legislation; bad systems; systems inadequate to the demands, the hopes, the glory, of a free, busy, and aspiring people, will not be stable. They ought not to be. They will not be so till the pulses of liberty are dead, and the cold, bitter, unfruitful, and calm sea of despotism shall cover us over. Stable protecting legislation, not an unprotecting stability, and not a fluctuating protection, is the one grand desideratum for American harmony and prosperity.

I have done, Sir, with the discussion of the general subject, and will soon resume my seat. The honorable Senator from Missouri thinks that the present is an unpropitious moment for the adjustment of the tariff; referring, as I understand him, to the approaching presidential election. The Senator from Georgia [Mr. Berrien] concurs in this opinion. go further, Sir, than either, and for reasons somewhat different. I should be quite willing, for my part, if for the six months preceding such an election, such a subject as this should be tabooed ground. It should be interdicted. The time should be dies non juridicus—the time of stump speaking, if you please, not of congressional legislation. I distrust my own ability to come with the requisite care and calmness to such a deliberation. I distrust myself; almost I distrust you. We are within a few months of an election which is to determine who is to wield the vast executive powers of this government for the next four years; who are to administer the executive depart ments; who to represent you at all the courts of the world, who to fill all the national offices; what will, what spirit, what dispositions, are to preside in the administration, for all good or evil which administration can accomplish. We are sur rounded by many millions of people, whose hearts are throbbing, as the heart of one man, with anxiety for the result. Among these all, are we sure that we are quite cool ourselves? Are we sure that we are quite in a condition to adjust this vast system, to settle these infinite and delicate details? Is there no danger that disturbing elements may enter into the deliber ation? Is there no danger that we shall be thinking how this rate of duty or how that may affect votes, instead of inquiring exclusively how it will affect labor, prices, revenue? Do you think the master of a steamboat is quite so good a judge how much his boilers will bear while he is running a race with a new rival on a ten thousand dollar wager?

I declare, Sir, that it has more than once crossed my mind, barely crossed it, that this circumstance of our legislating under the pernicious heat of this dog-star may help to explain the extraordinary attention that has been paid to Massachusetts in the debate. It is her profits for which newspapers have been ransacked. It is her advocacy of the tariff to which senators have supposed themselves replying. If a sneer could be insinuated against her opinions about the last war, or, better still, about abolition, it seems to have passed for some sort of argument against a protecting policy. The silence which has been observed towards Pennsylvania has been quite as remarkable as the eloquence which has been expended on Massachusetts. I deceive myself, if there has been the slightest allusion to her, or her iron duties, in the whole winter's debate. I perceive that, in the report of the committee of ways and means of the house, very affectionate and patriotic things are even said about iron. Now, Sir, when you consider that Massachusetts never made a protecting tariff; that she took no leading or influencive part in 1816; that she opposed that of 1824 with almost her entire vote, and with great zeal and ability; that she voted against that of 1828; that she has done nothing but just to stay where you placed her; that Pennsylvania, on the other hand, has been the founder, the steadfast support and stay of the whole system; that she made the protecting parts of the act of 1789; that in 1816, 1820, 1824, 1828, always, always her numerous vote, and her powerful and cultivated talents, have been prominent and controlling in maintaining and giving energy and completeness to the policy; and when you consider, too, what are the interests which it protects for her-considering all this, is it strange that the question has passed through my mind, whether the extraordinary notice of Massachusetts, and the extraordinary reserve towards Pennsylvania, may not possibly be attributable to her having a large electoral vote which is thought to be somewhat doubtful; while ours is a small one, not at all doubtful? Whatever the cause, the fact is certain. I amused myself the other evening with imagining what sort of history of the tariff a writer two thousand years hence might make up, from materials derived exclusively from one side of this debate. The Senator from New Hampshire once wrote a very

congress,

good discourse on the uncertainties of history; he will not wonder, therefore, to find this sketch pretty full of blunders. It might run nearly thus: "In the year 1824, the State of Massachusetts somewhat abruptly ejaculated, Go to, now! let us make a protecting tariff. And thereupon that State, having, as it would appear, by some means not clearly explained, acquired a large majority of votes in both houses of did actually proceed to force such a thing down the throats of the other astounded and reluctant States. What renders this the more remarkable is, that the Constitution evidently contemplated no such thing, that celebrated compact having been a mere great free-trade league, entered into mainly with a view to promoting the culture of a certain beautiful vegetable wool, called cotton. However, she made a tariff. And thenceforward the domestic history of the States seems to have consisted very much of a series of the most desperate and most chivalrous struggles, on the part of all the others, to get rid of a system which at once debauched their understandings and picked their pockets. In this contest, though all did well, South Carolina and New Hampshire particularly distinguished themselves; one being the great cotton-growing, and the other the great navigating State of the Union. Well might they take the lead; they were most ably represented, (there the historian is right;) and it appears to have been an indisputable and melancholy fact, that the tariff had killed all the cotton in the fields of South Carolina, and had rotted down the ten thousand masts of the merchant navy of New Hampshire, piecemeal, so that in 1842 the whole number of human beings who sailed from her ports, in her vessels, were only fifty-six men and three boys!" Here the manuscript terminates; and it is about as true as the first five books of Livy, nine tenths of Plutarch, and a considerable part of Hume's history of the Puritans and the Stuarts!

