The impulse thus given was continued and increased by the war; and thus the manufactures of 1816 were, as I have said, the joint and stimulated product of that event, of the interruptions of commerce which for five years preceded it, and of what I may call the national progress and changes of national industry.

Now, Sir, for the protection of manufactures thus called into existence, and which, instead of the plain, hardy, coarse, and household employments of 1789, had grown a refined, complicated, and sensitive industry, the duties of 1789 had become totally inadequate in 1816. It cannot be too often repeated nor too literally understood, that then a new age had opened on the world. With the battle of Waterloo one era ended, and another begun. The thunders of that day of doom -what were they but the great bell of time sounding out another hour? Then arose a new age on the exhausted nations; an age to which "no monarch shall affix his name; the age of industry; the age of comforts to the poor; the age of the people." Immediately they all turned to the development and culture of their own resources; to the contests of peace, more glorious than the contests of war. England, in a preeminent sense and degree, went back, with all her energies, all her capital, and all her numbers, from the Tagus, the Rhine, the Neva, to contend in Birmingham and Manchester and Liverpool for the markets of the United States. On that field, Sir, we were then no match for her. On others, we had won some laurels; there we were not yet her match. It became indispensable that the government should throw its protecting arm around the labor of the country; should guard it against the fierce, new, and hot competition which assailed it; should shelter it from the torrent heat and the sudden blasts of the new world in which it found itself. The duties of 1789 would have been as unavailing as bow and arrow against the bayonet and flying artillery of modern war. Sir, one most striking and decisive proof of this is at hand. The tariff of 1816 was meant to be a protecting tariff. As such, it was assailed and defended. Some things it did protect. Some effects it did produce. It put an end to the importation of cotton fabrics made in the East Indies of East Indian cotton; and to that extent it extended the market of the cotton of America. I

have no doubt that, taking it all together, it was a better tariff than this bill of the Senator from South Carolina; better than such a bill as the principles indicated by the Senator from Missouri would construct. But what were its effects? Manufactures were prostrated. From an annual product of two hundred millions in 1816, they had fallen in 1820 to an annual product of thirty-six millions only. This it was which stimulated that great effort in 1820 for a more adequate system. In this, as in 1789, Pennsylvania took the lead. She was powerfully seconded by the eloquence and zeal of Mr. Clay; a better law passed the house, but failed by one vote in this body. We lived along, languishing, until 1824, when government at length recognized the existence and the demands of the new age of the world. We came fairly into line, and entered on that contest of industrial glory with the nations, where the prizes are unstained by tears or blood; where the victory is without guilt, and the triumph without abatement.

I have spoken, Mr. President, of a new age. I hold here a curious and striking proof and product of such an age. It is a pamphlet called "Foreign Tariffs; their injurious effects on British manufactures, especially the woollen manufacture ; and it is a collection of the protecting regulations of different governments, adopted since 1815, with "proposed remedies." It is compiled by Mr. Bischoff, a British manufacturer, no doubt; but who at all events "most potently and powerfully believes that the world was created solely for the sake of consuming British manufactures. You could get no other idea into his head. If he could see the nations, one and all, coming back to British cottons, woollens, iron, and glass, and all else which makes up the circle of her arts, he would die happy. Read the motto on his title-page. "Encourage those trades most that vend most of our manufactures." He takes it from Sir Josiah Childs's discourses on trade; but it embodies the whole sum and substance of the political economy of England. What effect the consummation which he so devoutly wishes might have on the comforts, the population, the wealth, the aggrandizement of the consuming and nonmanufacturing nations, he very naturally and very properly leaves them to consider. That is their business. It is his "to vend the manufactures of England." Well, it is quite

plain that he feels that his country is a little wronged by the way the world is going. Hear how pathetically he ejaculates:

"The ink with which the treaties of Vienna were signed was scarce dry, ere Russia, to which an immense trade used to be carried on in woollens, prohibited the importation of all coarse cloth by enormous duties, excepting, indeed, what was ordered by her own government for the clothing of the troops. The King of Sardinia, who had his Italian dominions restored to him by British valor, and Genoa with its rich territories and fine seaport added to his kingdom, not only deprived us of the great privileges we formerly enjoyed, but imposed almost prohibitory duties on the importation of British manufactures, not only into his own dominions, but into those territories which were added to his kingdom. The Emperor of Austria prohibited the introduction of our woollens and cottons into his empire, including also his newly acquired Italian States, Lombardy, the Milanese, Venice, &c., which formerly took large quantities of our goods. And other governments acted in a similar manner.

"Such was the policy, and such has continued to be the policy of the continental powers, without apparently a single objection, remonstrance, or protest, from England, or any effort made to preserve our manufactures; and thus has our trade in the near markets of Europe been almost destroyed.

