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expenditures, fail to accumulate? But let a man, or a nation, frequently fall into bankruptcy, by improvident habits, and that man and that nation will be always weak, always in trouble; or, if relieved by a new and more prudent start, by a like improvidence will break down again. Such, and for this reason, has been the ever-changing commercial history of the United States.

"The first duty of all good government," says the Southern Planter, "is to look to its labor-insure it not only full occupation, but the greatest productiveness. Political economy abhors idleness worse, if possible, than Nature does a vacuum. It is worse than a vacuum, because gravity rushes forth to fill the vacuum; but idleness is a grave, where lies dead and buried the creative genius of man the means given to him by the God of Nature to improve his condition. . . It would appear to one dropped from another world, unacquainted with all our interests and resources, that our whole Congress or national legislature were taken or subsidized by Europe to favor all their productions or operations exclusively even to the total disregarding of those of this country. It would seem to such that Great Britain sat enthroned in all our legislative halls, and dictated all their enactments regulating industry and a tariff; and if told otherwise, could not be made to believe that some laws and most important regulations were not the results of bribes on the body politic by the superior wealth and foresight of older and wiser nations. Every idle finger will be pointed some day against those short-sighted and unpatriotic legislators who left it in sloth, and to vice and mischief, instead of stimulating it to proper action and usefulness... This country, like a young giant, knows not its own strength, or its resources, because it has never exerted the one, or examined the other. Nothing is wanted to bring forth all this, but a permanent policy, a certainty of protection, a security of the home market. All would then come forth and show themselves-capital, labor, raw materials, a market, wealth, comfort, elegance, taste, and independence. As soon as confidence was established, they would flash forth, as the gas-lights when touched by a match. No country is underlaid so universally with valuable minerals; and they lie in its extended fletz, or secondary formation, in horizontal strata, that can be followed into the thousands of hills and ridges, and, lying above the valleys, can be poured forth, without shafts or drainings, to the fertile. plains, water-powers, and navigations, that are there found. Had this young giant, with its free limbs, hold of these mines of wealth,

in the real skilful way, he could glut and monopolize all markets, in both the raw and wrought state. These hidden treasures need a protecting tariff to uncover them—its inducement to make them available, and wiser statesmen than we yet have, to put all in train, and on the certainty of the reality. . . When the fulcrum is furnished by Nature's God to this young Archimedes [the United States], it still fails to move the commercial world. Our commerce, if we demanded it, might double with England around the great capes of South America and Africa, and sweep the bays of Bengal and Bombay; might scour with her the West Indies; might run with her through all her various colonies; and in every port, place, colony, and in the mother-country, be a part of herself as to the facilities secured by treaty. No nation could gainsay us, for we would be in possession of all seas. No nation could war upon us, for we

would be full of resources and wealth. No nation could countervail us, for we would control all the productions necessary to her existence. We would stand on high and enviable ground, placed there by our own wisdom, that made use of natural advantages and resources too valuable to nations to be placed on any doubtful footing. This young Hercules, that strangled not the serpent in its early grasp, will fall, like Laocoon, in the foldings of its wrath."

Never, in the history of the world, did a nation occupy such a position, or have within its reach such means of wealth and power, as the United States. But, for the alternative, substitute Protection for "Degree," in the following lines, and we have a true picture of the character, tendency, career, and end, of Free Trade :

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“Take but DEGREE away, untune that string,

And hark! what discord follows! Each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy. The bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,
And make a sop of all this solid globe.
Strength should be lord of imbecility,

And the rude son should strike his father dead;
Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong,

Between whose endless jar Justice resides,

Should lose their names, and so should Justice too.
Then everything includes itself in power;
Power into will; will into appetite;

And appetite, a universal wolf,

So doubly seconded with will and power,

'Must make, per force, a universal prey,

AND LAST EAT UP ITSELF."-SHAKSPEARE.

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