesson for Presidents Day

The image of Washington in a brown American-made suit standing on the balcony of Federal Hall is more than a picturesque story from the founding era. It tells us something about the assumptions built into the republic itself.

The first president understood that sovereignty was not only defended on battlefields. It was also reinforced in workshops, mills, and factories.

Washington’s example suggests a simple proposition that later generations would repeatedly rediscover: political independence is fragile without industrial strength.

On Presidents Day, it is worth remembering that America’s first president was not only a soldier and statesman. He was, in the language of today, a tariff man.

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If you would like to learn more about the early development of the United States textile industry, consider purchasing the following book.

Manufacturing Advantage: War, the State, and the Origins of American Industry, 1776–1848 ( Book Review linked HERE)

To understand the importance of domestic manufacturing, particularly within todays context, please consider buying my friend John Gardners book

“Manufacturing Local” (Book Review Forthcoming)

The American people have entirely forgotten what the ongoing American Revolution is really all about, and you will soon realize, it is ABSOLUTELY NOT about a bland sentiment of “Freedumb”, and it definitely has NOTHING to do with Adam Smith or the mythology of laissez faire economics you were taught in grade school.

The United States of America became a world power with a unique economic outlook shaped by a school of thought that today has been deliberately wiped from our collective memory. The foundations of even our most prized and prestigious institutions of learning have deliberately been scrubbed from the historical record and our national consciousness. (more on this another time).

The American Protectionist School of Economics led the transformation of the United States from a backward agrarian economy, to the most powerful nation in history, and for that reason, the enemies of our people wish to destroy its legacy. The development of our nation was not accidental, instead, it is the product of deliberate intervention, planning, the agitation of protectionist thinkers, their political representatives, and above all, the blood of patriotic Americans who gave their lives to see our nation sovereign and prosperous.

Even prior to the adoption of the Constitution, key to our nation’s history has been the fight to create a society in which American business and labor have the opportunity to thrive in harmony, safeguarded from foreign intrusion and influence. From the earliest days in colonial New England, to today, the American people have battled for a government that puts its people first, that safeguards its people and its businesses from those who would seek to destroy them, and to foster an environment that sets the foundation for prosperity for industry and families. Our forefathers envisioned a land in which the government and its constitution would be an effective force for increasing the welfare of the American people, and protecting our way of life from threats abroad, both military and commercial.

Before the American Revolution, Britain had very different plans and views for its new found colonies. The American colonies were deliberately prohibited from developing and protecting its own industries, sometimes to even comical extents. The Hat Act of 1731 for instance prohibited Americans from even manufacturing their own hats. That privilege would be reserved for manufacturers in Great Britain. The idea was for the American colonies to be plantations for the production of raw material, to be sent toward the manufacturers and factories in Manchester and across Great Britain. Prohibitions on the production of textiles were so dire, that during the American Revolution, one of the largest concerns of George Washington and the Continental army was for procuring clothing for his troops. American soldiers were said to be “naked troops”, and this dire situation was not limited to the famous story of Valley Forge. For more on this, check out Lindsay Schakenbach Regele’s book “Manufacturing Advantage.”

But the incursion on the colonies ability to manufacture their own wares was hardly limited to the textile industry, indeed, virtually every item that early Americans depended on would be manufactured in Great Britain and imported into the colonies, in exchange for the export of the raw goods necessary to produce them. Our early Americans forefathers would break their backs harvesting agricultural goods and smelting pig iron, only to export their work to Britain, where it would be processed into finished goods that Americans would need to pay back dearly for the favor. Violators of the prohibitions on turning these raw goods into finished products within the domestic market of the colonies were punishable even to death.

On top of the obvious inability to repay for value added goods with the proceeds of the raw goods sold that were required to produce them, shipping costs associated with transporting these goods across the Atlantic, in combination with the British imposition of taxes and duties, worked together to make the economic situation quite dire prior to the revolution. In that sense, while this imposition of taxes and duties are what our modern education most reflects on, in reality this trespass was only salt on a wound. The real basis of the economic and cultural repression that culminated in the courageous rise of our forefathers to the point of revolution, lied within the deliberate and merciless repression of the American people to develop and create their own industries and manufacture their own products, and do so free from prohibition and the imposition of taxes and other duties without their sovereign consent.

Thus, from the very beginning of American history, the task of the politically courageous has been to break free from foreign aggression and the destruction of our industry and way of life, and to establish within our own land a sovereign government, and wield it and its power to lay the foundations for a sovereign people, free and empowered to pursue their natural inclination toward industry and innovation. No one understood this better than Alexander Hamilton, the man who set the foundation of America’s commercial and military strength and who set the path forward for the fledgling nation to ultimately become the greatest super power in world history. And it is precisely Alexander Hamilton, who is considered the foundational father of the American Protectionist School of Political Economy.

The revolution is still ongoing, and no group of thinkers ever captured the spirit of this revolution, more so than the American Protectionist School of Political Economy. Exploring and developing the work of these thinkers and their contributions to the history of our nation, to economic thought and theory, and most importantly, to the ongoing American Revolution, is the foundation of this channel / magazine / and my personal life.

American ingenuity and power is unlimited when the American people are free and sovereign. As George Washington stated in his farewell address, “history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government”. Until that day, in which this baneful foe is wholly eliminated, the Revolution will persist.

Donald Trump’s love of tariffs is often framed as a quirk—an anomaly among businessmen and political elites. But there’s a hidden history that helps explain why he broke with decades of free-trade orthodoxy: a history buried in the origins of his own alma mater, the Wharton School of Business.

Most people know Trump attended Wharton, but few realize that the school was founded explicitly to promote protectionism. That fact is especially ironic today, given how Wharton—like Harvard, Chicago, and other elite institutions—has become a bastion of free-trade dogma. Yet its origins tell a very different story.

Wharton was established in 1881 thanks to a $100,000 donation (about $3 million in today’s dollars) from Joseph Wharton, the co-founder of Bethlehem Steel. His purpose was clear: to create an academic institution that would instill a protectionist economic doctrine to support American industry—his own included. He is on record officially stating he intended to have taught “how a great nation should be, as far as possible, self-sufficient, maintaining a proper balance between agriculture, mining and manufacturers, and supplying its own wants…. how by a suitable tariff legislation a nation may keep its productive industry active, cheapen the cost of commodities, and oblige foreigners to sell to it at low prices, while contribution largely to defraying the expenses of its government; and lastly the necessity for each nation to care for its own, and to maintain by all suitable means its industrial and financial dependence, the right and duty of national self-protection must be firmly asserted and demonstrated”

In line with the steel magnates' wishes, the first dean of Wharton was the Reverend Robert Ellis Thompson, a fierce advocate of Henry Carey’s economic nationalism. Thompson was the perfect fit, as he saw tariffs as central to a prosperous and independent America and was well-respected in Pennsylvania.

At the time, Pennsylvania was the industrial heart of the nation, home to vast coal and steel interests, as well as the intellectual legacy of Carey and his father, Matthew Carey—two of the most influential protectionists in American history. Unlike today, when economic nationalism is often dismissed as reactionary or unsophisticated, protectionism was then a sophisticated and highly developed school of thought, deeply tied to the broader study of sociology, history, and national development.

Benjamin Franklin, whose vision shaped the University of Pennsylvania, laid the intellectual groundwork for this perspective. His Proposals for the Education of Youth advocated for a curriculum centered on commerce, manufacturing, and the rise of industry. By the mid-19th century, Henry Carey’s Principles of Social Science had become required reading at Penn, and when Wharton was founded, Carey’s influence was deeply embedded in its DNA.

Robert Ellis Thompson, Wharton’s first dean, saw political economy as inseparable from the broader study of human civilization. Unlike the free traders, who to this day view economics in reductive terms—mere supply-and-demand curves, disconnected from history and national interest—Thompson and the protectionist American School saw commerce as an extension of society itself.

Wharton remained a protectionist stronghold into the early 20th century, with figures like Simon Patten, another radical economic nationalist, carrying the torch. Patten, like Carey before him, believed that protectionism was the key to national economic development. He argued that technological progress was shifting economics from the "dismal science" of scarcity into a science of abundance, requiring new ways of thinking about economic organization.

By the time Trump arrived at Wharton in the 1960s, the school’s ideological foundations had shifted toward free trade. Yet echoes of its protectionist past remained. One key figure who carried that intellectual lineage forward was Dorothy Swain Thomas, a sociologist whose work emphasized the role of cultural and institutional structures in shaping economic and technological development. Like Carey, Thompson, and Patten before her, she rejected the laissez-faire determinism of mainstream economics, arguing that economic progress was a national and social phenomenon rather than an automatic product of market forces.

Thomas’s 1922 paper Are Inventions Inevitable? challenged the idea that great innovations emerged purely from individual genius or necessity, emphasizing instead the role of cultural and economic structures in driving technological progress. In other words, economic and technological development didn’t just happen—it had to be nurtured by a strong national framework that created a culture ripe with creativity and the spirit of invention, a view entirely consistent with the American School of Economics and the broader protectionist tradition.

It’s unclear how much of this history Trump was aware of. Few details exist about his time at Wharton. But it’s worth noting that his father, Fred Trump, was instrumental in convincing him to attend Wharton over Columbia. Given that Trump commuted back to New York every weekend to work in the family real estate business, attending Columbia would have been logistically easier—unless there was something about Wharton that Fred Trump saw as particularly valuable.

As part of my investigation into this matter, I contacted a former classmate of President Trump at Wharton, Stephen Foxman. Foxman would go on from Wharton to study at Harvard Law School, and has had a long and successful career as an attorney. Foxman has no recollection of any classes that taught about tariffs. However, he informed me that he specifically remembered being taught that the Great Depression was exacerbated by protectionist measures such as the Smoot-Hawley tariff.

Could Trump have absorbed the school’s forgotten legacy of economic nationalism? It’s not unthinkable. His political career has been defined by an instinctive rejection of free trade—a position that makes little sense for a real estate mogul. Unlike industrialists, who have an obvious stake in tariffs, real estate developers traditionally favor free-flowing global capital.

Yet Trump has never wavered on tariffs. He campaigned on them in 2016, governed with them, and remains committed to them today. His policies align far more closely with the forgotten thinkers of Wharton’s early years than with the Friedmanites and neoliberals who dominate business schools today.

Maybe it’s a coincidence. Maybe Trump’s protectionism is simply the product of his instincts, his populist base, or his deep skepticism of China. But perhaps, beneath it all, his commitment to tariffs is an echo of Wharton’s original purpose—a purpose its founders would likely recognize, even if today’s professors do not.

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Read next: The Speech where Henry Clay coined the term “The American System”

The Importance of Henry Clay Today

Henry Clay, whom Abraham Lincoln called his “beau ideal of a statesman,” is perhaps the most important figure in American political history that few remember. Those who do often focus on his failed presidential campaigns, his service as Secretary of State, or his reputation as “the Great Compromiser” during his many terms as Speaker of the House. Yet Clay’s greatest legacy was neither electoral nor diplomatic. It was his bold articulation of an economic program that would unify the nation and build lasting prosperity.

That idea, which Clay named The American System—in contrast to the British System of free trade—would define the politics of his era and dominate American economic thinking for a century. Today, in an era of renewed nationalist and protectionist movements, outlets such as The Tariff Times are once again championing its principles.

The American System rested on three pillars, each designed to strengthen national power and dramatically raise the quality of life for the American people:

1. A protective tariff regime to shield domestic markets from foreign pauper and slave labor.

2. Federal investment in productive infrastructure—known as “internal improvements”—such as canals, roads, and railways.

3. A National Bank to manage public revenues from tariffs, serve as a depository for the people’s funds, and channel investment toward productive industry and infrastructure.

In the 21st century, our leaders have chosen the opposite course. Instead of protecting American workers, they have opened our markets to duty-free exploitation by slave and pauper labor from abroad. They have subordinated American industry to the whims of the Chinese Communist Party, which uses manufacturing dominance to foster foreign dependence. They dismiss investment in public infrastructure as “big government,” betraying the very traditions they claim to uphold. And rather than a National Bank devoted to productive investment, we now endure a quasi-international central bank that funnels public money to private financial interests, often at the expense of American industry.

It is time for Congress to revisit the wisdom of Henry Clay. His speech below remains a blueprint for national revival. Clay first formally unveiled the phrase The American System during this landmark Speech on American Industry, delivered on April 6, 1824, from the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served as Speaker. The speech was given in support of the Tariff of 1824, a bill crafted by the House Committee on Manufactures to raise duties on imported goods such as wool, iron, and hemp in order to protect emerging American industries. It was in this setting that Clay laid out his bold, cohesive vision for national economic independence and prosperity.

