Слике страница
PDF
ePub

tionably laboring under great distress; but we | vantage from it? Those parts only where there cannot legislate it out of that distress. We is a water power in immediate contact with may, by your legislation, reduce all the country navigation, such as the vicinities of Boston, south and east of Mason and Dixon's line, the Providence, Baltimore and Richmond. Peterswhites as well as the blacks, to the condition of burg is the last of these as you travel south. Helots: you can do no more. We have had You take a bag of cotton up the river to Pittsplaced before us in the course of this discussion burgh, or to Zanesville, to have it manufactured foreign examples and authorities; and among and sent down to New Orleans for a market, other things, we have been told, as an argu- and before your bag of cotton has got to the ment in favor of this measure, of the prosperity place of manufacture, the manufacturer of Provof Great Britain. Have gentlemen taken into idence has received his returns for the goods consideration the peculiar advantages of Great made from his bag of cotton purchased at the Britain? Have they taken into consideration, same time that you purchased yours. No, sir, genthat not excepting Mexico and that fine country tlemen may as well insist that because the Cheswhich lies between the Orinoco and Caribbean apeake Bay, "mare nostrum" our Mediterransea, England is decidedly superior in point of ean sea, gives us every advantage of navigation, physical advantages, to every country under the we shall exclude from it every thing but steamsun? This is unquestionably true. I will enum- boats and those boats called kar' ¿§oxǹv, per erate some of those advantages. First, there is emphasin, par excellence, Kentucky boats-a her climate. In England such is the tempera- sort of huge square, clumsy, wooden box. And ture of the air that a man can there do more why not insist upon it? Haven't you "the power days' work in the year, and more hours' work to REGULATE COMMERCE?" Would not that too in the day, than in any other climate in the be a "REGULATION OF COMMERCE?" It would, world; of course I include Scotland and Ire- indeed, and a pretty regulation it is; and so is land in this description. It is in such a climate this bill. And, sir, I marvel that the represenonly that the human animal can bear without tation from the great commercial state of New extirpation the corrupted air, the noisome ex- York should be in favor of this bill. If operahalations, the incessant labor of these accursed tive-and if inoperative why talk of it?—if opmanufactories. Yes, sir, accursed; for I say iterative, it must, like the embargo of 1807-1809, is an accursed thing, which I will neither taste transfer no small portion of the wealth of the nor touch nor handle. If we were to act here London of America, as New York has been on the English system, we should have the yel- called, to Quebec and Montreal. She will relow fever at Philadelphia and New York, not ceive the most of her imports from abroad, down in August_merely, but from June to January, the river. I do not know any bill that could and from January to June. The climate in this be better calculated for Vermont than this bill; country alone, were there no other natural ob- because, through Vermont, from Quebec, Monstacle to it, says aloud, You shall not manufac-treal and other positions on the St. Lawrence, ture! Even our tobacco factories, admitted to be the most wholesome of any sort of factories, are known to be, where extensive, the very nidus (if I may use the expression) of yellow fever and other fevers of similar type. In another of the advantages of Great Britain, so important to her prosperity, we are almost on a par with her, if we know how properly to use it. "Fortunatos nimium sua si bona norint"-for, as regards defence, we are, to all intents and purposes, almost as much an island as England herself. But one of her insular advantages we can never acquire. Every part of that country is accessible from the sea. There, as you recede from the sea you do not get further from the sea. I know that a great deal will be said of our majestic rivers, about the father of floods and his tributary streams; but with the Ohio, frozen up all the winter and dry all the summer, with a long, tortuous, difficult and dangerous navigation thence to the ocean, the gentlemen of the west may rest assured that they will never derive one particle of advantage from even a total prohibition of foreign manufactures. You may succeed in reducing us to your own level of misery; but if we were to agree to become your slaves, you never can derive one farthing of advantage from this bill. What parts of this country can derive any ad

we are, if it passes, unquestionably to receive our supplies of foreign goods. It will no doubt suit the Niagara frontier.