Certainly, Sir, we are very much in these employments. You may thank yourselves for that. And is it not an excellent thing for you that we are? Are we not a very much more useful member of the partnership, more useful to the other partners, than we could be without? Is it not a good, honest, genial, social, “live and let live" sort of business you have driven us into? Suppose, Sir, you could drive us out of

it again, as you may; suppose you should send us back to ice and granite, to sawing boards, raising beans and corn, drying nets and making fish on the rocks of our iron-bound and stern coast, or to roaming the ocean for freights, in competition with the black-bread sailors of Bremen and Hamburg; suppose that thus you could drive three quarters of our people away, to return no more, what good would it do you? Now, if we had a Chinese wall around Massachusetts; if our work was done two thousand feet under ground; if it was the digging of gold or quicksilver, to be sent abroad in our vessels or foreign vessels; if all that you saw of us was when, once a year, we came here with the soot of the furnace on our faces, to beg for bounties and prohibitory duties, - why, that would be one thing. But is it nothing that we take and consume within that single State an annual amount of more than forty millions of dollars of your productions; an amount out of all manner of proportion to any other State, except Rhode Island; an amount equal to about one half of the whole exports of the whole Union, exclusive of manufactures? Is it nothing that we take these productions, not only from all the great regions, East, Central, South, and West, but from every State something,—cotton, grain, rice, sugar from the South, and South-west; naval stores from North Carolina; grain and meats from the Central regions; lead and corn from Missouri; buffalo robes from the Rocky Mountains? I hold here the enumeration of these productions, in an excellent speech of Mr. Hudson, of Massachusetts, delivered at the session of 1842, in the other house, to which senators may have access.

[See Note, p. 245.] And is this nothing? Is it not a truly national business which we pursue; national in the surface it spreads over; national in the good it does; national in the affections it generates? Well said Mr. Calhoun, in 1816,

"It produces an interest strictly American, as much so as agriculture, in which it had the decided advantage of commerce or navigation. The country will from this derive much advantage. Again: it is calculated to bind together more closely our widely spread Republic. It will greatly increase our mutual dependence and intercourse; and will, as a necessary consequence, excite an increased attention to internal improvements

a subject every way so intimately connected with the ultimate attainment of national strength and the perfection of our political institutions."

Yes, Sir, manufacturers and mechanics are Unionists by profession; Unionists by necessity; Unionists always. Learn to know your friends. The time may come you will need them!

I have been pained inexpressibly, Sir, by some things which have been insinuated, not very distinctly said, in this debate. In a discussion of the tariff, I have heard allusions to the course of Massachusetts in 1812, and to the abolition sentiments which she cherishes to-day. How am I to understand them? Does any one dare to propose, or dare to intimate, that speculative opinions on one subject are to be punished by unkind, deleterious, practical legislation on other subjects? For our opinions on the last war, or on the institution of slavery, do you propose to drive our artisans and mechanics from their livings and their homes? God forbid. Do not think of such a thing. Banish it. Disdain it. Despise it. Despise, I am sure you do, a retaliation so absurd, so mean, so unjust, so profligate. Permit me to say, that you must take the States of America as you find them. All of them have their peculiarities. All have their traits. All have their history; traditions; characters. They had them before they came into the Union. They will have them after

"Rome in Tiber melts, and the wide arch Of the ranged empire falls."

South Carolina has hers - Massachusetts has hers. She will continue to think, speak, print, just what she pleases, on every subject that may interest the patriot, the moralist, the Christian. But she will be true to the Constitution. She sat among the most affectionate at its cradle; she will follow, the saddest of the procession of sorrow, its hearse! She sometimes has stood for twenty years together in opposition to the general government. She cannot promise the implicit politics of some of her neighbors. I trust, however, that she will not be found in opposition to the next administration. I have heard that once her senate refused to vote thanks for a victory for which her people had shed their blood. Sir, you must take the States as you find them! You must take her as you find her! Be just to her, and she will be a blessing to you. She will sell to you at fair prices, and on liberal credits; she will buy of you when England and Canada and the West Indies