Henry Clay: Speech on American Industry

The gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Barbour] has embraced the occasion produced by the proposition of the gentleman from Tennessee to strike out the minimum price in the bill on cotton fabrics, to express his sentiments at large on the policy of the pending measure; and it is scarcely necessary for me to say that he has evinced his usual good temper, ability, and decorum. The parts of the bill are so intermingled and interwoven together that there can be no doubt of the fitness of this occasion to exhibit its merits or its defects. It is my intention, with the permission of the committee, to avail myself also of this opportunity, to present to its consideration those general views, as they appear to me, of the true policy of this country, which imperiously demand the passage of this bill. I am deeply sensible, Mr. Chairman, of the high responsibility of my present situation. But that responsibility inspires me with no other apprehension than that I shall be unable to fulfill my duty; with no other solicitude than that I may, at least, in some small degree, contribute to recall my country from the pursuit of a fatal policy, which appears to me inevitably to lead to its impoverishment and ruin. I do feel most awfully this responsibility. And if it were allowable for us at the present day to imitate ancient examples, I would invoke the aid of the Most High. I would anxiously and fervently implore his divine assistance: that He would be graciously pleased to shower on my country his richest blessings; and that He would sustain, on this interesting occasion, the humble individual who stands before Him, and lend him the power, moral and physical, to perform the solemn duties which now belong to his public station.

Two classes of politicians divide the people of the United States. According to the system of one, the produce of foreign industry should be subjected to no other impost than such as may be necessary to provide a public revenue; and the produce of American industry should be left to sustain itself, if it can, with no other than that incidental protection, in its competition, at home as well as abroad, with rival foreign articles. According to the system of the other class, whilst they agree that the imposts should be mainly, and may under any modification be safely, relied on as a fit and convenient source of public revenue, they would so adjust and arrange the duties on foreign fabrics as to afford a gradual but adequate protection to American industry, and lessen our dependence on foreign nations, by securing a certain and ultimately a cheaper and better sup­ply of our own wants from our own abundant resources. Both classes are equally sincere in their respective opinions, equally honest, equally patriotic, and desirous of advancing the prosperity of the country. In the discussion and consideration of these opposite opinions for the purpose of ascertaining which has the support of truth and reason, we should, therefore, exercise every indulgence and the greatest spirit of mutual modera­tion and forbearance. And in our deliberations on this great question, we should look fearlessly and truly at the actual condition of the country, retrace the causes which have brought us into it, and snatch, if possible, a view of the future. We should, above all, consult experience – the experience of other nations, as well as our own – as our truest and most unerring guide.

In casting our eyes around us, the most prominent circumstance which fixes our attention and challenges our deepest regret is the general distress which pervades the whole country. It is forced upon us by numerous facts of the most incontestable character. It is indicated by the diminished exports of native pro­ duce ; by the depressed and reduced state of our foreign navigation; by our diminished commerce; by successive unthrashed crops of grain, perishing in our barns and barn-yards for the want of a market; by the alarming diminution of the circulating medium ; by the numerous bankruptcies, not limited to the trading classes, but extending to all orders of society ; by a universal com­plaint of the want of employment, and a consequent reduction of the wages of labor; by the ravenous pursuit after public situations, not for the sake of their honors and the performance of their public duties, but as a means of private subsistence ; by the reluctant resort to the perilous use of paper money ; by the intervention of legislation in the delicate relation between debtor and creditor; and, above all, by the low and depressed state of the value of almost every description of the whole mass of the property of the nation, which has, on au average, sunk not less than about fifty per centum within a few years. This distress pervades every part of the Union, every class of society ; all feel it, though it may be felt at different places, in different degrees. It is like the atmosphere which surrounds us–all must inhale it, and none can escape it. In some places it has burst upon our people, without a single mitigating circumstance to temper its severity. In others, more fortunate, slight alleviations have been experienced in the expenditure of the public revenue, and in other favoring causes.

A few years ago the planting interest consoled itself with its happy exemptions, but it has now reached this interest also, which experiences, though with less severity, the general suffering. It is most painful to me to attempt to sketch or to dwell on the gloom of this picture. But I have exaggerated nothing. Perfect fidelity to the original would have authorized me to have thrown on deeper and darker hues. And it is the duty of the statesman, no less than that of the physician, to survey, with a penetrating, steady, and undismayed eye, the actual condition of the subject on which he would operate; to probe to the bottom the diseases of the body politic, if he would apply efficacious remedies.

We have not, thank God, suffered in any great degree for food. But distress resulting from the absence of a supply of the mere physical wants of our nature, is not the only nor perhaps the keenest distress to which we may be exposed. Moral and pecuniary suffering is, if possible, more poignant. It plunges its victim into hopeless despair. It poisons, it paralyzes the spring and source of all useful exertion. Its unsparing action is collateral as well as direct. It falls with inexorable force at the same time upon the wretched family of embarrassment and insolvency and upon its head. They are a faithful mirror, reflecting back upon him at once his own frightful image, and that no less appalling of the dearest objects of his affection. What is the cause of this wide-spreading distress, of this deep depression, which we behold stamped on the public countenance? We are the same people. We have the same country. We cannot ar­raign the bounty of Providence. The showers still fall in the same grateful abundance. The sun still casts his genial and vivifying influence upon the land; and the land, fertile and diversified in its soils as ever, yields to the industrious cultivator in boundless profusion its accustomed fruits, its richest treasures. Our vigor is unimpaired. Our industry has not relaxed. If ever the accusation of wasteful extravagance could be made against our people, it cannot now be justly preferred. They, on the contrary, for the few last years at least, have been practicing the most rigid economy. The causes, then, of our present affliction, whatever they may be, are human causes, and human causes not chargeable upon the people, in their private and individual relations.

What, again I would ask, is the cause of the unhappy condition of our country, which I have faintly depicted? It is to be found in the fact that, during almost the whole existence of this government, we have shaped our industry, our navigation, and our commerce, in reference to an extraordinary war in Europe, and to foreign markets which no longer exist; in the fact that we have depended too much upon foreign sources of supply, and excited too little the native; in the fact that, whilst we have cultivated, with assiduous care, our foreign re­sources, we have suffered those at home to wither in a state of neglect and abandonment. The consequence of the termination of the war of Europe has been the resumption of European commerce, European navigation, and the extension of European agriculture and European industry in all its branches. Europe, therefore, has no longer occasion, to anything like the same extent as that she had during her wars, for American commerce, American navigation, the produce of American industry. Europe, in commotion, and convulsed throughout all her members, is to America no longer the same Europe as she is now, tranquil, and watching with the most vigilant attention all her own peculiar interests without regard to the operation of her policy upon us. The effect of this altered state of Europe upon us has been, to circumscribe the employment of our marine, and greatly to reduce the value of the produce of our territorial labor.

The further effect of this twofold reduction has been to decrease the value of all property, whether on the land or on the ocean, and which I suppose to be about fifty per cent. And the still further effect has been to diminish the amount of our circulating medium, in a proportion not less, by its transmission abroad, or its withdrawal by the banking institutions, from a necessity which they could not control. The quantity of money, in whatever form it may be, which a nation wants, is in proportion to the total mass of its wealth, and to the activity of that wealth. A nation that has but little wealth has but a limited want of money. In stating the fact, therefore, that the total wealth of the country has diminished, within a few years, in a ratio of about fifty per cent, we shall at once fully comprehend the inevitable reduction which must have ensued in the total quantity of the circulating medium of the country. A nation is most prosperous when there is a gradual and untempting addition to the aggregate of its circulating medium. It is in a condition the most adverse, when there is a rapid diminution in the quantity of the circulating medium, and a consequent depression in the value of property. In the former case the wealth of individuals insensibly increases, and income keeps ahead of expenditure. But in the latter instance, debts have been contracted, engagements made, and habits of expense established in reference to the existing state of wealth and of its representative. When these come to be greatly reduced, individuals find their debts still existing, their engagements unexecuted, and their habits inveterate. They see themselves in the possession of the same property, on which, in good faith, they had bound themselves. But that property, without their fault, possesses no longer the same value ; and hence discontent, impoverishment and ruin arise.

Let us suppose, Mr. Chairman, that Europe was again the theatre of such a general war as recently raged through­ out all her dominions–such a state of the war as existed in her greatest exertions and in our greatest prosperity; instantly there would arise a greedy demand for the surplus produce of our industry, for our commerce, for our navigation. The languor which now prevails in our cities and in our seaports would give way to an animated activity. Our roads and rivers would be crowded with the produce of the interior. Everywhere we should witness excited industry. The precious metals would reflow from abroad upon us. Banks which have maintained their credit would revive their business; and new banks would be established to take the place of those which have sunk beneath the general pressure. For it is a mistake to suppose that they have produced our present adversity; they may have somewhat aggravated it, but they were the effect and the evidence of our prosperity. Prices would again get up; the former value of property would be restored. And those embarrassed persons who have not been already overwhelmed by the times would suddenly find, in the augmented value of their property, and the renewal of their business, ample means to extricate themselves from all their difficulties.

The greatest want of civilized society is a market for the sale and exchange of the surplus of the produce of the labor of its members. This market may exist at home or abroad, or both; but it must exist somewhere, if society prospers; and wherever it does exist, it should be competent to the absorption of the entire surplus of production. It is most desirable that there should be both a home and a foreign market. But with respect to their relative superiority, I cannot entertain a doubt. The home market is first in order, and paramount in importance. The object of the bill under consideration is, to create this home market, and to lay the foundations of a genuine American policy.

It is opposed; and it is incumbent upon the partisans of the foreign policy (terms which I shall use without any invidious intent) to demonstrate that the foreign market is an adequate vent for the surplus produce of our labor. But is it so?

First, foreign nations cannot, if they would, take our surplus produce. If the source of supply, no matter of what, increases in a greater ratio than the demand for that supply, a glut of the market is inevitable, even if we suppose both to remain perfectly unobstructed. The duplication of our population takes place in terms of about twenty-five years. The term will be more and more extended as our numbers multiply. But it will be a sufficient approximation to assume this ratio for the present. We increase, therefore, in population, at the rate of about 4% per annum. Supposing the increase of our production to be in the same ratio, we should, every succeeding year, have of surplus produce 4% more than that of the preceding year, without taking into the account the differences of seasons which neutralize each other. If, therefore, we are to rely upon the foreign market exclusively, foreign consumption ought to be shown to be increasing in the same ratio of 4% per annum, if it be an adequate vent for our surplus produce. But, as I have supposed the measure of our increasing production to be furnished by that of our increasing population, so the measure of their power of consumption must be determined by that of the increase of their population. Now, the total foreign population, who consume our surplus produce, upon an average, do not double their aggregate number in a shorter term than that of about one hundred years. Our powers of production increase, then, in a ratio four times greater than their powers of consumption. And hence their utter inability to receive from us our surplus produce.

But, secondly, if they could, they will not. The policy of all Europe is adverse to the reception of our agricultural produce, so far as it comes into collision with its own; and under that limitation we are absolutely forbid to enter their ports, except under circumstances which deprive them of all value as a steady market. The policy of all Europe rejects those great staples of our country which consist of objects of human subsistence. The policy of all Europe refuses to receive from us anything but those raw materials of smaller value, essential to their manufactures, to which they can give a higher value, with the exception of tobacco and rice, which they cannot produce. Even Great Britain, to which we are its best customer, and from which we receive nearly one half in value of our whole imports, will not take from us articles of subsistence produced in our country cheaper than can be produced in Great Britain. In adopting this exclusive policy, the states of Europe do not inquire what is best for us, but what suits themselves respectively; they do not take jurisdiction of the question of our interests, but limit the object of their legislation to that of the conservation of their own peculiar interests, leaving us free to prosecute ours as we please. They do not guide themselves by that romantic philanthropy which we see displayed here, and which invokes us to continue to purchase the produce of foreign industry, without regard to the state or prosperity of our own, that foreigners may be pleased to purchase the few remaining articles of ours which their restricted policy has not yet absolutely excluded from their consumption.

What sort of a figure would a member of the British Parliament have made, what sort of a reception would his opposition have obtained, if he had remonstrated against the passage of the corn-law, by which British consumption is limited to the bread­ stuffs of British production, to the entire exclusion of American, and stated that America could not and would not buy British manufactures, if Britain did not buy American flour?

Both the inability and the policy of foreign powers, then, forbid us to rely upon the foreign market, as being an adequate vent for the surplus produce of American labor. Now let us see if this general reasoning is not fortified and confirmed by the actual experience of this country. If the foreign market may be safely relied upon, as furnishing an adequate demand for our surplus produce, then the official documents will show a progressive increase from year to year in the exports of our native produce, in proportion equal to that which I have suggested. If, on the contrary, we shall find from them that, for a long term of past years, some of our most valuable staples have retrograded, some remained stationary, and others advanced but little, if any, in amount, with the exception of cotton, the deductions of reason and the lessons of experience will alike command us to withdraw our confidence in the competency of the foreign market.

