These are exceptions, he argues, by which we may wisely restrict the general freedom of commerce. These exceptions we have the constitutional power to engraft upon our general law of free trade. We may restrain it to encourage American ships and other American manufactures, for the uses of peace or war; to check luxury; to withdraw our too adventurous commerce from the grasp of an enemy, and to supply a revenue for the wants of government. I commend to your own reflections this enunciation of the general principle of commercial regulations and of the exceptions to it; the affirmation which it involves of the constitutional power of protection; the separation of the protecting and of the revenue power from one another, and the enumeration of each as substantive and distinct; and his acquiescence in Mr. Fitzsimons's proposition to unite the exercise and the objects of both powers in one law, "although he (Mr. Madison) thought the two objects ought not to be too confusedly blended." I commend all this to you, who would know his opinions on this part of that greatest work of his own hands or of any man's, the federal Constitution.

Mr.

I have said that no man then denied the power. Ames, I have reminded you, expressly affirmed it. No newspaper denied it. The usurpations, imaginary or real, of the two first administrations upon the Constitution,—their alleged usurpations, brought into life the party of State rights and of Democracy; but through all that tremendous contest which ended in the revolution of 1801, no man accused them for having dared to protect the planter, the farmer, the fisherman, the mechanic of America. No one laid that sin to their charge. The system of practical protectionfounded by the framers and in the age of the Constitution and of Washington-grew with the growth and strengthened with the strength of the nation. Every president, every congress, almost every public man, approved it. It went on widening its circuit, increasing its energy, and multiplying its beneficial effects, but never changing its nature or its aims for more than thirty years, when a subtle and a sectional metaphysics suddenly discerned that it was all a fraud on the Constitution.

It is one of the bad habits of politics which grow up under

written systems and limited systems of government to denounce what we think impolitic and oppressive legislation as unconstitutional legislation. The language is at first rhetorically and metaphorically used; excited feeling, producing inaccurate thought, contributes to give it currency; classes of States and parties weave it into their vocabulary, and it grows into an article of faith. I have not a doubt that such is the origin of this heresy.

Look, then, over the whole field of view which we have traversed. The terms of the Constitution, interpreted by the most indisputable and universal use of language of the time and country, expressly grant the power. For years the whole people - -men of business, statesmen, speculatists, the masses, all had demanded a Constitution which should contain the power under those precise terms; and they adopted it, in the belief, and in a substantial sense for the reason, that it satisfied that demand. The master-workmen by whom it was constructed,—the entire contemporary intelligence and statesmanship, - supposed it contained the power. With the very first breath it drew, the new government, in the age of Washington, Madison, Hamilton, Adams, and Jefferson, and with their approbation, entered upon its declared exercise; and for more than thirty years its existence was universally admitted.

I propose no more, Sir, than to suggest the general nature and main points of an argument familiar to the thoughts of senators. To my mind it is conclusive. Exercise the power or not, as you deem best for the good and glory of your country, but do not deny its existence, lest you accuse that energetic and heroic generation which gave us Independence and the Constitution, of delusion, fraud; and folly, such as never disgraced any age or race of men before.

I said, Mr. President, that congress had the power, and that it was their duty also to afford adequate protection in this exigency to the entire labor of the country. Something I could wish to add upon this great duty; but perhaps it may better be reserved until we have, as I earnestly hope we soon shall have, a practical measure before us. I trust even that it may be unnecessary to urge its performance on you at all. The mode, the degree in which it shall be performed, may disclose diversities of opinions. On this we shall stand in

need of mutual forbearance and indulgence; but, on the solemn and peremptory character of the duty itself, how can we differ? Take counsel of the "ancient prudence; " survey the subject in the spirit of the congress of 1789; purify your minds of the suggestions of a transient expediency, and of a small and local jealousy, by recalling and meditating anew the grand objects for which you know the Constitution was framed; and we cannot differ.

