said to be always open. Details may be said to be so. Having due regard to the great considerations of stability and constancy; of giving all things, when once adopted, a fair and full trial; and of changing nothing from lightness and caprice and the pursuit of abstractions, details may be admitted to be always open. When the lights of a full and fair experience prescribe the change of a duty, it is to be changed. It is open to inquiry, whether a given or a proposed duty is needed for protection, or is enough for it. It is an open question whether the rates of 1789 are sufficient to-day, and whether those of 1828 are required to-day. In such a sense as this, this subject, like all law, like all policy, like the steadfast nature of the Constitution itself, is open to the gentle and reforming hand of the great innovator, time.

But whether there ought to be in our industrial code such a thing as a policy of adequate protection of the universal labor of the country; such a thing as a system designed and sufficient to develop and sustain our whole capacity and all our forms of domestic employment, on the land, on the sea, in the arts, everywhere, and in everything, by the imposition, among other means, of duties on imports; a system designed and sufficient to guard the American workman, on whatever field, against the irregular irruptions of the redundant capital, low rates of interest money, low wages, under-fed labor and contingent surpluses of foreign States; this is a question which I do not mean, by my example, to acknowledge an open one. To the dispute whether protection shall always be treated as incidental to revenue, or may be made a principal object itself; to the dispute as to when it is an incident and when a principal object; whether there is such a thing, and what it is, as a revenue maximum; to disputes about forms of duties, specific, ad valorem, minimums, and the like, I attach no great importance. I mean by protecting duties, duties which protect: and whether these duties should or should not be blended with, and form part of our impost system, I repeat, I do not mean to discuss as an open question.

And why not open? Because, Sir, I find such a system of protection in operation, de jure and de facto, to-day; because I know perfectly well, or all our annals are a dream and a lie,that the American people established the Constitution and the

Union, very much to insure the maintenance of such a system; because it has been slowly maturing for years; because so large a concurrence of patriotism, intelligence, and experience, has helped to build it up; because, whether it was wise or unwise to introduce such a system, by direct legislation, at first, it would be supreme madness now, now when the first stages are passed, when the evil, if any there ever was, is all done, and the compensations of good are just fairly commencing; when capital has taken this direction; when prices are brought down, skill learned, habits formed, machinery accumulated, the whole scheme of things accommodated to it; when its propitious influence is felt palpably upon agriculture, upon the comfort and the standing of labor, upon domestic and foreign trade, upon defence, upon independence—it would be supreme madness, worthy only of a government nodding to its fall, now to overturn it; because, finally, it is the daily labor, and the daily bread of men, women, and children, our countrymen and countrywomen, whom we reckon by millions.

It is for these reasons, Sir, that I cannot regard it as a debatable question, whether it is lawful, under the Constitution, or expedient in point of political economy, that this system should exist.

While, therefore, I appreciate, as highly as any one can do, the ability and energy with which the Senator from South Carolina [Mr. McDuffie] has urged his opinions in this debate, I must, in conformity with these views, consider it as a sufficient notice for me to take of the bill which he has introduced, and still more, of such a bill as should embody the principles of policy and the Constitution which he has so powerfully advocated, to pronounce it a stupendous novelty, and there to leave it. It is all a novelty, from the beginning to the end. In its principle; in its object; in its details; in the argument which accompanies it, it is not only unlike, but it is adverse to, it is at war with, every law that has been passed under the Constitution; and not so only, but it forgets, it disregards, it disappoints the desires and purposes and wants of that generation of our fathers which called the Constitution into existence, and enriched it with all its vast powers of good. Why, Sir, what is the bill of the honorable Senator; or, rather, what would it be, if it still more exactly expressed

his constitutional and economical doctrines? It is a bill which aspires to construct an impost system, from which all purpose of intentional protection shall be carefully weeded out with thumb and finger. It goes for revenue, and nothing else. It does not merely seek to bring into the treasury a certain aggregate of revenue, having regard to the wants of an economical administration of the government that would be right - but in all its details it looks to revenue alone. Every single duty is to be laid upon the notion of getting, from that one item, the largest possible amount at the lowest possible rate of impost. The bill does not try to protect. It does not inquire whether it protects. It does not care whether it protects. Live or die under it who will, if the aggregate amount of money is obtained, and if each particular duty yields its prescribed quota of supply, its end is answered. Yes, Sir! The capital and labor and experience, which are producing three or four or five hundreds of millions of annual values, may go up or go down; the skill which years have been educating may be dismissed and squandered; fountains of national wealth and civilization may be dried up; machinery and processes and methods, the splendid triumphs of mind over matter, may be cast aside, as an old bow, which none of this generation knows how to bend, or has strength to bend; a million hands may miss their accustomed labor, a million mouths their accustomed food, - yet the bill has done all that it desires, and is perfectly satisfied with itself! I do not speak of, nor allude to, the wishes and dispositions of the honorable mover himself, of course; they, I doubt not, are just and philanthropic; but I speak of the bill. It goes for revenue; and if it obtains it, it disregards all possible intermediate consequences.