But, sir, I must not suffer myself to be led too far astray from the topic of the peculiar advantages of England as a manufacturing country. Her vast beds of coal are inexhaustible; there are daily discoveries of quantities of it, greater than ages past have yet consumed; to which beds of coal her manufacturing establishments have been transferred, as any man may see who will compare the present population of her towns with what it was formerly. It is to these beds of coal that Birmingham, Manchester, Wolverhampton, Sheffield, Leeds, and other manufacturing towns owe their growth. If you could destroy her coal in one day, you would cut at once the sinews of her power. Then, there are her metals, and particularly tin, of which she has the exclusive monopoly. Tin, I know, is to be found in Japan, and perhaps elsewhere; but in practice England has now the monopoly of that article. I might go further, and I might say that England possesses an advantage, "quoad hoc," in her institutions; for there men are compelled to pay their debts. But here, men are not only not compelled to pay their debts, but they are protected in the refusal to pay them, in the scandalous evasion of their legal

obligations; and after being convicted of embezzling the public money, and the money of others of which they were appointed guardians and trustees, they have the impudence to obtrude their unblushing fronts into society, and elbow honest men out of their way. There, though all men are on a footing of equality on the high way, and in the courts of law, at will and at market, yet the castes in Hindoostan are not more distinctly separated, one from the other, than the different classes of society are in England. It is true that it is practicable for a wealthy merchant or a manufacturer, or his descendants, after having through two or three generations, washed out what is considered the stain of their original occupation, to emerge by slow degrees into the higher ranks of society; but this rarely happens. Can you find men of vast fortune, in this country, content to move in the lower circles-content as the ox under the daily drudgery of the yoke? It is true, that in England, some of these wealthy people take it into their heads to buy seats in parliament. But when they get there, unless they possess great talents, they are mere nonentities; their existence is only to be found in the red book which contains a list of the members of parliament. Now, sir, I wish to know if, in the western country, where any man may get beastly drunk for three pence sterling-in England you cannot get a small wine-glass of spirits under twenty-five cents; one such drink of grog as I have seen swallowed in this country would there cost a dollar-in the western country, where every man can get as much meat and bread as he can consume, and yet spend the best part of his days, and nights too, perhaps, on the tavern benches, or loitering at the cross roads asking the news; can you expect the people of such a country, with countless millions of wild land and wild animals besides, can be cooped up in manufacturing establishments, and made to work sixteen hours a day, under the superintendence of a driver, yes, a driver, compared with whom a southern overseer is a gentleman and a man of refinement; for, if they do not work, these work-people in the manufactories, they cannot eat; and among all the punishments that can be devised (put death even among the number), I defy you to get as much work out of a man by any of them, as when he knows that he must work before he can eat.

But, sir, if we follow the example of England in one respect, as we are invited to do, we must also follow it in another. If we adopt her policy, we must adopt her institutions also. Her policy is the result of her institutions, and our institutions must be the result of our policy, assimilated to hers. We cannot adopt such an exterior system as that of England, without adopting also her interior policy. We have heard of her wealth, her greatness, her glory; but her eulogist is silent about the poverty, wretchedness, and misery of the lowest orders. Show me the country, say gentlemen, which has risen to glory without this system of boun

|

ties and protection on manufactures. Sir, show me any country, beyond our own, which has risen to glory or to greatness, without an established church, or without a powerful aristocracy, if not an hereditary nobility. I know no country in Europe, except Turkey, without hereditary nobles. Must we, too, have these Corinthian ornaments of society, because those countries of greatness and glory have given it to them? But, after we shall have destroyed all our foreign trade; after we shall have, by the prevention of imports, cut off exports-thus keeping the promise of the constitution to the ear, and breaking it to the hope-paltering with the people in a double sense-after we shall have done this, we are told "we shall only have to resort to an excise; we have only to change the mode of collection of taxes from the people; both modes of taxation are voluntary." Very voluntary! The exciseman comes into my house, searches my premises, respects not even the privacy of female apartments, measures, gauges, and weighs every thing, levies a tax upon every thing, and then tells me the tax is a voluntary one on my part, and that I am, or ought to be, content. Yes, voluntary, as Portia said to Shylock, when she played the judge so rarely-Art thou content, Jew? Art thou content?