If our trivial and timid manufacturing and mechanical arts, at the organization of the government, not much further out of ground than this premature green grass of the month of March, were not below the care of such a congress as the first, how much more worthy of yours is this diversified and yet sensitive industry, which sends its roots and branches everywhere, but which a storm or a frost would prostrate and kill in an hour! Is that vast circle of employments, which gives to more than 800,000 operatives the means of a comfortable and respectable life; in which nearly three hundred millions of capital are invested directly; which supplies one tenth of all our exports, more in value than the export of rice and tobacco together; feeds our coasting trade, a nation's best trade, or certainly our best; animates, in a hundred ways, the sister or the parent art of agriculture, by keeping up its prices, by turning away from its cultivation the crowds who would overstock it, and by opening to its great staples of cotton, rice, flour, meats, and wool, a market at home, steady, growing, sure; which policy, or unkindness, or the storms of war, cannot close is that too inconsiderable in the mass of the national policy to deserve your regard? And yet, is that interest by the side of England anything more than an infant, which her statesmen and capitalists coolly talk of "stifling in the cradle," and which thrives and lives by your care alone? If forty years ago, when we had a continent to plant, and so few to do it, and with a whole ocean unoccupied, occupied only for war, inviting us to go forth and carry on the commerce of the world with scarcely a competitor, sound policy was thought to require the establishment of this industry, how much more now, when we have arrived at the period in the course of national advancement in which it should, in the process of things, begin to take root, and when the condition of

all our other occupations so impressively urges us to make the most of this for the benefit of all? If the exhausting importations of foreign goods, the overwhelming accumulation of foreign 'debt, the drain of specie to pay the foreign creditor, the derangement of American currency, the transportation of American produce in foreign ships, the antagonist regulations of foreign policy, and the consequent depression of all employments, were reasons for making the Constitution, are not the same things a reason to-day for administering it in its whole energy? If so many successive presidents, congresses, administrations, have invited, aye, compelled the investment of so much capital in this industry, and connected the labors, hopes, the daily livelihood, the whole scheme of life of so many thousands, their own, their children's, inextricably with it, does it not impose the duty of steady, just, and parental protecting legislation on you? Did you really mean in 1833, when you framed the Compromise Act, that if, unexpectedly, American industry, or one single branch of it, could not live under its ultimate reduction, to let it perish? We told you then that it would endanger the whole system of domestic labor, and that some portions, and they the most precious, the most popular, the first in favor from the date of the government,— woollens, the production of wool, the manufactures of leather, paper, glass, sugar, iron, hats, wood, cotton printing, the whole cotton manufacture in the hands of moderate capitalists, would be destroyed by it. You differed from us; but do you not mean to admit us to the proof, that our predictions were true? Your compromise does not prevent your replenishing the treasury of the government; shall it prevent your protecting the labor of the people? Will you suffer the country to lose in a year all that it has slowly gained in twenty? Will you squander away the skill which has been acquired; break up your machinery, or send it to the East Indies; close the door to a hundred useful occupations just as men have learned how to pursue them; put your whole scale of prices, which the establishment of every manufacture at home has regularly reduced and steadied, into the hands of the experimental capitalists of England, to lower and raise at their pleasure? No, Sir; no, Sir. You will hear the proofs and the discussion with patience; and you will decide with wisdom.

Let me say, Mr. President, in a spirit of the utmost respect to the opinions of senators, that, if there is any power of the Constitution, I do not know that there is any, which it might be prudent to suffer to slumber, and, as I have heard it expressed, to die out, it is not this. No, Sir. Desirous always, and determined to administer it moderately, discreetly, justly; throwing no burden of discrimination on the South which the North does not at least equally feel; keeping the aggregate amount which it shall yield to the treasury in subordination to the wants of government, efficiently and wisely administered; clothing it, if that is preferred, under the forms, the name, and the reality, of a measure of revenue with discriminations for protection, giving all up but the practical, sufficient, and sure protecting energy itself; that I would never give up. No, Sir; the power which this whole country with one voice demanded to have inserted in the Constitution, and which they hailed as another Declaration of Independence; the power by which we are able to protect all our children of labor, on whatsoever fields they wipe the sweat from their brow; by which, as Washington foretold, we may hope to bind these States together, to run the race of freedom, power, enjoyment, and glory with the nations, and to afford the example of a people, now counted by millions, every one of whom has work to do, and good pay for his work; this power must not be surrendered, must not sleep, till the Union flag shall be hauled down from the last masthead! That sight, I trust, neither we nor our children, to the thousandth generation, are doomed

to see.