theirs alone, or preeminently, they share perhaps with commerce only. I observe, with surprise, that Mr. Calhoun, in his speech in opposition to Mr. Randolph's motion to strike out the mininum valuation, on cotton goods, in the house of representatives, April, 1816, a speech in many respects remarkable and instructive, and to which I shall make frequent reference before I have done in that speech Mr. Calhoun gives some slight countenance to the suggestion that "capital employed in manufacturing produced a greater dependence on the part of the employed, than in commerce, navigation, or agriculture." Sir, I think this is contradicted by the history of the whole world. "Millionary manufacturing capitalists," like all other persons possessed of large accumulations, are essentially conservative, timorous, disinclined to change, on the side of law, order, and permanence. So are millionary commercial capitalists, and millionary cotton-growing and sugargrowing capitalists, and millionary capitalists of all sorts. But the artisans of towns-mechanics, manufacturing operatives, that whole city and village population, wherever concentrated, by whom the useful arts of a civilized society are performed -are among the freest of the free, the world over. They are no man's slaves; they are "no man's men." Brought together in considerable numbers, and forming part of a still larger urban population in immediate contact; reciprocally acting on, and acted on by, numerous other minds; enjoying every day some time of leisure, and driven by the craving for stimulus which the monotony of their employments, their own mental activity, and all the influences about them, are so well calculated to produce-driven to the search of some external objects of interest, they find these in conversation, in, discussion, in reading newspapers and books, in all the topics which agitate the crowded community of which they are part; and thus they become curious, flexible, quick, progressive. Something too in their position and relations, just starting in the world, their fortunes to seek or to make; something in their half antagonistical, half auxiliary connection with their employers,-free associated labor employed by large associated capital; something, with unfailing certainty, determines them to the side of the largest liberty. So always it has been. So it was in the freest of the Greek republics. So too, in the Middle Age, after her

sleep of a thousand years from the battle of Pharsalia, liberty revived and respired among the handicraftsmen and traders of the small commercial and manufacturing towns of Germany, Italy, and England. There, in sight of the open and glorious sea, law, order, self-government, popular liberty, art, taste, and all the fair variety of cultivated things, sprung up together, and set out together on that "radiant round," never to cease but with the close of time. And where do you feel the pulses of democratical England and Scotland beat quickest and hottest to-day? What are the communities that called loudest for parliamentary reform; and call loudest now for those social and political ameliorations, the fear of which perplexes the throne, the church, and the aristocracy? Certainly, the large and small manufacturing towns. "The two great powers," I read from the ablest Tory journal in Great Britain, “operating on human affairs, which are producing this progressive increase of democratical influence, are the extension of manufactures and the influence of the daily press." What British periodical is it, which most zealously advocates the cause, asserts the dignity, appreciates the uses and claims, of manufacturing industry? Precisely the most radical and revolutionary of them all. And whose rhymes are those which convey to the strong, sad heart of English labor "thoughts that wake to perish never," the germs of a culture growing up to everlasting life, the "public and private sense of a man; the dream, the hope, of social reform; and a better, but not revolutionary liberty Whose, but Elliot's, the worker in iron, the "artisan poet of the poor "?

The real truth is, Sir, that manufacturing and mechanical, and commercial industry, is "the prolific source of democratic feeling." Of the two great elements, which must be combined in all greatness of national character and national destiny, permanence and progression, these employments stimulate the latter; agriculture contributes to the former. They are one of those acting and counteracting, opposing yet not discordant powers, from whose reciprocal struggle is drawn out the harmony of the universe. Agriculture is the other. The country is the home of rest. The town is the theatre of change. Senators are very fond of reminding us that the census shows so large a preponderance of numbers at work on the land. Then,

Sir, over and above all the good you do them, by calling off some who would crowd that employment into other business, and providing a better market for those who remain in it, why should you be afraid, on a larger and deeper reason, to temper and attend this by other occupation? You have provided well for permanence. Be not afraid of the agents of intelligent progress. It is the union of social labors which causes the wealth, develops the mind, prolongs the career, and elevates and adorns the history of nations.