but

These taxes, however, it seems, are voluntary, "as being altogether upon consumption." By a recent speech on this subject, the greater part of which I was so fortunate as to hear, I learn that there have been only two hundred capital prosecutions in England, within a given time, for violations of the revenue laws. Are we ready, if one of us, too poor to own a saddlehorse, should borrow a saddle, and clap it on his plough-horse, to ride to church or court, or mill, or market, to be taxed for a surplus saddle-horse, and surcharged for having failed to list him as such? Are gentlemen aware of the inquisitorial, dispensing, arbitrary, and almost papal power of the commissioners of excise? I shall not stop to go into a detail of them; I never did expect to hear it said, on this floor, and by a gentleman from Kentucky too, that the excise system was a mere scare-crow, a bug-bear; that the sound of the words constituted all the difference between a system of excise and a system of customs; that both meant the same thing: "Write them together; yours is as fair a name; sound them; it doth become the mouth as well;" here, sir, I must beg leave to differ; I do not think it does: "Weigh them; it is as heavy;" that I grant"conjure with them; "-excise "will start a spirit as soon as " customs. This I verily believe, sir, and I wish, with all my heart, if this bill is to pass, if new and unnecessary burdens are to be wantonly imposed upon the people, that we were to return home with the blessed news of a tax or excise, not less by way of "minimum," than fifty cents per gallon upon whiskey. And here, if I did not consider an exciseman to bear, according to the language

[ocr errors]

And what are we now about to do? For what was the constitution formed? To drive the people of any part of this Union from the plough to the distaff? Sir, the Constitution of the United States never would have been formand if formed, would have been scouted, "una voce," by the people, if viewed as a means for effecting purposes like this. The constitution was formed for external purposes, to raise armies and navies, and to lay uniform duties on imports, to raise a revenue to defray the expenditure for such objects. What are you going to do now? To turn the constitution wrong side out; to abandon foreign commerce and exterior relations-I am sorry to use this Frenchified word-the foreign affairs, which it was established to regulate, and convert it into a and excise into every log-house in the United States. We went to war with Great Britain for free trade and sailors' rights; we made a treaty of peace, in which I never could, with the aid of my glasses, see a word about either the one or the other of these objects of contention: we are now determined never to be engaged in another for such purposes; for we are ourselves putting an end to them. And, by the way of comfort in this state of things, we have been told, by the doctor as well as the apothecary, that much cannot be immediately expected from this new scheme; that years will pass away before its beneficial effects will be

of the old law books, "caput lupinum," and that it was almost as meritorious to shoot such a hell-hound of tyranny, as to shoot a wolf or a mad-dog; and if I did not know that any thing like an excise in this country is in effect utterly impracticable, I myself, feeling, seeing, blush-ed, ing for my country, would gladly vote to lay an excise on this abominable liquor, the lavish consumption of which renders this the most drunken nation under the sun; and yet we have refused to take the duties from wines, from cheap French wines particularly, that might lure the dog from his vomit, and lay the foundation of a reformation of the public man- | ners. Sir, an excise system can never be maintained in this country. I had as lief be a tithe proctor in Ireland, and met on a dark night in a narrow road by a dozen white-boys, or peep-municipal agent, to carry a system of espionage of-day boys, or hearts of oak, or hearts of steel, as an excise man in the Alleghany mountains, met, in a lonely road, or by-place, by a backwoodsman, with a rifle in his hand. With regard to Ireland, the British chancellor of the exchequer has been obliged to reduce the excise in Ireland on distilled spirits, to comparatively nothing to what it was formerly, in consequence of the impossibility of collecting it in that country. Ireland is, not to speak with statistical accuracy, about the size of Pennsylvania, containing something like twenty-five thousand square miles of territory, with a population of six millions of inhabitants, nearly as great a number as the whole of the white pop-fully realized. And to whom is this told? To ulation of the United States; with a standing army of twenty thousand men; with another standing army, composed of all those classes in civil life, who, through the instrumentality of that army, keep the wretched people in subjection: under all these circumstances, even in Ireland, the excise cannot be collected. I venture to say that no army that the earth has ever seen; not such a one as that of Bonaparte, which marched to the invasion of Russia, would be capable of collecting an excise in this country; not such a one (if you will allow me to give some delightful poetry in exchange for very wretched prose) as Milton has described