"The continental States have, moreover, by adopting the mode of imposing duties on weight instead of, as formerly, on value, struck an irreparable blow, unless that system be altered, at the old staple manufactures of the country-cloths, coatings, and other woollens of low qualities, which consume British wool, making a pound weight of the coarsest fabrics pay the same amount of duty as a pound of the very best superfine cloth. That system is as injurious to the wool grower as it is to the manufacturer.

"With scarce a single exception, all States have had in view what has been deemed protection or stimulus to their own fabrics. This has been the policy of France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Prussia, Denmark, Sweden, Russia, Austria, Sardinia, Naples, and even the United States of America. Whether the course so adopted be wise or not - whether the term shackles would not be more properly applied to the system than 'protection' — whether it be just or not, to tax the many for the supposed advantage of the few, is not now the question: they had the example of England, which appears to have been the rule upon which they have acted."

In all Europe, Holland is perhaps the single country which has not adopted such a policy. And she, Sir, is not quite the Holland she was in the times of Charles the Second, when the thunders of her cannon "startled that effeminate tyrant in his own palace, and in the arms of his mistresses; not what she was in 1688, when she gave a deliverer to England; not what

she was when she was the carrier and banker of all the world. All but her are taking care of themselves, with the most total and provoking disregard of all the free-trade preaching by which England would persuade mankind that the methods which have made her rich and great will make all other nations poor and feeble. Turkey improves a little on all, “letting everything come freely into her dominions, but letting nothing go out; borrowing her policy, it might seem, from her own Mediterranean, into which there ever runs an unreturning flood.

A distinguished friend not long since remarked to me, that the character and topics of the British parliamentary debates, compared with those of a half century ago, very strikingly indicated the existence of that new world which statesmen have to act in. I have thought I could remark the same thing. What could such a leader as the elder Pitt do with such a house of commons and such subjects of debate? What would the exaggerated eloquence of the great war minister find to say about "onion seed"? Sir Robert Peel speaks as well on that important article as he does on Ireland. "The glory of a great minister in the last century was, that he made this country flourish still more by war than by peace. The glory of the present era is, that things have returned to their natural course; and that peace is become, as it ever ought to be, a greater restorer of national force than war."

Yes, Sir, the times have changed. That is the wisest nation which the most adequately comprehends the degree, the permanence, the nature of the change, and first places itself at the head of the great industrial revolution. It is the praise of the statesmen of 1816 and 1824, that they understood and acted upon this truth. It was because they did, that they at once held fast by the principles and deserted the details of the legislation of 1789. If you would restore the dress and the cradle of infancy, you must bring back again its tiny limbs, and its stature of a span long. If the statesmen of the age of Washington were alive to-day, they would not revive the duties of their time, unless you could give back again from the dim dominion of the past the world of their time.

Another consideration urged by the honorable Senator from Missouri, for returning to the good old legislation, for aban

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doning protective duties, and substituting duties which I think are not protective, was this, that certain statistical tables which he produced reveal some very unfavorable practical results of the present system, as contrasted with the results of the former system. And I agree at once, that if the clear and unequivocal teachings of a sufficient experience pronounce against the existing policy, it is to be abandoned. But do these tables make out such a case?

I find, Sir, that I shall not have occasion to detain you upon them as long as I at first designed to do, because I think that one general observation applies to and disposes of the matter. If the premises are true, the conclusions do not appear to follow. If the tables are true, and the whole truth, they prove nothing against the policy of protection. If every figure in every column is right, still the great question of the effect of that policy on agriculture, commerce, and revenue, which has been so instructively debated, is left just where it was before. No new argument is afforded against the views which the Senators from Maine, Connecticut, Vermont, Rhode Island, Georgia, and my colleague, have taken; and no additional force or illustration is given to the views of the Senators from South Carolina and New Hampshire. The tables either do not show what the working of the existing system has been, or they show nothing which has not been asserted and conceded before.

Suppose, for example, in the first place, that the tables indi.cate that the receipts from customs were more regular before 1808 than since 1816; that they went on advancing with a more regular progression, with less of fluctuation from large in one year to small in the next, and the reverse; how can you possibly refer this to the low duties of one period, or the high duties of the other? I can very well understand that sudden and great changes from one rate to another, too many of which have disfigured and disturbed the latter period, will cause fluctuations in all things, in imports, exports, business, hopes, fears, plans, everything. It is for that very reason that I deprecate the proposed great change. But that a fixed, settled policy of high duties, known, promulgated to the world, promulgated to the foreign manufacturer and shipper, such a system as that of England, for instance, should cause more