fluctuations in the receipts from customs, than a policy of low duties no better known and no more firmly fixed — this I have not organs to comprehend. Sir, you must show some connection between high duties as such and the fluctuations you complain of. You must not say post hoc ergo propter hoc. This would be to attribute the rise of cotton to icebergs or meteors, if I may employ an illustration of the Senator from South Carolina. I think it is Addison's country gentleman who insisted upon it there had been no good weather in England since the revolution of 1688. I cannot speak for the weather; but, good or bad, nobody but the Tory fox-hunter himself threw the blame on the going out of the Stuarts. Sir, no doubt there are far more causes of irregularity in our imports and in our receipts from customs, wholly disconnected with the absence or presence of a protective policy, now, than when we were poorer, fewer, traded less, and had a market for which foreign producers less desperately contended. If you go back to good old colonial times, to 1650 and 1670, I dare say you might find still less irregularity in these particulars. Probably, too, the Indians of the North-west have received their annual supplies of gunpowder, blankets, and the like, from the British colonial government, with a regularity still more severely and beautifully guarded. A thousand causes of this kind of fluctuations there must be, with which the rates of duties have no more to do than the icebergs with the price of cotton, or the revolution with the bad weather. In a country whose numbers have been growing from ten millions to seventeen millions; with a commerce extending as far as winds blow and waters roll; a commerce which trades in everything, with everybody; a country partly supplying its home market, and partly carrying its own productions in its own ships, and yet contending for that market and that navigation with numerous and greedy foreign competitors; passing through more than one great convulsion which has shaken the whole world of trade; agitated by the currents and winds of its own seasons of local speculation; its currency sometimes disordered; its policy too often changing; all things, business, values, wages, the solemn temples of its Constitutions themselves rising and falling on the waters of opinion which know no rest in such a country I shall neither be surprised nor

scared to see, under whatever rates of duty, a great deal of irregularity in imports and in revenue from imports. Whether it be an evil or not, and to whatever extent it be one, I see no connection between it and a known, settled, promulgated, well and widely understood policy of protection.

Perhaps I might not entirely concur with the distinguished Senator from Missouri, in his estimate of the magnitude of the evil. An evil, it no doubt is. Sometimes, in some circumstances, irregularity would be an intolerable one. In the case he puts, of a balloon in the air, now "bursting with distention, now collapsing from depletion," it would be greatly inconvenient. But all greatness is irregular. All irregularity is not defect, is not ruin. Take a different illustration from that of the balloon. Take the New England climate in summer you would think the world was coming to an end. Certain recent heresies on that subject may have had a natural origin there. Cold to-day, hot to-morrow; mercury at 80° in the morning, with wind at south-west; and in three hours more, a sea turn, wind at east, a thick fog from the very bottom of the ocean, and a fall of 40 degrees of Fahrenheit; now so dry as to kill all the beans in New Hampshire, then floods carrying off the bridges and dams of the Penobscot and Connecticut; snow in Portsmouth in July, and the next day a man and a yoke of oxen killed by lightning in Rhode Island-you would think the world was twenty times coming to an end! But I don't know how it is; we go along; the early and the latter rain falls each in his season; seed-time and harvest do not fail; the sixty days of hot corn weather are pretty sure to be measured out to us; the Indian summer, with its bland southwest and mitigated sunshine brings all up; and on the twentyfifth of November, or thereabouts, being Thursday, three millions of grateful people, in meeting-houses, or around the family board, give thanks for a year of health, plenty, and happiness. All irregularity, whatever the cause, is not defect,

nor ruin,

Suppose, in the next place, that these tables show a diminished consumption of foreign imports, since 1816, in proportion to our numbers, compared with the consumption before 1807? The protective policy is not the cause. This is my first answer. And the evil is over-balanced by the good.

This is my next answer. You may consume less of foreign fabrics, in proportion to your numbers, than before 1808, for the reason that the decline of agricultural prices, the dimin ished agricultural exportation, the loss of the profits and freights of the golden age of commerce and navigation, may really have made you less able than before to exchange your labor for foreign labor. Is the policy of protection to blame for this? Is it not, on the other hand, its office, its aim, to counteract this very evil which it does not produce, by enabling you to exchange that labor for domestic fabrics, which you cannot pass for foreign fabrics? You may consume less of some imported fabrics than before, for the reason, that while your general ability is greater, your demand is supplied by the domestic manufacturer. And is there anything very dreadful in this? Suppose that, by this means, that useful foreign commerce which binds the nations together may not grow quite in proportion to our increasing numbers; or rather, that its outward and homeward cargoes somewhat change their nature; still enough of it is left, enough for philanthropy, for civilization, for national wealth, for diversified social employment, while that far more useful domestic commerce which binds together associated States, and kindred hearts and tribes, has expanded till it carries a value of a thousand millions of dollars in a year.