The total amount of all our exports of domestic produce for the year beginning in 1795, and ending on the 30th September, 1796, was $40,764,097. Estimating the increase according to the ratio of the increase of our population, that is, at 4% per annum, the amount of the exports of the same pro­ duce, in the year ending on the 30th of September last, ought to have been $85,420,861. It was in fact only $47,155,408. Taking the average of five years, from 1803 to 1807, inclusive, the amount of native produce exported was $43,202,751 for each of those years. Estimating what it ought to have been, during the last year, applying the principle suggested to that amount, there should have been exported $77,760,751, instead of $47,155,408. If these comparative amounts of the aggregate actual exports, and what they ought to have been, be discouraging, we shall find, on descending into particulars, still less cause of satisfaction. The export of tobacco in 1791 was 112,428 hogsheads. That was the year of the largest exportation of that article; but it is the only instance in which I have selected the maxi­ mum of exportation. The amount of what we ought to have exported last year, estimated according to the scale of increase ·which I have used, is •266,332 hogs­ heads. The actual export was 99,009 hogsheads. We exported, in 1803, the quantity of 1,311,853 barrels of flour, and ought to have exported last year 2,361,333 barrels. We in fact exported only 756,702 barrels. Of that quantity we sent to South America 150,000 barrels, according to a statement furnished me by the diligence of a friend near me [Mr. Poinsett] to whose valuable mass of accurate information in regard to that interesting quarter of the world I have had occasion frequently to apply.

But that demand is temporary, growing out of the existing state of war. Whenever peace is restored to it, – and I now hope that the day is not distant when its independence will be generally acknowledged, – there cannot be a doubt that it will sup­ ply its own consumption. In all parts of it, the soil, either from climate or from elevation, is well adapted to the culture of wheat; and nowhere can better wheat be produced than in some portions of Mexico and Chile. Still the market of South America is one which, on other accounts, deserves the greatest consideration. And I congratulate you, the committee, and the country on the recent adoption of a more auspicious policy towards it.

We exported, in 1803, Indian com to the amount of 2,074,608 bushels. The quantity should have been, in 1823, 3,734,288 bushels. The actual quantity exported was 749,034 bushels, or about one fifth of what it should have been, and a little more than one third of what it was more than twenty years ago. We ought not, then, to be surprised at the extreme depression of the price of that article, of which I have heard my honorable Friend (Mr. Bassett) complain, nor of the distress of the corn-growing districts adjacent to the Chesapeake Bay. We exported 77,934 barrels of beef in 1803, and last year but 61,418, instead of 140,274 barrels. In the same year (1803) we exported 96,602 barrels of pork, and last year 55,529, instead of 173,882 barrels. Rice has not advanced, by any means, in the proportion which it ought to have done. All the small articles, such as cheese, butter, candles, and so forth, too minute to detail, but important in their aggregate, have also materially diminished. Cotton alone has advanced. But whilst the quantity of it is augmented, its actual value is considerably diminished. The total quantity last year exceeded that of the preceding year by nearly 30,000,000 pounds. And yet the total value of the year of smaller exportation exceeded that of the last year by upwards of $3,500,000. If this article, the capacity of our country to produce which was scarcely known in 1790, were subtracted from the mass of our exports, the value of the residue would only be a little upwards of $27,000,000 during the last year. The distribution of the articles of our exports throughout the United States cannot fail to fix the attention of the Committee. Of the 847,155,408 to which they amounted last year, three articles alone (cotton, rice, and tobacco) composed together 828,549,177. Now these articles are chiefly produced in the South. And if we estimate that portion of our population who are actually engaged in their culture, it would probably not exceed 2,000,000. Thus, then, less than one fifth of the whole population of the United States produced upwards of one half-nearly two thirds – of the entire value of the exports of the last year.

Is this foreign market, so incompetent at present, and which, limited as its demands are, operates so unequally upon the productive labor of our country, likely to improve in future ? If I am correct in the views which I have presented to the Committee, it must become worse and worse. What can improve it? Europe will not abandon her own agriculture to foster ours. We may even anticipate that she will more and more enter into competition with us in the supply of the West India market. That of South America, for articles of subsistence, will probably soon vanish. The value of our exports for the future may remain at about what it was last year. But if we do not create some new market, if we persevere in the existing pursuits of agriculture, the inevitable consequence must be, to augment greatly the quantity of our produce, and to lessen its value in the foreign market. Can there be a doubt on this point? Take the article of cotton, for example, which is almost the only article that now remunerates labor and capital. A certain description of labor is powerfully attracted towards the cotton-growing country. The cultivation will be greatly extended, the aggregate amount annually produced will be vastly augmented. The price will fall. The more unfavorable soils will then be gradually abandoned. And I have no doubt that, in a few years, it will cease to be profitably produced, anywhere north of the thirty-fourth degree of latitude. But in the meantime, large numbers of the cotton-growers will suffer the greatest distress. And whilst this distress is brought upon our own country, foreign industry will be stimulated by the very cause which occasions our distress. For, by surcharging the markets abroad, the price of the raw material being reduced, the manufacturer will be able to supply cotton fabrics cheaper; and the consumption in his own country, and in foreign nations other than ours (where the value of the import must be limited to the value of the export, which I have supposed to remain the same) being proportionally extended, there will be consequently an increased demand for the produce of his industry.

Our agricultural is our greatest interest. It ought ever to be predominant. All others should bend to it. And, in considering what is for its advantage, we should contemplate it in all its varieties, of planting, farming, and grazing. Can we do nothing to invigorate it; nothing to correct the errors of the past, and to brighten the still more unpromising prospects which lie before us? We have seen, I think, the causes of the distresses of the country. We have seen that an exclusive dependence upon the foreign market must lead to still severer distress, to impoverishment, to ruin. We must then change somewhat our course. We must give a new direction to some portion of our industry. We must speedily adopt a genuine American policy. Still cherishing the foreign market, let us create also a home market, to give further scope to the consumption of the produce of American industry. Let us counteract the policy of foreigners, and withdraw the support which we now give to their industry, and stimulate that of our own country. It should be a prominent object with wise legislators to multiply the vocations and extend the business of society, as far as it can be done, by the protection of our interests at home against the injurious effects of foreign legislation. Suppose we were a nation of fishermen, or of skippers, to the exclusion of every other occupation, and the legislature had the power to introduce the pursuits of agriculture and manufactures, would not our happiness be promoted by an exertion of its authority? All the existing employments of society – the learned professions, commerce, agriculture – are now overflowing. We stand in each other’s way. Hence the want of employment. Hence the eager pursuit after public stations, which I have before glanced at. I have been again and again shocked during this session by instances of solicitation for places before the vacancies existed. The pulse of incumbents who happen to be taken ill is not marked with more anxiety by the attending physicians than by those who desire to succeed them, though with very opposite feelings. Our old friend, the faithful sentinel–who has stood so long at our door, and the gallantry of whose patriotism deserves to be noticed because it was dis­ played when that virtue was most rare and most wanted, on a memorable occasion in this unfortunate city–became indisposed some weeks ago. The first intelligence which I had of his dangerous illness was by an application for his unvacated place. I hastened to assure myself of the extent of his danger, and was happy to find that the eagerness of succession out ­stripped the progress of disease. By creating a new and extensive business, then, we should not only give employment to those who want it, and augment the sum of national wealth by all that this new business would create, but we should ameliorate the condition of those who are now engaged in existing employments. In Europe, particularly in Great Britain, their large standing armies, large navies, large even on their peace arrangement, their established church, afford to their population employments, which, in that respect, the happier constitution of our government does not tolerate but in a very limited degree. The peace establishments of our army and our navy are extremely small, and I hope ever will be. We have no established church, and I trust never shall have. In proportion as the enterprise of our citizens in public employments is circumscribed, should we excite and invigorate it in private pursuits.

The creation of a home market is not only necessary to procure for our agriculture a just reward of its labors, but it is indispensable to obtain a supply of our necessary wants. If we cannot sell, we cannot buy. That portion of our population (and we have seen that it is not less than four fifths) which makes comparatively nothing that foreigners will buy, has nothing to make purchases with from foreigners. It is in vain that we are told of the amount of our exports supplied by the planting interest. They may enable the planting interest to supply all its wants; but they bring no ability to the interests not planting; unless, which cannot be pretended, the planting interest was an adequate vent for the surplus produce of the labor of all other interests. It is in vain to tantalize us with the greater cheapness of foreign fabrics. There must be an ability to purchase, if an article be obtained, whatever may be the price, high or low, at which it is sold. And a cheap article is as much beyond the grasp of him who has no means to buy, as a high one.

Even if it were true that the American manufacturer would supply consumption at dearer rates, it is better to have his fabrics than the unattainable foreign fabrics; because it is better to be ill supplied than not supplied at all. A coarse coat, which will communicate warmth and cover nakedness, is better than no coat. The superiority of the home market results, first, from its steadiness and comparative certainty at all times; secondly, from the creation of reciprocal interest; thirdly, from its greater security; and, lastly, from an ultimate and not distant augmentation of consumption (and consequently of comfort) from increased quantity and reduced prices. But this home market, highly desirable as it is, can only be created and cherished by the protection of our own legislation against the inevitable prostration of our industry which must ensue from the action of foreign policy and legislation. The effect and the value of this domestic care of our own interests will be obvious from a few facts and considerations. Let us suppose that half a million of persons are now employed abroad in fabricating for our consumption those articles of which, by the operation of this bill, a supply is intended to be provided within ourselves. That half a million of persons are, in effect, subsisted by us; but their actual means of subsistence are drawn from foreign agriculture. If we could transport them to this country, and incorporate them in the mass of our own population, there would instantly arise a demand for an amount of provisions equal to that which would be requisite for their subsistence throughout the whole year. That demand, in the article of flour alone, would not be less than the quantity of about 900,000 barrels, besides a proportionate quantity of beef and pork and other articles of subsistence. But 900,000 barrels of flour exceeded the entire quantity exported last year by nearly 150,000 barrels. What activity would not this give, what cheerfulness would it not communicate to our now dispirited farming interest! But if, instead of these five hundred thousand artisans emigrating from abroad, we give by this bill employment to an equal number of our own citizens now engaged in unprofitable agriculture, or idle from the want of business, the beneficial effect upon the productions of our farming labor would be nearly doubled. The quantity would be diminished by a subtraction of the produce from the labor of all those who should be diverted from its pursuits to manufacturing industry, and the value of the residue would be enhanced, both by that diminution and the creation of the home market, to the extent supposed. And the honorable gentleman from Virginia may repress any apprehensions which he entertains that the plow will be abandoned and our fields remain unsown. For, under all the modifications of social industry, if you will secure to it a just reward, the greater attractions of agriculture will give to it that proud superiority which it has always maintained. If we suppose no actual abandonment of farming, but, what is most likely, a gradual and imperceptible employment of population in the business of manufacturing, instead of being compelled to resort to agriculture, the salutary effect would be nearly the same.

Is any part of our common country likely to be injured by a transfer of the theatre of fabrication for our own consumption from Europe to America? All that those parts, if any there be, which will not, nor cannot engage in manufactures, should require, is, that their consumption should be well supplied; and if the objects of that consumption are produced in other parts of the Union that can manufacture, far from having on that account any just cause of complaint, their patriotism will and ought to inculcate a cheerful acquiescence in what essentially contributes, and is indispensably necessary, to the prosperity of the common family.

The great desideratum (something needed or wanted) in political economy is the same as in private pursuits ; that is, what is the best application of the aggregate industry of a nation that can be made honestly to produce the largest sum of national wealth? Labor is the source of all wealth; but it is not natural labor only. And the fundamental error of the gentleman from Virginia, and of the school to which he belongs, in deducing from our sparse population, our unfitness for the introduction of the arts, consists in their not sufficiently weighing the importance of the power of machinery. In former times, when but little comparative use was made of machinery, manual labor and the price of wages were circumstances of the greatest consideration. But it is far otherwise in these latter times. Such are the improvements and the perfection of machinery, that, in analyzing the compound value of many fabrics, the element of natural labor is so inconsiderable as almost to escape detection. This truth is demonstrated by many facts. Formerly Asia, in consequence of the density of her population, and the consequent lowness of wages, laid Europe under tribute for many of her fabrics. Now Europe reacts upon Asia, and Great Britain, in particular, throws back upon her countless millions of people the rich treasures produced by artificial labor, to a vast amount, infinitely cheaper than they can be manufactured by the natural exertions of that portion of the globe. But Britain is herself the most striking illustration of the immense power of machinery. Upon what other principle can you account for the enormous wealth which she has accumulated, and which she annually produces? A statistical writer of that country, several years ago, estimated the total amount of the artificial or machine labor of the nation to be equal to that of 100,000,000 of able-bodied laborers.