"Such forces met not, nor so wide a camp,
When Agrican, with all his northern powers
Besieged Albracca, as romances tell,
The city of Calliphrone, from whence to win
The fairest of her sex, Angelica,

His daughter, sought by many prowest knights,
Both Paynim and the peers of Charlemagne;"

not such a force, nor even the troops with
which he compares them, which were no less
than "the legend fiends of hell" could collect
an excise here. If any officer of our govern-
ment were to take the field a still-hunting, as
they call it in Ireland, among our southern or
western forests and mountains, I should like to
see the throwing off of the hounds. I have still
so much of the sportsman about me, that I
should like to see the breaking cover, and,
above all, I should like to be in at the death.

the consumptive patient it is said, Here is the remedy; persevere in it for a few years, and it will infallibly cure your disorder; and this infallible remedy is prescribed for pulmonary consumption, which is an opprobrium of physicians, and has reached a stage, that, in a few months, not to say days, must inevitably terminate the existence of the patient. This is to be done, too, on the plea that the people who call for this measure are already ruined. I will do any thing, sir, in reason, to relieve these persons; but I can never agree, because they are ruined, and we are half ruined only, that we shall be entirely ruined, for the contingent possibility of their relief. We have no belief in this new theory; new, for it came in with the French revolution, and that is of modern date of the transfusion of blood from a healthy animal to a sick one; and if there is to be such a transfusion for the benefit of these ruined persons now, we refer the gentlemen to bulls and goats for supplies of blood, for we should be the veriest asses to permit them to draw our own.

We are told, however, that we have nothing to do but to postpone the payment of the public debt for a few years, and wait for an accumulation of wealth, for a new run of luck,

"Rusticus expectat dum defluat amnis, at ille Labitur, et labetur in omne volubilis ævum.' This postponement of the public debt is no novelty. All debts are, now-a-days, as old

Lilly hath it, in the future in rus, "about to throats. On this, we of the south are as rebe" paid. We have gone on postponing pay-solved as were our fathers about the tea, which ing the national debt, and our own debts, until individual credit is at an end; until property, low as it is reduced in price by our fantastic legislation; can no longer be bought but for ready money. Here is one, and there the other. I am describing a state of society which I know to exist in a part of the country, and which I hear, with concern, does exist in a greater degree, in a much larger portion of the country, than I pretend to be personally acquainted with.

In all beneficial changes in the natural worldand the sentiment is illustrated by one of the most beautiful effusions of imagination and genius that I ever read-in all those changes, which are the work of an all-wise, all-seeing, and superintending Providence, as in the insensible gradation by which the infant bud expands into manhood, and from manhood to senility; or, if you will, to caducity itself you find nature never working but by gradual and imperceptible changes; you cannot see the object move, but take your eye from it for a while, and, like the index of that clock, you can see that it has moved. The old proverb says, God works good, and always by degrees. The devil, on the other hand, is bent on mischief, and always in a hurry. He cannot stay: his object is mischief, which can best be effected suddenly, and he must be gone to work elsewhere. But we have the comfort, under the pressure of this measure, that at least no force is exercised upon us; we are not obliged to buy goods of foreign manufacture. It is true, sir, that gentlemen have not said you shall not send your tobacco or cotton abroad; but they have said the same thing in other words; by preventing the importation of the returns which we used to receive, and without which the sale or exchange of our produce is impracticable, they say to us, You shall sell only to us, and we will give you what we please; you shall buy only of us, but at what price we please to ask. Bu no force is used! You are at full liberty not to buy or to sell. Sir, when an English judge once told a certain curate of Brentford, that the court of chancery was open equally to the rich and the poor, Horne Tooke replied, "So, my lord, is the London tavern." You show a blanket or a warm rug to a wretch that is shivering with cold, and tell him, You shall get one no where else, but you are at liberty not to buy mine.