Such a bill, Sir, within the views which I take of this whole subject, I cannot consent to discuss. I pass it by, with entire respect to its friends, as an enormous and pernicious novelty. It is enough for me that no such impost system as this was dreamed of by the people who willed the Constitution into being; or by the minds who framed it and adopted it, or by any president, or congress, or party, who ever administered it; and that no precedent and no warrant for such a thing is to be found in all the series of our legislation. Grati

fied certainly, I have been, with the able and instructive arguments of my friends in this discussion, showing, with resistless force, that all this is not only novel, but impolitic; that our system is not only settled, but rightly settled. To those reasonings I could add nothing if I would; and I would not if I could. If at this time of day, the labor of the country cannot repose upon the policy of protection as an established policy, then indeed is "the pillared firmament rottenness, and earth's base built on stubble."

While, then, I retire from that general discussion of a boundless and exhausted subject to which we have been invited, I admit that a question more practical, and more properly to be regarded as open, is involved in this deliberation; and that is, not whether adequate protection shall or shall not be given to American labor; not whether mechanical and manufacturing arts and industry are worth preserving for their influence upon all industry, and upon individual prosperity and enjoyment, and national wealth and power; but whether a given or a proposed rate of duty affords that adequate protection, and insures the growth of those useful and those imperial arts? In other words, it is this question, you make a proposed great change in the existing rates, and still leave enough for the protection which the government and the country have determined to give?

66

can

Sir, this is the question which has been moved by the honorable Senator from Missouri, [Mr. Benton,] not now in his place. That distinguished gentleman comes into this deliberation, not as an enemy, but as a friend of a sufficient protective system. He reminded you that he voted for the act of 1824, and voted "cordially" for it; yet that act, beyond all doubt, permanently laid the foundation of what he calls the new system; "that he voted for the act of 1828 "reluctantly," but that he voted for it; that he voted for that of 1832 "because it reduced duties on many necessaries," although it still left, as I suppose, for most objects, a pretty energetic protecting tariff, against which both the then senators from South Carolina, and six out of nine of her representatives voted; and, finally, that he voted against the Compromise Act, “because he thought the horizontal line wrong in principle, and for other reasons. Retaining his original friendship, as I understood

him, for a sufficient protective system, since he expressly declares himself "willing to give manufactures far more protection than they need," he however counsels a vast change of the existing system, a change which I am profoundly impressed with the conviction that you cannot make without the ultimate, perhaps quick, but at last inevitable destruction of all the interests which it was created to cherish, and all that multiplied variety of individual and general good which illustrates and recommends it. He counsels an abandonment of the existing system, "the new system," the system which began, as he says, in 1816, and has been embodied successively in the acts of 1816, of 1824, of 1828, and of 1842; the last (against which he voted) being in his judgment "the very worst of all." He counsels an abandonment of this system, and a return to the "good old laws," the good old system, the system of our fathers, the system "which began in 1789, with the beginning of the government," and continued down to the year 1808. He does not advise you to revive any one law, or any one precise rate of duty, that obtained in the happy and peaceful period to which he turns you back. It is the system which he would revive. In his terse, forcible, and clear expression, he sketches rapidly its general features, as he would reproduce them. He indicates certain conditions which must be satisfied, and such protection as can be afforded consistently with the satisfaction of those conditions he means to leave. As well as I remember, and I speak with the most anxious desire, in his absence this morning from his seat, not to misrepresent him,-among these conditions are these: all minimums are to be abolished; ad valorem duties are, as I infer, although I cannot pronounce positively of his views in this particular, to be computed upon the foreign values; luxuries are to be taxed high; necessaries, although coming in competition with what are woven in your own looms, hammered out on your own anvils, cut and stitched on your own shoemakers' or merchant-tailors' seats, are to be taxed low; and no duty, under whatever denomination, is to ascend above thirty-three and one third per cent. "The average on the whole, he fully believes, will not be equal to the twenty per cent. ad valorem of the Compromise Act." Subject to these conditions, satisfying these conditions to this extent, the dis