Subsequent estimates of her artificial labor at the present day carry it to the enormous height of 200,000,000. But the population of the three kingdoms is 21,500,000. Supposing that to furnish able-bodied labor to the amount of 4,000,000, the natural labor will be but two per cent of the artificial labor. In the production of wealth she operates, therefore, by a power (including the whole population) of 221,500,090; or, in other words, by a power eleven times greater than the total of her natural power. If we suppose the machine labor of the United States to be equal to that of 10,000,000 able-bodied men, the United States will operate, in the creation of wealth, by a power (including all their population) of 20,000,000. In the creation of wealth, therefore, the power of Great Britain compared to that of the United States is as eleven to one.

That these views are not imaginary, will be, I think, evinced by contrasting the wealth, the revenue, the power of the two countries. Upon what other hypothesis can we explain those almost incredible exertions which Britain made during the late wars of Europe? Look at her immense subsidies! Behold her standing unaided and alone, and breasting the storm of Napoleon’s colossal power, when all continental Europe owned and yielded to its irresistible sway; and finally, contemplate her vigorous prosecution of the war, with and without allies, to its splendid termination on the ever-memorable field of Waterloo! The British works which the gentleman from Virginia has quoted portray a state of the most wonderful prosperity in regard to wealth and resources that ever was before contemplated. Let us look a little into the semi­ official pamphlet, written with great force, clearness, and ability, and the valuable work of Lowe, to both of which that gentleman has referred. The revenue of the United Kingdom amounted, during the latter years of the war, to £70,000,000 sterling; and one year it rose to the astonishing height of £90,000,000 sterling, equal to $400,000,000. This was actual revenue, made up of real contributions from the purses of the people. After the close of the war, ministers slowly and reluctantly reduced the military and naval establishments, and accommodated them to a state of peace.

The pride of power, everywhere the same, always unwillingly surrenders any of those circumstances which display its pomp and exhibit its greatness. Contemporaneous with this reduction, Britain was enabled to lighten some of the heaviest burdens of taxation, and particularly that most onerous of all, the income tax. In this lowered. state, the revenue of peace, gradually rising from t momentary depression incident to a transition from war, attained in 1822 the vast amount of £55,000,000 sterling, upwards of $240,000,000, and more than eleven times that of the United States for the same year; thus indicating the difference which I have suggested, in the respective productive powers of the two countries. The excise alone (collected under twenty-five·. different heads) amounted to £28,000,000, more than one half of the total revenue of the kingdom. This great revenue allows Great Britain to constitute an efficient sinking fund of £5,000,000 sterling, being an excess of actual income beyond expenditure, and amounting to more than the entire revenue of the United States.

If we look at the commerce of England, we shall perceive that its prosperous condition no less denotes the immensity of her riches. The average of three years’ exports, ending in 1789, was between thirteen and fourteen millions. The average for the same term, ending in 1822, was £40,000,000. The average of the imports for three years, ending in 1789, was £17,000,000. The average for the same term, ending in 1822, was £36,- 000,000, showing a favorable balance of £4,000,000. Thus, in a period not longer than that which has elapsed since the establishment of our constitution, have the exports of that kingdom been tripled; and this has mainly been the effect of the power of machinery. The total amount of the commerce of Great Britain is greater since the peace, by one fourth, than it was during the war. The average of her tonnage, during the most flourishing period of the war, was 2,400,000 tons. Its average, during the three years, 1819, 1820, and 1821, was 2,600,000; exhibiting an in­ crease of 200,000 tons. If we glance at some of the more prominent articles of her manufactures, we shall be assisted in comprehending the true nature of the sources of her riches. The amount of cotton fabrics exported, in the most prosperous year of the war, was £18,000,000. In the year 1820, it was £16,600,000; in 1821, £20,500,000 ; in 1822, £21,639,000 ; presenting the astonishing increase in two years of upwards of £5,000,000. The total amount of imports in Great Britain, from all foreign parts, of the article of cotton wool, is £5,000,000. After supplying most abundantly the consumption of cotton fabrics within the country (and a people better fed and clad and housed are not to be found under the sun than the British nation) by means of her industry, she gives to this cotton wool a new value, which enables her to sell to foreign nations to the amount of £21,639,000, making a clear profit of upwards of £16,500,000! In 1821, the value of the export of woolen manufactures was £4,300,000. In 1822 it was £5,500,000.

The success of her restrictive policy is strikingly illustrated in the article of silk. In the manufacture of that article she labors under great disadvantages, besides that of not producing the raw material. She has subdued them all, and the in­ crease of the manufacture has been most rapid. Al­though she is still unable to maintain, in foreign countries, a successful competition with the silks of France, of India, and of Italy, and therefore exports but little, she gives to the £2,000,000 of the raw material which she imports, in various forms, a value of £10,000,000, which chiefly enter into British consumption. Let us suppose that she was dependent upon foreign nations for these £10,000,000, what an injurious effect would it not have upon her commercial relations with them? The average of the exports of British manufactures, during the peace, exceeds the average of the most productive years of the war. The amount of her wealth annually produced is £350,000,000, bearing a large proportion to all of her pre-existing wealth. The agricultural portion of it is said, by the gentleman from Virginia, to be greater than that created by any other branch of her industry. But that flows mainly from a policy similar to that proposed by this bill. One third only of her population is engaged in agriculture, the other two thirds furnishing a market for the pro­duce of that third. Withdraw this market, and what becomes of her agriculture? The power and the wealth of Great Britain cannot be more strikingly illustrated than by a comparison of her population and revenue with those of other countries and with our own. (Here Mr. Clay points toward the following chart)

From this exhibit we must remark, that the wealth of Great Britain, and consequently her power, is greater than that of any of the other nations with which it is compared. The amount of the contributions which she draws from the pockets of her subjects is not referred to for imitation, but as indicative of their wealth. The burden of taxation is always relative to the ability of the subjects of it. A poor nation can pay but little. And the heavier taxes of British subjects, for example, in consequence of their greater wealth, may be more easily borne than the much lighter taxes of Spanish subjects, in consequence of their extreme poverty. The object of wise governments should be, by sound legislation, so to protect the industry of their own citizens against the policy of foreign powers, as to give to it the most expansive force in the production of wealth. Great Britain has ever acted, and still acts, on this policy. She has pushed her protection of British interest further than any other nation has fostered its industry. The result is, greater wealth among her subjects, and consequently greater ability to pay their public burdens. If their taxation is estimated by their natural labor alone, nominally it is greater than the taxation of the subjects of any other power; but if on a scale of their national and artificial labor compounded, it is less than the taxation of any other people. Estimating it on that scale, and assuming the aggregate of the natural and artificial labor of the United Kingdom to be what I have already stated, 221,500,000, the actual taxes paid by a British subject are only about three and seven-pence sterling. Estimating our own taxes on a similar scale, – that is, supposing both descriptions of labor to be equal to that of twenty millions of able-bodied persons, – the amount of tax paid by each soul in the United States is four shillings and six-pence sterling.

The committee will observe, from that table, that the measure of the wealth of a nation is indicated by the measure of its protection of its industry; and that the measure of the poverty of a nation is marked by that of the degree in which it neglects and abandons the care of its own industry, leaving it exposed to the action of foreign powers. Great Britain protects most her industry, and the wealth of Great Britain is consequently the greatest. France is next in the degree of protection, and France is next in the order of wealth. Spain most neglects the duty of protecting the industry of her subjects, and Spain is one of the poorest of European nations. Unfortunate Ireland, disinherited or rendered in her industry subservient to England, is exactly in the same state of poverty with Spain, measured by the rule of taxation. And the United States are still poorer than either.

The views of British prosperity, which I have endeavored to present, show that her protecting policy is adapted alike to a state of war and of peace. Self-poised, resting upon her own internal resources, possessing a home market carefully cherished and guarded, she is ever prepared for any emergency. We have seen her coming out of a war of incalculable exertion, and of great duration, with her power unbroken, her means undiminished. We have seen that almost every revolving year of peace has brought along with it an increase of her manufactures, of her commerce, and, consequently, of her navigation. We have seen that, constructing her prosperity upon the solid foundation of her own protecting policy, it is unaffected by the vicissitudes of other states. What is our own condition? Depending upon the state of foreign powers, confiding exclusively in a foreign, to the culpable neglect of a domestic policy, our interests are affected by all their movements. Their wars, their misfortunes, are the only source of our prosperity. In their peace, and our peace, we behold our condition the reverse of that of Great Britain, and all our interests stationary or declining. Peace brings to us none of the blessings of peace. Our system is anomalous; alike unfitted to general tranquility, and to a state of war or peace on the part of our own country. It can succeed only in the rare occurrence of a general state of war throughout Europe.

I am no eulogist of England. I am far from recommending her systems of taxation. I have adverted to them only as manifesting her extraordinary ability. The political and foreign interests of that nation may have been, as I believe them to have been, often badly managed. Had she abstained from the wars into which she has been plunged by her ambition, or the mistaken policy of her ministers, the prosperity of England would, unquestionably, have been much greater. But it may happen that the public liberty, and the foreign relations of a nation, have been badly provided for, and yet that its political economy has been wisely managed. The alacrity or sullenness with which a people pay taxes depends upon their wealth or poverty. If the system of their rulers leads to their impoverishment, they can contribute but little to the necessities of the state; if to their wealth, they cheerfully and promptly pay the burdens imposed on them. Enormous as British taxation appears to be in comparison with that of other nations, but really lighter as it in fact is when we consider its great wealth and its powers of production, that vast amount is collected with the most astonishing regularity. [Here Mr. Clay read certain passages from Holt, showing that, in 1822, there was not a solitary prosecution arising out of the collection of the assessed taxes, which are there considered among the most burdensome, and that the prosecution for violations of the excise laws, in all its numerous branches, were sensibly and progressively decreasing.]

Having called the attention of the committee to the present adverse state of our country, and endeavored to point out the causes which have led to it; having shown that similar causes, wherever they exist in other countries, lead to the same adversity in their condition; and having shown that, wherever we find opposite causes prevailing, a high and animating state of national prosperity exists, the committee will agree with me in thinking that it is the solemn duty of government to apply a remedy to the evils which afflict our country, if it can apply one. Is there no remedy within the reach of the government? Are we doomed to behold our industry languish and decay, yet more and more? But there is a remedy, and that remedy consists in modifying our foreign policy, and in adopting a genuine American system.

(Here is Clays first use of the term that would come to dominate a century of American Politics)

We must naturalize the arts in our country; and we must naturalize them by the only means which the wisdom of nations has yet discovered to be effectual, – by adequate protection against the otherwise overwhelming influence of foreigners. This is only to be accomplished by the establishment of a tariff, to the consideration of which I am now brought.

And what is this tariff? It seems to have been regarded as a sort of monster, huge and deformed–a wild beast, endowed with tremendous powers of destruction, about to be let loose among our people, if not to devour them, at least to consume their substance. But let us calm our passions, and deliberately survey this alarming, this terrific being.

The sole object of the tariff is to tax the produce of foreign industry, with the view of promoting American industry. The tax is exclusively leveled at foreign industry. That is the avowed and the direct purpose of the tariff. If it subjects any part of American industry to burdens, that is an effect not intended, but is altogether incidental, and perfectly voluntary.

It has been treated as an imposition of burdens upon one part of the community by design, for the benefit of another; as if, in fact, money were taken from the pockets of one portion of the people and put into the pockets of another. But is that a fair representation of it? No man pays the duty assessed on the foreign article by compulsion, but voluntarily; and this voluntary duty, if paid, goes into the common exchequer, for the common benefit of all. Consumption has four objects of choice. First, it may abstain from the use of the foreign article, and thus avoid the payment of the tax. Second, it may employ the rival American fabric. Third, it may engage in the business of manufacturing, which this bill is designed to foster. Fourth, or it may supply itself from the household manufactures.

But it is said, by the honorable gentleman from Virginia, that the South, owing to the character of a certain portion of its population, cannot engage in the business of manufacturing. Now, I do not agree in that opinion, to the extent in which it is asserted. The circumstance alluded to may disqualify the South from engaging in every branch of manufacture, as largely as other quarters of the Union, but to some branches of it that part of our population is well adapted. It indisputably affords great facility in the household or domestic line. But, if the gentleman’s premises were true, could his conclusion be admitted? According to him, a certain part of our population, happily much the smallest, is peculiarly situated. The circumstance of its degradation unfits it for the manufacturing arts. The well-being of the other, and the larger part of our population, requires the introduction of those arts. What is to be done in this conflict? The gentleman would have us abstain from adopting a policy called for by the interest of the greater and freer part of our population. But is that reasonable? Can it be expected that the interests of the greater part should be made to bend to the condition of the servile part of our population? That, in effect, would be to make us the slaves of slaves.

I went with great pleasure along with my Southern friends, and I am ready again to unite with them in protesting against the exercise of any legislative power, on the part of Congress, over that delicate subject, because it was my solemn conviction that Congress was interdicted, or at least not authorized, by the Constitution, to exercise any such legislative power. And I am sure that the patriotism of the South may be exclusively relied upon to reject a policy which should be dictated by considerations altogether connected with that degraded class, to the prejudice of the residue of our population. But does not a perseverance in the foreign policy, as it now exists in fact, make all parts of the Union, not planting, tributary to the planting parts? What is the argument? It is, that we must continue freely to receive the produce of foreign industry, without regard to the protection of American industry, that a market may be retained for the sale abroad of the produce of the planting portion of the country; and that, if we lessen in all parts of America – those which are not planting as well as the planting sections – the consumption of foreign manufactures, we diminish to that extent the foreign market for the planting produce.