No Jew, who ever tampered with the necessities of a profligate young heir, lending him money at a usury of cent. per cent., ever acted more paternally than the advocates of this bill, to those upon whom it is to operate. I advise you, young man, for your good, says the usurer. I do these things very reluctantly, says Moses these courses will lead you to ruin. But, no force-no, sir, no force, short of Russian despotism, shall induce me to purchase, or, knowing it, to use any article from the region of country which attempts to cram this bill down our

they refused to drink; for this is the same old question of the stamp act in a new shape, viz: whether they, who have no common feeling with us, shall impose on us, not merely a burdensome but a ruinous tax, and that by way of experiment and sport. And I say again, if we are to submit to such usurpations, give me George Grenville, give me Lord North for a master. It is in this point of view that I most deprecate the bill. If, from the language I have used, any gentleman shall believe I am not as much attached to this Union as any one on this floor, he will labor under a great mistake. But there is no magic in this word union. I value it as the means of preserving the liberty and happiness of the people. Marriage itself is a good thing, but the marriages of Mezentius were not so esteemed. The marriage of Sinbad, the Sailor, with the corpse of his deceased wife, was a union; and just such a union will this be, if, by a bare majority in both Houses, this bill shall become a law. And, I ask, sir, whether it will redound to the honor of this House, if this bill should pass, that the people should owe their escape to the act of any others rather than to us? Shall we, when even the British parliament are taking off taxes by wholesale-when all the assessed taxes are diminished fifty per cent.—when the tax on salt is reduced seven eighths, with a pledge that the remainder shall come off, and the whole would have been repealed, but that it was kept as a salvo for the wounded pride of Mr. Chancellor of the Exchequer, who, when asked-Why keep on this odious tax, which brings but a paltry hundred and fifty thousand per annum? answered by subterfuge and evasion, as I have heard done in this House, and drew back upon his resources, his majority-how will it answer for the people to have to look up for their escape from oppression, not to their immediate representatives, but to the representatives of the States, or, possibly, to the executive? And, permit me here to say, and I say it freely, because it is true, that I join as heartily as any man, in reprehending "the cold, ambiguous support of the executive government to this bill." I do not use my own words; I deprecate as much as any member of this House can do, that the executive of this country should lend to this bill, or to any other bill, a cold and ambiguous support, or support of any sort, until it comes before him in the shape of a law, unless it be a measure which he, in his constitutional capacity, may have invited Congress to pass. I may be permitted to say, and I will say, that, in case this bill should be unhappily presented to him for his signatureand as an allusion has been made to him in debate, I presume I may repeat it-I hope he will recollect how much the country that gave him birth has done for him, and the little, not to say, worse than nothing, that, during his administration, he has done for her. I hope, sir, he will scout the bill, as contrary to the genius

of our government, to the whole spirit and let- | for manufactures-men with rifles on their ter of our confederation-I say of our confederation-Blessed be God, it is a confederation, and that it contains within itself the redeeming power which has more than once been exercised-and that it contains within itself the seeds of preservation, if not of this Union, at least of the individual commonwealths of which it is composed.