But, Mr. President, there was another consideration, which might well have weight to induce the statesmen of 1816 and 1824 to protect the manufacturing and mechanical arts of their country. It was not merely that they were useful, but that they were a thing actually existing, not requiring to be made out of the whole cloth, if I may borrow a figure from the subject, but only requiring to be saved, preserved, sheltered. It is one thing to force these arts by main strength, by a violent policy, right out of the ground, out of the mine, out of the waterfall; and quite another, after they have so started, after capital has taken that direction, after the evil is done and the good is beginning, after skill is acquired, machinery accumulated, investments made, habits formed-after all this, not to let them die. The first may be unwise; the other cannot be. The statesmen of 1816 and 1824 were not required to choose between the theory of Adam Smith, and the practice of England. They were not required to choose between Scotch and French philosophy, and that immemorial, steady, daring, and perhaps happy disregard of such philosophy, which has domesticated and naturalized the whole circle of civilized arts on that narrow and stormy isle; which has raised on it the throne of the sea; which has given it the wealth that (poured out on the banks of the Neva, of the Danube, and of the Tagus) may have disappointed the dream of a universal French monarchy. They had no such choice to make. Not at all. There were the arts in existence sine diis animosi infantes! before them. It no more followed, because they might not have forced them into being, that they were to let them perish, than it follows, because you advise a young friend not to marry till he is older, that you mean, if he disregards your counsel, to have him kill his infant child. In such a case, new and precious elements mingle in the delibera

non

tion. The existence of interests, spontaneously, undesignedly arisen, may turn the scale. And so Mr. Calhoun, in the speech from which I have once read, reasoned. He said,

"Besides, we have already surmounted the greatest difficulty that has ever been found in undertakings of this kind. The cotton and woollen manufactures are not to be introduced, they are already introduced to a great extent; freeing us entirely from the hazards, and, in a great measure, the sacrifices experienced in giving the capital of the country a new direction. The restrictive measures and the war, though not intended for that purpose, have, by the necessary operation of things, turned a large amount of capital to this new branch of industry."

"A good patriot and true politician," says Burke, "always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country." Sir, we are forced to hear it sometimes said, in these tariff discussions, that the precepts of philosophy, the dictates of common sense, and the teachings of experience, appear to come in conflict. I do not know how that is; but this I will say, that if in all that political economy has reasoned or dogmatized or dreamed, in any one page of any one book on the subject, of high authority, or of little authority, there can be found one solitary sentence which asserts, that in the actual circumstances of this country in 1816, 1824, and 1842 -after manufacturing industry had advanced to the state in which then it existed, after so much capital was invested, and skill learned that it was, at these periods, wise and expedient to have given to that industry less than an adequate protection, and to have suffered it to die, or asserts any principle which fairly applies to and governs such a case, then I will confess that the dictates of common sense and the revelations of experience are a far better guide than such madness and foolishness of science. I have heard no such proposition read, now or formerly.

In this attempt, Mr. President, to show that the statesmen of 1816 and 1824, the framers of the "second system," acted not under the influence of "millionary capitalists," not in the spirit of "ambitious politicians," for "sectional enrichment and political advancement," but upon grounds and considerations worthy of them, and which should even recommend the system itself, I must not forget one influence which I doubt not had its effect. Sir, between the year 1807 and the year 1816,

the national character, or at least the national spirit, tone, temper, underwent a great change. A more intense nationality was developed. Everybody felt taller, stronger, more wholly American, prouder of America than he did in 1807. Everybody felt that we had passed through one epoch and stage of our history, and were come to another. We felt that we were emerging from the class of small States, to the class of large States. We had just gone through a war with honor; we had contended not ingloriously with the first power in the world; we had recovered our long lost self-respect. The long wrongs of England for a quarter of a century had been avenged. Our flag floated again, all unstained as on the day when freedom

"Tore the azure robe of night,
And set the stars of glory there."

Yes, Sir, everybody felt that that age- never to be remembered without a tear for America the age of gunboats and torpedoes; of proclamations and philanthropy, falsely so called; when we were knocked down one day by a Berlin or Milan decree, and the next by an order in council; when we retired from all the seas, and hid ourselves under embargoes and acts of non-intercourse-everybody felt that that age was gone forever. The baptism of blood and fire was on our brow, and its influence was on our spirit and our legislation. Sir, I believe it was under the influence of this change of national feeling that the public men of 1816, scarcely conscious of it, perhaps, turned with the instinct of a true and happy civil discretion to a policy which was appropriate to the altered temper, the prouder spirit, the more national sentiments, the new age of their country. They turned to find in her various climate, diversified soil, exhaustless mines, ample water-power, in her frugality and industry, the materials of that self-derived and durable greatness to which they now felt that she was destined. They turned to make her independent in reality as in name. Foul shame they deemed it, that the American soldier at least should not sleep under an American blanket; that the very halyards by which we send up the stars and stripes in the hour of naval battle should be made in a Russian ropewalk; that an American frigate should ride at anchor by a British chain cable!