Suppose, finally, the honorable Senator's tables announce a diminished export of agricultural productions since the year 1816, diminished since the time when Europe forgot agriculture, to pursue war,-how is the tariff of protection responsible for this? Does anybody believe that we should sell one pound or one peck the more, if we imported from England the very shoes which we put upon our horses' feet? No, Sir; you sell all which the necessities of foreigners oblige them to buy at remunerating prices; so you would, tariff or no tariff; and you would do no more. Sir, to hold our protective legislation responsible for this falling off of these exports, is to hold it responsible for the very evils whose existence compelled you to resort to it, in order to break their force; evils which, but for this, you could not bear at all. You lay the fault, not on the ferocious assailant, but on the defensive armor, and the manly resistance, without which the attack would have been fatal.

Yes, Sir, it is far nearer the truth to say this: that it was because foreign tariffs, discriminating for colonial agriculture and against yours; the increased agricultural production of Europe; the great bulk of that class of commodities compared with the value it was because these and other causes had deprived your farmers of their foreign market, that your statesmen turned to find them one at home, and have already to an encouraging extent succeeded; it was because the wings of our ancient golden foreign commerce had been clipped, that they turned to find a substitute in domestic commerce; it was because the old world had unexpectedly developed new and extraordinary resources and powers and productiveness, that they sought, in another sense than Mr. Canning used the lofty boast, "to restore the balance," by bringing a new world into existence in the new world. This is far nearer the truth than to describe the protective policy as the author of the evils which it seeks to mitigate.

I have done, then, Sir, with the argument drawn from the tables. As I said, I do not think they affect at all the great question which we have had so long and ably discussed, of the operation of protective duties on commerce, agriculture, and revenue. They leave that where they find it. I do not mean to repeat a word of that discussion. Neither these tables, nor any quantity of tables, nor any amount of reasoning, nor any public opinion of one region, or of all regions of the country, nor all the polemical political economy of manufacturing England, will bring me to doubt that I do good service to agriculture by lessening the numbers that pursue it, and giving them a nearer and better market; that even the foreign trade of a nation, which manufactures as well as tills the earth, will be richer, wider, steadier, better prepared to spread its sails to every breeze, than the foreign trade of a nation which only tills the earth; and, finally, that domestic commerce among such States as ours is better than an exclusive foreign commerce. These truths, at last, are above all cavil. I will not confess that they require vindication, by attempting to vindicate them.

It has been urged, Sir, as another consideration to induce or to reconcile us to a return to the old system, that manufacturing and mechanical industry is in a highly prosperous gen

eral condition. Its products are said to be vast. are said to be great.

Its profits

I admit, undoubtedly, that an immense amount of capital is invested in it. I admit that it employs and feeds millionsmen, women, and children of our own household. I admit that it has spread over the whole country; that it is insepar ably intertwined with the labor and the prosperity of the whole; that it benefits all; that it harms none. I admit that, with the general business of the nation, it is just now prosperous.

But what then? Does the Senator from Missouri say, that because these employments are so numerous, so widespread, so interwoven with all the nerves of business, and so flourishing, that therefore he would destroy or lessen or impoverish them? The direct reverse. He desires to see them prosper. He is willing to leave them more protection than they need. So I understood his speech; and so I understood him to say in reply to my friend from Rhode Island, [Mr. Simmons,] whom he supposed to have suspected him of unfriendliness to protection. I mean to treat, then, this argument from the prosperous condi. tion of this industry, as the argument of a friend of adequate protection, who will maintain the existing degree and mode of protection, if it is necessary; who would, however, be desirous to reduce that degree, and depart from that mode, if manufac turing employments can bear the reduction and the change, and who infers from their present prosperity that they can bear it.

To him, then, Sir, who, being a friend of sufficient protection, and of a diffused, multiform, advanced manufacturing and mechanical industry, tells us, that a reduction of one half or one third of the existing protection will leave enough, I answer by asking, how do you know this? How do you make me, how do you make the senate, know it? How do you prove it? Where is your evidence? I respect your opinions highly. But I must see the grounds of this opinion.

The burden is on you. The presumption in the first instance is, that the existing rates of duty cause, and are necessary to, the existing prosperity. Prima fronte it is so. Here is the apparent cause. There is the apparent effect. Here is the law of 1842. Side by side, contemporaneous, coexistent, is the acknowledged prosperity. Here are the fruits: figs and