The existing state of things, indeed, presents a sort of tacit compact between the cotton grower and the British manufacturer, the stipulations of which are, on the part of the cotton grower, that the whole of the United States, the other portions as well as the cotton-growing, shall remain open and unrestricted in the consumption of British manufactures; and, on the part of the British manufacturer, that, in consideration thereof, he will continue to purchase the cotton of the South. Thus, then, we perceive that the proposed measure, instead of sacrificing the South to the other parts of the Union, seeks only to preserve them from being absolutely sacrificed under the operation of the tacit compact which I have described. Supposing the South to be actually incompetent, or disinclined, to embark at all in the business of manufacturing, is not its interest, nevertheless, likely to be promoted by creating a new and an American source of supply for its consumption? Now foreign powers, and Great Britain principally, have the monopoly of the supply of Southern consumption. If this bill should pass, an American competitor, in the supply of the South, would be raised up, and ultimately I cannot doubt that it will be supplied more cheaply and better. I have before had occasion to state, and will now again mention, the beneficial effects of American competition with Europe, in furnishing a supply of the article of cotton bagging. After the late war, the influx of the Scottish manufacture prostrated the American establishments. The consequence was, that the Scotch possessed the monopoly of the supply; and the price of it rose, and attained, the year before the last, a height which amounted to more than an equivalent for ten years’ protection to the American manufacture. This circumstance tempted American industry again to engage in the business, and several valuable manufactories have been established in Kentucky. They have reduced the price of the fabric very considerably; but, without the protection of government, they may again be prostrated, and then, the Scottish manufacturer engrossing the supply of our consumption, the price will probably again rise. It has been tauntingly asked if Kentucky cannot maintain herself in a competition with the two Scottish towns of Inverness and Dundee? But is that a fair statement of the case? Those two towns are cherished and sustained by the whole protecting policy of the British empire, whilst Kentucky cannot, and the general government will not, extend a like protection to the few Kentucky villages in which the article is made.

If the cotton-growing consumption could be constitutionally exempted from the operation of this bill, it might be fair to exempt it, upon the condition that foreign manufactures, the proceeds of the sale of cotton abroad, should not enter at all into the consumption of the other parts of the United States. But such an arrangement as that, if it could be made, would probably be objected to by the cotton-growing country itself.

Second. The second objection to the proposed bill is that it will diminish the amount of our exports. It can have no effect upon our exports, except those which are sent to Europe. Except tobacco and rice, we send there nothing but the raw materials. The argument is, that Europe will not buy of us if we do not buy of her. The first objection to it is that it calls upon us to look to the question, and to take care of European ability in legislating for American interests. Now if, in legislating for their interests, they would consider and provide for our ability, the principle of reciprocity would enjoin us so to regulate our intercourse with them as to leave their ability unimpaired. But I have shown that, in the adoption of their own policy, their inquiry is strictly limited to a consideration of their peculiar interests, without any regard to that of ours. The next remark I would make is that the bill only operates upon certain articles of European industry, which it is supposed our interest requires us to manufacture within ourselves; and although its effect will be to diminish the amount of our imports of those articles, it leaves them free to supply us with any other produce of their industry. And since the circle of human comforts, refinements, and luxuries is of great extent, Europe will still find herself able to purchase from us what she has hitherto done, and to discharge the debt in some of those objects. If there be any diminution in our exports to Europe, it will probably be in the article of cotton to Great Britain. I have stated that Britain buys cotton wool to the amount of about £5,000,000, and sells to foreign states to the amount of upwards of £21,500,000. Of this sum we take a little upwards of £1,500,000. The residue, of about £20,000,000, she must sell to other foreign powers than to the United States. Now their market will continue open to her as much after the passage of this bill as before. She will therefore require from us the raw material to supply their consumption. But, it is said, she may refuse to purchase it of us, and seek a supply elsewhere. There can be but little doubt that she now resorts to us, because we can supply her more cheaply and better than any other country. And it would be unreasonable to suppose that she would cease, from any pique towards us, to pursue her own interest. Suppose she was to decline purchasing from us. The consequence would be, that she would lose the market for the £20,000,000, which she now sells other foreign powers, or enter it under a disadvantageous competition with us, or with other nations, who should obtain their supplies of the raw material from us. If there should be any diminution, therefore, in the exportation of cotton, it would only be in the proportion of about one and a half to twenty; that is, a little upwards of 5%; the loss of a market for which, abroad, would be fully compensated by the market for the article created at home. Lastly, I would observe that, the new application of our industry producing new objects of exportation, and they possessing much greater value than in the raw state, we should be in the end amply indemnified by their exportation. Already the item in our foreign exports of manufactures is considerable; and we know that our cotton fabrics have been recently exported in a large amount to South America, where they maintain a successful competition with those of any other country.

Third. The third objection to the tariff is that it will diminish our navigation. This great interest deserves every encouragement, consistent with the paramount interest of agriculture. In the order of nature it is secondary to both agriculture and manufactures. Its business is the transportation of the productions of those two superior branches of industry. It cannot therefore be expected that they shall be molded or sacrificed to suit its purposes; but, on the contrary, navigation must accommodate itself to the actual state of agriculture and manufactures. If, as I believe, we have nearly reached the maximum in value of our exports of raw produce to Europe, the effect hereafter will be, as it respects that branch of our trade, if we persevere in the foreign system, to retain our navigation at the point which it has now reached. By reducing, indeed, as will probably take place, the price of our raw materials, a further quantity of them could be exported, and, of course, additional employment might, in that way, be given to our tonnage; but that would be at the expense of the agricultural interest. If I am right in supposing that no effect will be produced by this measure upon any other branch of our export trade but that to Europe, that with regard to that there will be no sensible diminution of our exports, and that the new direction given to a portion of our industry will produce other objects of exportation, the probability is that our foreign tonnage will be even increased under the operation of this bill. But, if I am mistaken in these views, and it should experience any reduction, the increase in our coasting tonnage, resulting from the greater activity of domestic exchanges, will more than compensate the injury. Although our navigation partakes of the general distress of the country, it is less depressed than any other of our great interests. The foreign tonnage has been gradually, though slowly, increasing since 1818. And our coasting tonnage since 1816 has increased upwards of 100,000 tons.

Fourth. It is next contended that the effect of the measure will be to diminish our foreign commerce. The objection assumes, what I have endeavored to controvert, that there will be a reduction in the value of our exports. Commerce is an exchange of commodities. Whatever will tend to augment the wealth of a nation must increase its capacity to make these exchanges. By new productions, or creating new values in the fabricated forms which shall be given to old objects of our industry, we shall give to commerce a fresh spring, a new aliment. The foreign commerce of the country, from causes some of which I have endeavored to point out, has been extended as far as it can be. And I think there can be but little doubt that the balance of trade is, and for some time past has been, against us. I was surprised to hear the learned gentleman from Massachusetts [Mr. Webster] rejecting, as a detected and exploded fallacy, the idea of a balance of trade. I have not time nor inclination now to discuss that topic. But I will observe that all nations act upon the supposition of the reality of its existence, and seek to avoid a trade the balance of which is unfavorable, and to foster that which presents a favorable balance. However the account be made up, whatever may be the items of a trade, commodities, fishing industry, marine labor, the carrying trade, all of which I admit should be comprehended, there can be no doubt, I think, that the totality of the exchanges of all descriptions made by one nation with another, or against the totality of the exchanges of all other nations together, may be such as to present the state of an unfavorable balance with the one or with all. It is true that, in the long run, the measures of these exchanges, that is, the totality in value of what is given and of what is received, must be equal to each other. But great distress may be felt long before the counterpoise can be effected. In the meantime there will be an export of the precious metals, to the deep injury of internal trade, an unfavorable state of exchange, an export of public securities, a resort to credit, debt, mortgages. Most of if not all these circumstances are believed now to be indicated by our country in its foreign commercial relations. What have we received, for example, for the public stocks sent to England? Goods. But those stocks are our bond, which must be paid. Although the solidity of the credit of the English public securities is not surpassed by that of our own, strong as it justly is, when have we seen English stocks sold in our market, and regularly quoted in the prices current, as American stocks are in England? An unfavorable balance with one nation may be made up by a favorable balance with other nations; but the fact of the existence of that unfavorable balance is strong presumptive evidence against the trade. Commerce will regulate itself! Yes, and the extravagance of a spendthrift heir who squanders the rich patrimony which has descended to him will regulate itself ultimately. But it will be a regulation which will exhibit him in the end safely confined within the walls of a jail. Commerce will regulate itself! But is it not the duty of wise governments to watch its course, and beforehand to provide against even distant evils, by prudent legislation stimulating the industry of their own people, and checking the policy of foreign powers as it operates on them? The supply, then, of the subjects of foreign commerce, no less than the supply of consumption at home, requires of us to give a portion of our labor such a direction as will enable us to produce them. That is the object of the measure under consideration, and I cannot doubt that, if adopted, it will accomplish its object.

Fifth. The fifth objection to the tariff is that it will diminish the public revenue, disable us from paying the public debt, and finally compel a resort to a system of excise and internal taxation. This objection is founded upon the supposition that the reduction in the importation of the subjects on which the increased duties are to operate will be such as to produce the alleged effect. All this is matter of mere conjecture, and can only be determined by experiment. I have very little doubt, with my colleague [Mr. Trimble], that the revenue will be increased considerably, for some years at least, under the operation of this bill. The diminution in the quantity imported will be compensated by the augmentation of the duty. In reference to the article of molasses, for example, if the import of it should be reduced 50%, the amount of duty collected would be the same as it now is. But it will not, in all probability, be reduced by anything like that proportion. And then there are some other articles which will continue to be introduced in as large quantities as ever, notwithstanding the increase of duty, the object in reference to them being revenue, and not the encouragement of domestic manufactures. Another cause will render the revenue of this year, in particular, much more productive than it otherwise would have been; and that is that large quantities of goods have been introduced into the country in anticipation of the adoption of this measure. The eagle does not dart a keener gaze upon his intended prey than that with which the British manufacturer and merchant watches the foreign market, and the course even of our elections as well as our legislation. The passage of this bill has been expected; and all our information is that the importations, during this spring, have been immense. But, further, the measure of our importations is that of our exportations. If I am right in supposing that in future the amount of these, in the old or new forms of the produce of our labor, will not be diminished, but probably increased, then the amount of our importations, and consequently of our revenue, will not be reduced, but may be extended. If these ideas be correct, there will be no inability on the part of government to extinguish the public debt. The payment of that debt, and the consequent liberation of the public resources from the charge of it, is extremely desirable. No one is more anxious than I am to see that important object accomplished. But I entirely concur with the gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Barbour] in thinking that no material sacrifice of any of the great interests of the nation ought to be made to effectuate it. Such is the elastic and accumulating nature of our public resources, from the silent augmentation of our population, that if, in any given state of the public revenue, we throw ourselves upon a couch and go to sleep, we may, after a short time, awake with an ability abundantly increased to redeem any reasonable amount of public debt with which we may happen to be burdened.

The public debt of the United States, though nominally larger now than it was in the year 1791, bears really no sort of discouraging comparison to its amount at that time, whatever standard we may choose to adopt to institute the comparison. It was in 1791 about $75,000,000. It is now about $90,000,000. Then we had a population of about 4,000,000. Now we have upwards of 10,000,000. Then we had a revenue short of $5,000,000. Now our revenue exceeds $20,000,000. If we select population as the standard, our present population is 150% greater than it was in 1791; if revenue, that is four times more now than at the former period; whilst the public debt has increased only in a ratio of 20%, A public debt of $300,000,000, at the present day, considering our actual ability, compounded both of the increase of population and of revenue, would not be more onerous now than the debt of $75,000,000 was at the epoch of 1791, in reference to the same circumstances. If I am right in supposing that, under the operation of the proposed measure, there will not be any diminution, but a probable increase of the public revenue, there will be no difficulty in defraying the current expenses of government, and paying the principal as well as the interest of the public debt as it becomes due.