But, sir, not satisfied with an appeal to the example of Great Britain, whom we have been content hitherto very sedulously to censure and to imitate as I once heard a certain person say that it was absolutely necessary for persons of a peculiar character to be extremely vehement of censure of the very vice of which they are themselves guilty-the example of Russia has been introduced, the very last, I should suppose, that would be brought into this House on this or any other question. A gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Poinsett), whose intelligence and information I very much respect, but the feebleness of whose voice does not permit him to be heard as distinctly as could be wished, remarked the other day, and having it on my notes, I will, with his leave, repeat it-"Russia is cursed with a paper money, which, in point of depreciation and its consequent embarrassment to her, can boast of no advantage, I believe, even over that of Kentucky-so cursed, that it is impossible, until her circulation is restored to a healthful state, she can ever take her station as a commercial or manufacturing nation, to any extent." Nay, more, Russia, with the exception of few of her provinces, consists, like the interior of America, of a vast inland continent, desolated and deformed by prairies, or steppes, as they are there called, inhabited by a sparse population; and, as an appeal has been made to experience, I ask any gentleman to show me an instance of any country under the sun that has, under these circumstances, taken a stand as a manufacturing or great commercial nation. These great rivers and inland seas cut a mighty figure on the map; but, when you come to consider of capacities for foreign commerce, how unlike the insular situation of Great Britain, or the peninsular situation of almost the whole continent of Europe, surrounded or penetrated as it is by inland seas and gulfs! May I be pardoned for adverting to the fact-I know that comparisons are extremely odiousthat, when we look to Salem and Boston, to parts of the country where skill, and capital, and industry, notoriously exist, we find opposition to this bill; and that, when we look to countries which could sooner build one hundred pyramids, such as that of Cheops, than manufacture one cambric needle, or a paper of Whitechapel pins, or a watch spring, we hear a clamor about this system for the protection of manufactures. The merchants and manufacturers of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, the province of Maine, and Sagadahock repel this bill, whilst men in hunting shirts, with deer-skin leggins and moccasons on their feet, want protection

shoulders, and long knives in their belts, seeking in the forests to lay in their next winter's supply of bear-meat. But it is not there alone the cry is heard. It is at Baltimore-decayed, deserted Baltimore, whose exports have more than one half decreased, while those of Boston have four times increased-it is decayed and deserted Baltimore that comes here and asks us for the protection of those interests which have grown up during the late war-privateering among the number, I presume. Philadelphia, too, in a state of atrophy, asks for the measure Philadelphia, who never can, pass what bill you please, have a foreign trade to any great amount, or become a great manufacturing town, for which she wants all the elements of climate, coal, and capital-this city, now overbuilt, swollen to the utmost extent of the integument, and utterly destitute of force or weight in the Union, wants this bill for the protection of the domestic industry of her free blacks, I presume. New York, too, is now willing to build up Montreal and Quebec at her expense-to convert the Hudson into a theatre for rival disputants about steamboats in the courts below stairs, and for them, and such as them, with a coasting license to ply upon. The true remedy, and the only one, for the iron manufacturer of Pennsylvania, who has nothing but iron to sell-and that, they tell us, is worth nothing-would be to lay on the table of this House a declaration of war in blank, and then go into a committee of the whole, to see what nation in the world it would be most convenient to go to war withfor, fill the blank with the name of what power you please, it must be a sovereign State, and though it have not a seaman or a vessel in the world, its commissions are as good and valid in an admiralty court, as those of the lord high admiral of Great Britain. In this way you will put our furnaces in blast, and your paper-mills into full operation; and many, very many, who, during the last war, transported flour on horseback for the supply of your army, at the cost of a hundred dollars per barrel, and who have since transported provisions in steamboats up and down the Missouri river-very many such individuals would thus be taken out of the very jaws of bankruptcy and lifted up to opulence, at the expense of that people, at whose expense, also, you are now about to enable these iron manufacturers to fill their pockets. New England does not want this bill. Connecticut, indeed, molasses having been thrown overboard to lighten the ship, votes for this bill. A word in the ear of the land of steady habits-I voted against that tax, on the principle, which has always directed my public life, not to compromise my opinions-not to do evil that good may come of it-let me tell the land of steady habits, that, after this bill shall be fairly off the shore; after we shall have cleared decks and made ready for action again; after she shall have imposed on me the onerous burden of this bill, she shall have the benefit of my vote to put

« ПретходнаНастави »