Let us, for a moment, however, indulge the improbable supposition of the opponents of the tariff, that there will be a reduction of the revenue to the extent of the most extravagant calculation which has been made, that is to say, to the extent of $5,000,000. That sum deducted, we shall still have remaining a revenue of about $15,000,000. The treasury estimates of the current service of the years 1822, 1823, and 1824 exceeds, each year, $9,000,000. The lapse of revolutionary pensions, and judicious retrenchments which might be made without detriment to any of the essential establishments of the country, would probably reduce them below $9,000,000. Let us assume that sum, to which add about $5,500,000 for the interest of the public debt, and the wants of government would require a revenue of $14,500,000, leaving a surplus of revenue of $500,000 beyond the public expenditure. Thus, by a postponement of the payment of the principal of the public debt, in which the public creditors would gladly acquiesce, and confiding, for the means of redeeming it, in the necessary increase of our revenue from the natural augmentation of our population and consumption, we may safely adopt the proposed measure, even if it should be attended (which is confidently denied) with the supposed diminution of revenue. We shall not, then, have occasion to vary the existing system of taxation; we shall be under no necessity to resort either to direct taxes or to an excise. But, suppose the alternative were really forced upon us of continuing the foreign system, with its inevitable impoverishment of the country, but with the advantage of the present mode of collecting the taxes, – or of adopting the American system, with its increase of the national wealth, but with the disadvantage of an excise: could anyone hesitate between them? Customs and an excise agree in the essential particulars, that they are both taxes upon consumption, and both are voluntary. They differ only in the mode of collection. The office for the collection of one is located on the frontier, and that for the other within the interior. I believe it was Mr. Jefferson, who, in reply to the boast of a citizen of New York of the amount of the public revenue paid by that city, asked who would pay it, if the collector’s office were removed to Paulus Hook, on the New Jersey shore? National wealth is the source of all taxation. And, my word for it, the people are too intelligent to be deceived by mere names, and not to give a decided preference to that system which is based upon their wealth and prosperity, rather than to that which is founded upon their impoverishment and ruin.

Sixth. But, according to the opponents of the domestic policy, the proposed system will force capital and labor into new and reluctant employments; we are not prepared, in consequence of the high price of wages, for the successful establishment of manufactures, and we must fail in the experiment. We have seen that the existing occupations of our society, those of agriculture, commerce, navigation, and the learned professions, are overflowing with competitors, and that the want of employment is severely felt. Now what does this bill propose? To open a new and extensive field of business, in which all that choose may enter. There is no compulsion upon any one to engage in it. An option only is given to industry, to continue in the present unprofitable pursuits, or to embark in a new and promising one. The effect will be to lessen the competition in the old branches of business, and to multiply our resources for increasing our comforts and augmenting the national wealth. The alleged fact of the high price of wages is not admitted. The truth is that no class of society suffers more, in the present stagnation of business, than the laboring class. That is a necessary effect of the depression of agriculture, the principal business of the community. The wages of able-bodied men vary from $5 to $8 per month, and such has been the want of employment, in some parts of the Union, that instances have not been unfrequent of men working merely for the means of present subsistence. If the wages for labor here and in England are compared, they will be found not to be essentially different. I agree with the honorable gentleman from Virginia, that high wages are a proof of national prosperity; we differ only in the means by which that desirable end shall be attained. But, if the fact were true, that the wages of labor are high, I deny the correctness of the argument founded upon it. The argument assumes that natural labor is the principal element in the business of manufacture. That was the ancient theory. But the valuable inventions and vast improvements in machinery, which have been made within a few past years, have produced a new era in the arts. The effect of this change, in the powers of production, may be estimated, from what I have already stated in relation to England and to the triumphs of European artificial labor over the natural labor of Asia. In considering the fitness of a nation for the establishment of manufactures, we must no longer limit our views to the state of its population and the price of wages. All circumstances must be regarded, of which that is, perhaps, the least important. Capital, ingenuity in the construction and adroitness in the use of machinery, and the possession of the raw materials, are those which deserve the greatest consideration. All these circumstances (except that of capital, of which there is no deficiency) exist in our country in an eminent degree, and more than counterbalance the disadvantage, if it really existed, of the lower wages of labor in Great Britain. The dependence upon foreign nations for the raw material of any great manufacture has been ever considered as a discouraging fact. The state of our population is peculiarly favorable to the most extensive introduction of machinery. We have no prejudices to combat, no persons to drive out of employment. The pamphlet to which we have had occasion so often to refer, in enumerating the causes which have brought in England their manufactures to such a state of perfection, and which now enable them, in the opinion of the writer, to defy all competition, does not specify, as one of them, low wages. It assigns three: first, capital; secondly, extent and costliness of machinery; and, thirdly, steady and persevering industry. Notwithstanding the concurrence of so many favorable causes in our country for the introduction of the arts, we are earnestly dissuaded from making the experiment, and our ultimate failure is confidently predicted. Why should we fail? Nations, like men, fail in nothing which they boldly attempt, when sustained by virtuous purpose and firm resolution. I am not willing to admit this depreciation of American skill and enterprise. I am not willing to strike before an effort is made. All our past history exhorts us to proceed, and inspires us with animating hopes of success. Past predictions of our incapacity have failed, and present predictions will not be realized. At the commencement of this government, we were told that the attempt would be idle to construct a marine adequate to the commerce of the country, or even to the business of its coasting trade. The founders of our government did not listen to these discouraging counsels; and behold the fruits of their just comprehension of our resources!

Our restrictive policy was denounced, and it was foretold that it would utterly disappoint all our expectations. But our restrictive policy has been eminently successful; and the share which our navigation now enjoys in the trade with France, and with the British West India islands, attests its victory. What were not the disheartening predictions of the opponents of the late war? Defeat, discomfiture, and disgrace, were to be the certain, but not the worst effect of it. Here, again, did prophecy prove false; and the energies of our country, and the valor and the patriotism of our people, carried us gloriously through the war. We are now, and ever will be, essentially an agricultural people. Without a material change in the fixed habits of the country, the friends of this measure desire to draw to it, as a powerful auxiliary to its industry, the manufacturing arts. The difference between a nation with and without the arts may be conceived by the difference between a keel-boat and a steamboat, combating the rapid torrent of the Mississippi. How slow does the former ascend, hugging the sinuosities of the shore, pushed on by her hardy and exposed crew, now throwing themselves in vigorous concert on their oars, and then seizing the pendant boughs of overhanging trees: she seems hardly to move; and her scanty cargo is scarcely worth the transportation! With what ease is she not passed by the steamboat, laden with the riches of all quarters of the world, with a crew of gay, cheerful, and protected passengers, now dashing into the midst of the current, or gliding through the eddies near the shore! Nature herself seems to survey with astonishment the passing wonder, and, in silent submission, reluctantly to own the magnificent triumphs, in her own vast dominion, of Fulton’s immortal genius.

Seventh. But it is said that, wherever there is a concurrence of favorable circumstances, manufactures will arise of themselves, without protection; and that we should not disturb the natural progress of industry, but leave things to themselves. If all nations would modify their policy on this axiom, perhaps it would be better for the common good of the whole. Even then, in consequence of natural advantages and a greater advance in civilization and in the arts, some nations would enjoy a state of much higher prosperity than others. But there is no universal legislation. The globe is divided into different communities, each seeking to appropriate to itself all the advantages it can, without reference to the prosperity of others. Whether this is right or not, it always has been, and ever will be the case. Perhaps the care of the interests of one people is sufficient for all the wisdom of one legislature; and that it is among nations as among individuals, that the happiness of the whole is best secured by each attending to its own peculiar interests. The proposition to be maintained by our adversaries is that manufactures, without protection, will in due time spring up in our country, and sustain themselves in a competition with foreign fabrics, however advanced the arts and whatever the degree of protection may be in foreign countries.

Now I contend, that this proposition is refuted by all experience, ancient and modern, and in every country. If I am asked why unprotected industry should not succeed in a struggle with protected industry, I answer, the fact has ever been so, and that is sufficient; I reply that uniform experience evinces that it cannot succeed in such an unequal contest, and that is sufficient. If we speculate on the causes of this universal truth, we may differ about them. Still the indisputable fact remains. And we should be as unwise in not availing ourselves of the guide which it furnishes as a man would be who should refuse to bask in the rays of the sun, because he could not agree with Judge Woodward as to the nature of the substance of that planet to which we are indebted for heat and light. If I were to attempt to particularize the causes which prevent the success of the manufacturing arts without protection, I should say that they are, first, the obduracy of fixed habits. No nation, no individual, will easily change an established course of business, even if it be unprofitable; and least of all is an agricultural people prone to innovation. With what reluctance do they not adopt improvements in the instruments of husbandry, or in modes of cultivation! If the farmer makes a good crop and sells it badly, or makes a short crop, buoyed up by hope he perseveres, and trusts that a favorable change of the market, or of the seasons, will enable him, in the succeeding year, to repair the misfortunes of the past. Secondly, the uncertainty, fluctuation, and unsteadiness of the home market, when liable to an unrestricted influx of fabrics from all foreign nations; and, thirdly, the superior advance of skill, and amount of capital, which foreign nations have obtained by the protection of their own industry. From the latter, or from other causes, the unprotected manufactures of a country are exposed to the danger of being crushed in their infancy, either by the design or from the necessities of foreign manufacturers. Gentlemen are incredulous as to the attempts of foreign merchants and manufacturers to accomplish the destruction of ours. Why should they not make such attempts? If the Scottish manufacturer, by surcharging our market in one year with the article of cotton bagging, for example, should so reduce the price as to discourage and put down the home manufacture, he would secure to himself the monopoly of the supply. And now, having the exclusive possession of the market, perhaps for a long term of years, he might be more than indemnified for his first loss, in the subsequent rise in the price of the article. What have we not seen under our own eyes! The competition for the transportation of the mail, between this place and Baltimore, so excited, that to obtain it an individual offered, at great loss, to carry it a whole year for one dollar! His calculation no doubt was, that, by driving his competitor off the road, and securing to himself the carriage of the mail, he would be afterwards able to repair his original loss by new contracts with the department. But the necessities of foreign manufacturers, without imputing to them any sinister design, may oblige them to throw into our markets the fabrics which have accumulated on their hands, in consequence of obstruction in the ordinary vents, or from over-calculation; and the forced sales, at losing prices, may prostrate our establishments. From this view of the subject, it follows that, if we would place the industry of our country upon a solid and unshakable foundation, we must adopt the protecting policy, which has everywhere succeeded, and reject that which would abandon it, which has everywhere failed.

Eighth. But if the policy of protection be wise, the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Barbour) has made some ingenious calculations, to prove that the measure of protection already extended has been sufficiently great. With some few exceptions, the existing duties, of which he has made an estimate, were laid with the object of revenue, and without reference to that of encouragement to our domestic industry; and although it is admitted that the incidental effect of duties, so laid, is to promote our manufactures, yet, if it falls short of competent protection, the duties might as well not have been imposed with reference to that purpose. A moderate addition may accomplish this desirable end; and the proposed tariff is believed to have this character.

Ninth. The prohibitory policy, it is confidently asserted, is condemned by the wisdom of Europe, and by her most enlightened statesmen. Is this the fact? We call upon gentlemen to show in what instance a nation that has enjoyed its benefits has surrendered it. [Here Mr. Barbour rose (Mr. Clay giving way) and said that England had departed from it in the China trade, in allowing us to trade with her East India possessions, and in tolerating our navigation to her West India colonies.] With respect to the trade to China, the whole amount of what England has done is, to modify the monopoly of the East India company in behalf of one and a small part of her subjects to increase the commerce of another and the greater portion of them. The abolition of the restriction, therefore, operates altogether among the subjects of England, and does not touch at all the interests of foreign powers. The toleration of our commerce to British India is for the sake of the specie with which we mainly carry on that commerce, and which, having performed its circuit, returns to Great Britain in exchange for British manufactures. The relaxation from the colonial policy, in the instance of our trade and navigation with the West Indies, is a most unfortunate example for the honorable gentleman; for in it is an illustrious proof of the success of our restrictive policy when resolutely adhered to. Great Britain had prescribed the terms on which we were to be graciously allowed to carry on that trade. The effect of her regulations was to exclude our navigation altogether, and a complete monopoly on the part of the British navigation was secured. We forbade it, unless our vessels should be allowed a perfect reciprocity. Great Britain stood out a long time, but finally yielded, and our navigation now fairly shares with hers in the trade.

Have gentlemen no other to exhibit than these trivial relaxations from the prohibitory policy, which do not amount to a drop in the bucket, to prove its abandonment by Great Britain? Let them show us that her laws are repealed which prohibit the introduction of our flour and provisions; of French silks, laces, porcelain, manufactures of bronze, mirrors, woolens; and of the manufactures of all other nations; and then we may be ready to allow that Great Britain has really abolished her prohibitory policy. We find there, on the contrary, that system of policy in full and rigorous operation, and a most curiously interwoven system it is, as she enforces it. She begins by protecting all parts of her immense dominions against foreign nations. She then protects the parent country against the colonies; and, finally, one part of the parent country against another. The sagacity of Scotch industry has carried the process of distillation to a perfection which would place the art in England on a footing of disadvantageous competition, and English distillation has been protected accordingly. But suppose it were even true that Great Britain had abolished all restrictions upon trade, and allowed the freest introduction of the produce of foreign labor, would that prove it unwise for us to adopt the protecting system? The object of protection is the establishment and perfection of the arts. In England it has accomplished its purpose, fulfilled its end. If she has not carried every branch of manufacture to the same high state of perfection that any other nation has, she has succeeded in so many that she may safely challenge the most unshackled competition in exchanges. It is upon this very ground that many of her writers recommend an abandonment of the prohibitory system. It is to give greater scope to British industry and enterprise. It is upon the same selfish principle. The object of the most perfect freedom of trade with such a nation as Britain, and of the most rigorous system of prohibition with a nation whose arts are in their infancy, may both be precisely the same. In both cases it is to give greater expansion to native industry. They only differ in the theatres of their operation. The abolition of the restrictive system by Britain, if by it she could prevail upon other nations to imitate her example, would have the effect of extending the consumption of British produce in other countries where her writers boldly affirm it could maintain a fearless competition with the produce of native labor. The adoption of the restrictive system, on the part of the United States, by excluding the produce of foreign labor, would extend the consumption of American produce, unable in the infancy and unprotected state of the arts to sustain a competition with foreign fabrics. Let our arts breathe under the shade of protection; let them be perfected, as they are in England, and we shall then be ready, as England now is said to be, to put aside protection and to enter upon the freest exchanges. To what other cause than to their whole prohibitory policy can you ascribe British prosperity? It will not do to assign it to that of her antiquity, for France is no less ancient, though much less rich and powerful in proportion to the population and natural advantages of France.

Hallam, a sensible and highly approved writer on the Middle Ages, assigns the revival of the prosperity of the north of Europe to the success of the woolen manufactories of Flanders, and the commerce of which their fabrics became the subject; and the commencement of that of England to the establishment of similar manufactures there under the Edwards, and to the prohibitions which began about the same time. As to the poor-rates, the theme of so much reproach without England, and of so much regret within it, among her speculative writers, the system was a strong proof, no less of her unbounded wealth than of her pauperism. What other nation can dispense, in the form of regulated charity, the enormous sum, I believe, of ten or twelve millions sterling? [Mr. Barbour stated it was reduced to six; to which Mr. Clay replied, that he entertained no doubt but that the benign operation of British protection of home industry had greatly reduced it within the last few years by the full employment of her subjects, of which her flourishing trade bore evidence.] The number of British paupers was the result of pressing the principle of population to its utmost limits by her protecting policy, in the creation of wealth, and in placing the rest of the world under tribute to her industry. Doubtless the condition of England would be better without paupers, if in other respects it remained the same. But in her actual circumstances the poor system has the salutary effect of an equalizing corrective of the tendency to the concentration of riches, produced by the genius of her political institutions and by her prohibitory system.

But is it true, that England is convinced of the impolicy of the prohibitory system, and desirous to abandon it? What proof have we to that effect? We are asked to reject the evidence deducible from the settled and steady practice of England, and to take lessons in a school of philosophical writers whose visionary theories are nowhere adopted; or if adopted, bring with them inevitable distress, impoverishment, and ruin. Let us hear the testimony of an illustrious personage, entitled to the greatest attention, because he speaks after the full experiment of the unrestrictive system made in his own empire. I hope I shall give no offense in quoting from a publication issued from “the mint of Philadelphia;” from a work of Mr. Carey, of whom I seize, with great pleasure, the occasion to say, that he merits the public gratitude for the disinterested diligence with which he has collected a large mass of highly useful facts, and for the clear and convincing reasoning with which he generally illustrates them. The Emperor of Russia, in March, 1822, after about two years’ trial of the free system, says, through Count Nesselrode: –

“To produce happy effects, the principles of commercial freedom must be generally adopted. The State which adopts, whilst others reject them, must condemn its own industry and commerce to pay a ruinous tribute to those of other nations.

“From a circulation exempt from restraint, and the facility afforded by reciprocal exchanges, almost all the governments at first resolved to seek the means of repairing the evil which Europe had been doomed to suffer; but experience and more correct calculations, because they were made from certain data, and upon the results already known of the peace that had just taken place, forced them soon to adhere to the prohibitory system.

“England preserved hers. Austria remained faithful to the rule she had laid down, to guard herself against the rivalship of foreign industry. France, with the same views, adopted the most rigorous measures of pre­ caution. And Prussia published a new tariff in October last, which proves that she found it impossible not to follow the example of the rest of Europe.”

“In proportion as the prohibitory system is extended and rendered perfect in other countries, that State which pursues the contrary system makes from day to day sacrifices more extensive and more considerable. . . . It offers a continual encouragement to the manufactures of other countries, and its own manufactures perish in the struggle which they are, as yet, unable to maintain.

“It is with the most lively feelings of regret we acknowledge it is our own proper experience which enables us to trace this picture. The evils which it details have been realized in Russia and Poland, since the conclusion of the act of the 7th and 19th of December, 1818. Agriculture without a market, industry without protection, languish and decline. Specie is exported, and the most solid commercial houses are shaken. The public prosperity would soon feel the wound inflicted on private fortunes, if new regulations did not promptly change the actual state of affairs.

“Events have proved that our agriculture and our commerce, as well as our manufacturing industry, are not only paralyzed, but brought to the brink of ruin.”

The example of Spain has been properly referred to, as affording a striking proof of the calamities which attend a State that abandons the care of its own internal industry. Her prosperity was the greatest when the arts, brought there by the Moors, flourished most in that kingdom. Then she received from England her wool, and returned it in the manufactured state; and then England was least prosperous. The two nations have reversed conditions. Spain, after the discovery of America, yielding to an inordinate passion for the gold of the Indies, sought in their mines that wealth which might have been better created at home. Can the remarkable difference in the state of the prosperity of the two countries be otherwise explained than by the opposite systems which they pursued? England, by a sedulous attention to her home industry, supplied the means of an advantageous commerce with her colonies. Spain, by an utter neglect of her domestic resources, confided altogether in those which she derived from her colonies, and presents an instance of the greatest adversity. Her colonies were infinitely more valuable than those of England; and, if she had adopted a similar policy, is it unreasonable to suppose that in wealth and power she would have surpassed that of England? I think the honorable gentleman from Virginia does great injustice to the Catholic religion, in specifying that as one of the leading causes of the decline of Spain. It is a religion entitled to great respect, and there is nothing in its character incompatible with the highest degree of national prosperity. Is not France, the most polished, in many other respects the most distinguished State of Christendom, Catholic? Is not Flanders, the most populous part of Europe, also Catholic ? Are the Catholic parts of Switzerland and of Germany less prosperous than those which are Protestant?

Tenth. The next objection of the honorable gentleman from Virginia, which I shall briefly notice, is, that the manufacturing system is adverse to the genius of our government, in its tendency to the accumulation of large capitals in a few hands ; in the corruption of the public morals, which is alleged to be incident to it; and in the consequent danger to the public liberty. The first part of the objection would apply to every lucrative business, to commerce, to planting, and to the learned professions. Would the gentleman introduce the system of Lycurgus? If his principle be correct, it should be extended to any and every vocation which had a similar tendency. The enormous fortunes in our country – the nabobs of the land – have been chiefly made by the profitable pursuit of that foreign commerce, in more propitious times, which the honorable gentleman would so carefully cherish. Immense estates have also been made in the South. The dependents are, perhaps, not more numerous upon that wealth which is accumulated in manufactures, than they are upon that which is acquired by commerce and by agriculture. We may safely confide in the laws of distributions, and in the absence of the rule of primogeniture, for the dissipation, perhaps too rapid, of large fortunes. What has become of those which were held two or three generations back in Virginia? Many of the descendants of the ancient aristocracy, as it was called, of that State, are now in the most indigent condition. The best security against the demoralization of society is the constant and profitable employment of its members. The greatest danger to public liberty is from idleness and vice. If manufactures form cities, so does commerce. And the disorders and violence which proceed from the contagion of the passions are as frequent in one description of those communities as in the other. There is no doubt but that the yeomanry of a country is the safest depository of public liberty. In all time to come, and under any probable direction of the labor of our population, the agricultural class must be much the most numerous and powerful, and will ever retain, as it ought to retain, a preponderating influence in our councils. The extent and the fertility of our lands constitute an adequate security against an excess in manufactures, and also against oppression, on the part of capitalists, towards the laboring portions of the community.

Eleventh. The last objection with a notice of which I shall trouble the committee is that the Constitution does not authorize the passage of the bill. The gentleman from Virginia does not assert, indeed, that it is inconsistent with the express provisions of that instrument, but he thinks it incompatible with the spirit of the Constitution. If we attempt to provide for the internal improvement of the country, the Constitution, according to some gentlemen, stands in our way. If we attempt to protect American industry against foreign policy and the rivalry of foreign industry, the Constitution presents an insuperable obstacle. This Constitution must be a most singular instrument! It seems to be made for any other people than our own. Its action is altogether foreign. Congress has power to lay duties and imposts, under no other limitation whatever than that of their being uniform throughout the United States. But they can only be imposed, according to the honorable gentleman, for the sole purpose of revenue. This is a restriction which we do not find in the Constitution. No doubt revenue was a principal object with the framers of the Constitution in investing Congress with the power. But, in executing it, may not the duties and imposts be so laid as to secure domestic interests? Or is Congress denied all discretion as to the amount or the distribution of the duties and imposts?

The gentleman from Virginia has, however, entirely mistaken the clause of the Constitution on which we rely. It is that which gives to Congress the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations. The grant is plenary, without any limitation whatever, and includes the whole power of regulation, of which the subject to be regulated is susceptible. It is as full and complete a grant of the power, as that is to declare war. What is a regulation of commerce? It implies the admission or exclusion of the object of it, and the terms. Under this power some articles, by the existing laws, are ad­mitted freely; others are subjected to duties so high as to amount to their prohibition, and various rates of duties are applied to others. Under this power, laws of total non-intercourse with some nations, embargoes producing an entire cessation of commerce with all foreign countries, have been, from time to time, passed. These laws, I have no doubt, met with the entire approbation of the gentleman from Virginia. [Mr. Barbour said that he was not in Congress.] Wherever the gentleman was, whether on his farm or in the pursuit of that profession of which he is an ornament, I have no doubt that he gave his zealous support to the laws referred to.

The principle of the system under consideration has the sanction of some of the best and wisest men, in all ages, in foreign countries as well as in our own, of the Edwards, of Henry the Great, of Elizabeth, of the Colberts, abroad; of our Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, at home. But it comes recommended to us by a higher authority than any of these, illustrious as they unquestionably are, – by the master-spirit of the age, that extraordinary man who has thrown the Alexanders and the Caesars infinitely further behind him than they stood in advance of the most eminent of their predecessors, that singular man, who – whether he was seated on his imperial throne, deciding the fate of nations and allotting kingdoms to the members of his family with the same composure, if not with the same affection, as that with which a Virginia father divides his plantations among his children, or on the miserable rock of St. Helena, to which he was condemned by the cruelty and the injustice of his unworthy victors – is equally an object of the most intense admiration. He [Napoleon Bonaparte] appears to have comprehended, with the rapidity of intuition, the true interests of a State, and to have been able, by the turn of a single expression, to develop the secret springs of the policy of cabinets. We find that Las Casas reports him to have said:

“He opposed the principles of economists, ‘which,’ he said, ‘were correct in theory though erroneous in their application. The political constitution of different States,’ continued he, ‘must render these principles defective; local circumstances continually call for deviations from their uniformity. Duties,’ he said, ‘which were so severely condemned by political economists, should not, it is true, be an object to the treasury; they should be the guaranty and protection of a nation, and should correspond with the nature and the objects of its trade. Holland, which is destitute of productions and manufactures, and which has a trade only of transit and commission, should be free of all fetters and barriers. France, on the contrary, which is rich in every sort of production and manufactures, should incessantly guard against the importations of a rival, who might still continue superior to her, and also against the cupidity, egotism, and indifference, of mere brokers.

“’I have not fallen into the error of modern systematizers,’ said the emperor, ‘who imagine that all the wisdom of nations is centered in themselves. Experience is the true wisdom of nations. And what does all the reasoning of economists amount to? They incessantly extol the prosperity of England, and hold her up as our model; but the custom-house system is more burden­some and arbitrary in England than in any other country. They also condemn prohibitions; yet it was England set the example of prohibitions; and they are in fact necessary with regard to certain objects. Duties cannot adequately supply the place of prohibitions; there will always be found means to defeat the object of the legislator. In France we are still very far behind on these delicate points, which are still unperceived or ill understood by the mass of society. Yet, what advancement have we not made; what correctness of ideas has been introduced by my gradual classification of agriculture, industry, and trade; objects so distinct in themselves, and which present so great and positive a graduation!

“First. Agriculture; the soul, the first basis of the empire.

“Second. Industry; the comfort and happiness of the population.

“Third. Foreign trade; the superabundance, the proper application of the surplus of agriculture and industry.

“Agriculture was continually improving during the whole course of the revolution. Foreigners thought it ruined in France. In 1814, however, the English were compelled to admit that we had little or nothing to learn from them.

“Industry or manufactures, and internal trade, made immense progress during my reign. The application of chemistry to the manufactures caused them to advance with giant strides. I gave an impulse, the effects of which extended throughout Europe.

“Foreign trade, which, in its results, is infinitely inferior to agriculture, was an object of subordinate importance in my mind. Foreign trade is made for agriculture and home industry, and not the two latter for the former. The interests of these three fundamental cases are diverging and frequently conflicting. I al­ways promoted them in their natural gradation, but I could not and ought not to have ranked them all on an equality. Time will unfold what I have done, the national resources which I created, and the emancipation from the English which I brought about. We have now the secret of the commercial treaty of 1783. France still exclaims against its author; but the English demanded it on pain of resuming the war. They wished to do the same after the treaty of Amiens, but I was then all-powerful; I was a hundred cubits high. I replied that if they were in possession of the heights of Montmartre I would still refuse to sign the treaty. These words were echoed through Europe.

“’The English will now impose some such treaty on France, at least, if popular clamor and the opposition of the mass of the nation do not force them to draw back. This thralldom would be an additional disgrace in the eyes of that nation, which is now beginning to acquire a just perception of her own interests.

“’When I came to the head of the Government, the American ships, which were permitted to enter our ports on the score of their neutrality, brought us raw materials, and had the impudence to sail from France without freight, for the purpose of taking in cargoes of English goods in London. They, moreover, had the insolence to make their payments, when they had any to make, by giving bills on persons in London. Hence the vast profits reaped by the English manufacturers and brokers, entirely to our prejudice. I made a law that no American should import goods to any amount, without immediately exporting their exact equivalent. A loud outcry was raised against this; it was said that I had ruined trade. But what was the consequence? Notwithstanding the closing of my ports, and in spite of the English, who ruled the seas, the Americans re­turned and submitted to my regulations. What might I not have done under more favorable circumstances?

“’Thus I naturalized in France the manufacture of cotton, which includes: –

“’First, spun cotton. We did not previously spin it ourselves; the English supplied us with it, as a sort of favor.

“’Secondly, the web. We did not yet make it; it came to us from abroad.

“’Thirdly, the printing. This was the only part of the manufacture that we performed ourselves. I wished to naturalize the two first branches; and I proposed to the Council of State that their importation should be prohibited. This excited great alarm. I sent for Oberkamp, and I conversed with him a long time. I learned from him that this prohibition would doubtless produce a shock, but that, after a year or two of perseverance, it would prove a triumph, whence we should derive immense advantages. Then I issued my decree in spite of all; this was a true piece of statesmanship.

“’I at first confined myself merely to prohibiting the web; then I extended the prohibition to spun cotton; and we now possess, within ourselves, the three branches of the cotton manufacture, to the great benefit of our population, and the injury and regret of the English, which proves that, in civil government, as well as in war, decision of character is often indispensable to success.’”

I will trouble the Committee with only one other quotation, which I shall make from Lowe; and from hearing which the Committee must share with me in the mortification which I felt on perusing it. That author says: “It is now above forty years since the United States of America were definitely separated from us, and since, their situation has afforded a proof that the benefit of mercantile intercourse may be retained, in all its extent, without the care of governing, or the expense of defending these once regretted provinces.” Is there not too much truth in this observation? By adhering to the foreign policy which I have been discussing, do we not remain essentially British, in everything but the form of our government? Are not our interests, our industry, our commerce, so modified as to swell British pride, and to increase British power?

Mr. Chairman, our confederacy comprehends within its vast limits great diversity of interests: agricultural, planting, farming, commercial, navigating, fishing, manufacturing. No one of these interests is felt in the same degree and cherished with the same solicitude throughout all parts of the Union. Some of them are peculiar to particular sections of our common country. But all these great interests are confided to the protection of one Government – to the fate of one ship; and a most gallant ship it is, with a noble crew. If we prosper and are happy, protection must be extended to all; it is due to all. It is the great principle on which obedience is demanded from all. If our essential interests cannot find protection from our own Government against the policy of foreign powers, where are they to get it? We did not unite for sacrifice, but for preservation. The inquiry should be, in reference to the great interests of every section of the Union (I speak not of minute subdivisions), what would be done for those interests if that section stood alone and separated from the residue of the republic? If the promotion of those interests would not injuriously affect any other section, then everything should be done for them which would be done if it formed a distinct Government. If they come into absolute collision with the interests of another section, a reconciliation, if possible, should be attempted by mutual concession, so as to avoid a sacrifice of the prosperity of either to that of the other. In such a case all should not be done for one which would be done, if it were separated and independent, but something; and in devising the measure the good of each part and of the whole should be carefully consulted. This is the only mode by which we can preserve, in full vigor, the harmony of the whole Union. The South entertains one opinion, and imagines that a modification of the existing policy of the country for the protection of American industry involves the ruin of the South. The North, the East, the West hold the opposite opinion, and feel and contemplate, in a longer adherence to the foreign policy as it now exists, their utter destruction. Is it true that the interests of these great sections of our country are irreconcilable with each other? Are we reduced to the sad and afflicting dilemma of determining which shall fall a victim to the prosperity of the other? Happily, I think, there is no such distressing alternative.

If the North, the West, and the East formed an independent State, unassociated with the South, can there be a doubt that the restrictive system would be carried to the point of prohibition of every foreign fabric of which they produce the raw material, and which they could manufacture? Such would be their policy, if they stood alone; but they are fortunately connected with the South, which believes its interests to require a free admission of foreign manufactures. Here, then, is a case for mutual concession, for fair compromise. The bill under consideration presents this compromise. It is a medium between the absolute exclusion and the unrestricted admission of the produce of foreign industry. It sacrifices the interest of neither section to that of the other; neither, it is true, gets all that it wants, nor is subject to all that it fears. But it has been said that the South obtains nothing in this compromise. ‘Does it lose anything?’ is the first question. I have endeavored to prove that it does not, by showing that a mere transfer is effected in the source of the supply of its consumption from Europe to America; and that the loss, whatever it may be, of the sale of its great staple in Europe is compensated by the new market created in America. But does the South really gain nothing in this compromise? The consumption of the other sections, though somewhat restricted, is still left open by this bill, to foreign fabrics purchased by Southern staples. So far its operation is beneficial to the South, and prejudicial to the industry of the other sections, and that is the point of mutual concession. The South will also gain by the extended consumption of its great staple, produced by an increased capacity to consume it in consequence of the establishment of the home market. But the South cannot exert its industry and enterprise in the business of manufactures! Why not? The difficulties, if not exaggerated, are artificial, and may therefore be surmounted; But can the other sections embark in the planting occupations of the South? The obstructions which forbid them are natural, created by the immutable laws of God, and therefore unconquerable.

Other and animating considerations invite us to adopt the policy of this system. Its importance, in connection with the general defense in time of war, cannot fail to be duly estimated. Need I recall to our painful recollection the sufferings, for the want of an adequate supply of absolute necessaries, to which the defenders of their country’s rights and our entire population were subjected during the late war? Or to remind the Committee of the great advantage of a steady and unfailing source of supply, unaffected alike in war and in peace? Its importance, in reference to the stability of our Union, that paramount and greatest of all our interests, cannot fail warmly to recommend it, or at least to conciliate the forbearance of every patriot bosom. Now our people present the spectacle of a vast assemblage of jealous rivals, all eagerly rushing to the seaboard, jostling each other in their way, to hurry off to glutted foreign markets the perishable produce of their labor. The tendency of that policy, in conformity to which this bill is prepared, is to transform these competitors into friends and mutual customers; and, by the reciprocal exchanges of their respective productions, to place the confederacy upon the most solid of all foundations, the basis of common interest. And is not Government called upon, by every stimulating motive, to adapt its policy to the actual condition and extended growth of our great republic? At the commencement of our Constitution, almost the whole population of the United States was confined between the Alleghany mountains and the Atlantic ocean. Since that epoch, the western part of New York, of Pennsylvania, of Virginia, all the Western States and Territories have been principally peopled. Prior to that period we had scarcely any interior. An interior has sprung up, as it were by enchantment, and along with it new interests and new relations, requiring the parental protection of Government. Our policy should be modified accordingly, so as to comprehend all, and sacrifice none. And are we not encouraged by the success of past experience, in respect to the only article which has been adequately protected? Already have the predictions of the friends of the American system, in even a shorter time than their most sanguine hopes could have anticipated, been completely realized in regard to that article; and consumption is now better and more cheaply supplied with coarse cottons than it was under the prevalence of the foreign system.

Even if the benefits of the policy were limited to certain sections of our country, would it not be satisfactory to behold American industry, wherever situated, active, animated, and thrifty, rather than persevere in a course which renders us subservient to foreign industry? But these benefits are two-fold, direct and collateral, and in the one shape or the other they will diffuse themselves throughout the Union. All parts of the Union will participate, more or less, in both. As to the direct benefit, it is probable that the North and the East will enjoy the largest share. But the West and the South will also participate in them. Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Richmond will divide with the Northern capitals the business of manufacturing. The latter city unites more advantages for its successful prosecution than any other place I know, Zanesville in Ohio only excepted. And where the direct benefit does not accrue, that will be enjoyed of supplying the raw material and provisions for the consumption of artisans. Is it not most desirable to put at rest and prevent the annual recurrence of this unpleasant subject, so well fitted, by the various interests to which it appeals, to excite irritation and to produce discontent? Can that be effected by its rejection? Behold the mass of petitions which lie on our table, earnestly and anxiously entreating the protecting interposition of Congress against the ruinous policy which we are pursuing. Will these petitioners, comprehending all orders of society, entire States and communities, public companies and private individuals, spontaneously assembling, cease in their humble prayers by your lending a deaf ear? Can you expect that these petitioners and others, in countless numbers, that will, if you delay the passage of this bill, supplicate your mercy, should contemplate their substance gradually withdrawn to foreign countries, their ruin, slow but certain and as inevitable as death itself, without one expiring effort? You think the measure injurious to you; we believe our preservation depends upon its adoption. Our convictions, mutually honest, are equally strong.

What is to be done? I invoke that saving spirit of mutual concession under which our blessed Constitution was formed, and under which alone it can be happily administered. I appeal to the South – to the high-minded, generous, and patriotic South – with which I have so often cooperated, in attempting to sustain the honor and to vindicate the rights of our country. Should it not offer, upon the altar of the public good, some sacrifice of its peculiar opinions? Of what does it complain? A possible temporary enhancement in the objects of consumption. Of what do we complain? A total incapacity, produced by the foreign policy, to purchase, at any price, necessary foreign objects of consumption. In such an alternative, inconvenient only to it, ruinous to us, can we expect too much from Southern magnanimity? The just and confident expectation of the passage of this bill has flooded the country with recent importations of foreign fabrics. If it should not pass, they will complete the work of destruction of our domestic industry. If it should pass, they will prevent any considerable rise in the price of foreign commodities, until our own industry shall be able to supply competent substitutes.

To the friends of the tariff I would also anxiously appeal. Every arrangement of its provisions does not suit each of you; you desire some further alterations; you would make it perfect. You want what you will never get. Nothing human is perfect. And I have seen, with great surprise, a piece signed by a member of Congress, published in the “National Intelligencer,” stating that this bill must be rejected, and a judicious tariff brought in as its substitute. A judicious tariff! No member of Congress could have signed that piece; or, if he did, the public ought not to be deceived. If this bill do not pass, unquestionably no other can pass at this session, or probably during this Congress. And who will go home and say that he rejected all the benefits of this bill, because molasses has been subjected to the enormous additional duty of five cents per gallon? I call, therefore, upon the friends of the American policy to yield somewhat of their own peculiar wishes, and not reject the practicable in the idle pursuit after the unattainable. Let us imitate the illustrious example of the framers of the Constitution, and, always remembering that whatever springs from man partakes of his imperfections, depend upon experience to suggest, in future, the necessary amendments.

We have had great difficulties to encounter. First, the splendid talents which are arrayed in this house against us. Second, we are opposed by the rich and powerful in the land. Third, the executive Government, if any, affords us but a cold and equivocal support. Fourth, the importing and navigating interest, I verily believe from misconception, are adverse to us. Fifth, the British factors and the British influence are inimical to our success. Sixth, long-established habits and prejudices oppose us. Seventh, the reviewers and literary speculators, foreign and domestic. And, lastly, the leading presses of the country, including the influence of that which is established in this city and sustained by the public purse.

From some of these, or other causes, the bill may be postponed, thwarted, defeated. But the cause is the cause of the country, and it must and will prevail. It is founded in the interests and affections of the people. It is as native as the granite deeply embosomed in our mountains. And, in conclusion, I would pray God, in his infinite mercy, to avert from our country the evils which are impending over it, and, by enlightening our councils, to conduct us into that path which leads to riches, to greatness, to glory.