grain perishing in our barns and barnyards for the want of a market; by the alarming diminution of the circulating medium; by the numerous bankruptcies, not limited to the trading classes, but extending to all orders of society; by a universal complaint of the want of employment, and a consequent reduction of the wages of labor; by the ravenous pursuit after public situations, not for the sake of their honors and the performance of their public duties, but as a means of private subsistence; by the reluctant resort to the perilous use of paper money; by the intervention of legislation in the delicate relation between debtor and creditor; and, above all, by the low and depressed state of the value of almost every description of the whole mass of the property of the nation, which has, on an average, sunk not less than about fifty per centum within a few years. This distress pervades every part of the Union, every class of society; ... it is like the atmosphere which surrounds us-all must inhale it, and none can escape it. In some places it has burst upon our people without a single mitigating circumstance to temper its severity. In others, more fortunate slight alleviations have been experienced in the expenditure of the public revenue, and in other favoring causes. A few years ago the planting interest consoled itself with its happy exemptions, but it has now reached this interest also, which experiences, though with less severity, the general suffering. It is most painful to me to attempt to sketch or to dwell on the gloom of this picture, but I have exaggerated nothing." These extracts are sufficient to prove that it was not a change of opinion on the economic questions involved that induced Mr. Clay to abandon his position. But if these citations do not establish this fact, the following, from his speech in the Senate in 1832, is proof as absolute as language can express: "If I were to select any term of seven years, since the adoption of the present Constitution, which exhibited a scene of the most widespread dismay and desolation, it would be exactly that term of seven years which immediately preceded the establishment of the tariff of 1824; and if the term of seven years were to be selected of the greatest prosperity which this people have enjoyed since the establishment of their present Constitution, it would be exactly that period of seven years which immediately followed the passage of the tariff of 1824." No; Mr. Clay made this, the great sacrifice of his life, in the presence of conditions which convinced him that civil war was imminent as the alternative of the refusal of such surrender. Southern statesmen, impelled by the necessities of slavery, demanded the enactment of a tariff for revenue only. South Carolina had organized troops to resist the further enforcement of the provisions of the laws of 1824 and 1828, and President Jackson was preparing to execute his threat to "haug higher than Haman" those who might lead in resistance to the government. To this end he had recalled ships of war from foreign stations, and directed General Scott to hold as much of the army as could safely be withdrawn from the Indian country in position to maintain the integrity of the national sovereignty in South Carolina. It was to avert civil war that Mr. Clay surrendered his economic convictions and the high hopes he had indulged of blessing his countrymen and giving perpetuity to the Union by promoting the diversification of employments, the development of material resources, and the establishment of commercial interdependence between the people of all the States. Let us consider the outcome of this concession. The unequaled prosperity the people were enjoying began to wane, and idleness and want spread over the country as the protective duties of 1824 and 1828 were succeeded by the annually decreasing duties of the compromise act. Mr. Clay's description of the condition of the country and people in 1820 portrayed but feebly, and in neutral tints, the miseries they endured from 1835 till the bankrupt law of 1841 and the protective tariff of 1842 had gone into practical effect. Not even the national government escaped the disgrace and penalties of insolvency. It could not pay its current expenses, nor, though authorized by Congress to raise a loan for this purpose, could it borrow from any American citizen. The money-lenders of England and the continent of Europe refused it aid; and the gentleman, Mr. Tyler, sent abroad to negotiate the loan, after having visited London, Paris, Frankfort, and Berlin, reported that no recognized dealer in national credits would attempt to put an American loan on the market. In this dilemma the administration, opposed as it was to the protective system, could see but one source of relief, which was, to animate the industries and provide employment for the people of the country by the enactment of protective duties. The tariff of 1842 was enacted, and having been relieved by a bankrupt law from the debts that had clouded their lives, the manufacturers, miners, merchants, and planters, who had been ruined by the compromise act, saw a guarantee of success in the adequate duties provided by the new tariff, and began life again. The prosperity of the country returned as by enchantment. Our mining and manufacturing interests seemed to advance by leaps and bounds, and the brief period from the beginning of 1843 to the close of 1847 constitutes a noteworthy era in our industrial history. Unhappily Mr. Clay was beaten by Mr. Polk in the presidential campaign of 1844, and the belief of the slave-owners of the South, that free foreign trade was essential to the preservation of slavery, impelled them to demand that the enactment of a revenue tariff should be one of the first measures of Mr. Polk's administration. Robert J. Walker, of Mississippi, Secretary of the Treasury, formulated what is now known as the tariff of 1846 on the strictest revenue principles, and the close of 1847 found the government and people again on the high road to bankruptcy. As if it were the purpose of Providence to force. the American people to accept the truth that they could not prosper under free trade or a merely revenue tariff, a series of abnormally favorable conditions, some of which were on nature's grandest scale, were crowded into the current decade. The prosperity attained under the tariff of 1842 had revived the hopes of our manufacturers, and inspired many of them with a belief that they might force success even under an adverse tariff, and for a time unusual conditions seemed to justify their faith. The potato rot having destroyed the staple crop of the Irish people, and spread over England and continental Europe, there was an unprecedented demand for our cereals; and while this extraordinary incentive to agricultural production existed California was acquired, the vast deposits of precious metals upon the Pacific coast and in Australia were discovered, and the immense outflow of gold and silver from these sources quickened and expanded the manufactures, agriculture, and commerce of the world. The agricultural capacities of our new territory on the Pacific coast and of Australia were not known, and for some years our eastern farmers and millers exchanged their wheat and flour for the gold and silver of these new mining regions. Every industry felt the quickening impulse of the increasing volume of money; and if there has ever been a period in our history in which we could safely have thrown open our markets to competition with the productions of the underpaid laborers of other countries, it was during the decade from 1847, in which the tariff of 1846 went into effect, to 1857. During that decade we mined more than $1,100.000,000 of gold and silver. But, with the unprecedented markets for our grain and provisions, and with the addition of $110,000,000 annually to our metallic money, a decade of low duties served to bring us to insolvency, State, corporate, and individual. The summer of 1857 found us involved in a financial crisis that overwhelmed our banks, trust companies, and other financial institutions, silenced our spindles and looms, extinguished the fires in our furnaces, forges, rolling-mills, and machine-shops, and sent thousands of miners of coal, iron, and other ores to the public lands of the Northwest, to begin life anew as farmers, and to acquire skill in their new pursuit by their failures and sufferings. But this was not an isolated instance, for, as conditions were from 1857 to 1860, they had been from 1817 to 1820 and from 1837 to 1840; and in each of these melancholy epochs debtors clamored for stay laws and other means of protecting their property from confiscation by heartless creditors, and the government of the United States was compelled to endure the disgrace of temporary insolvency. Toward the close of 1860 President Buchanan found the revenues of the country insufficient to meet its ordinary expenditures, and, in pursuance of a law providing for such an exigency, proposed to sell $5,000,000 of Treasury notes. The bids elicited by this announcement were opened on the 28th of December, 1860. As in 1841, no foreign bank or banker had exhibited a willingness to loan money to the government of the United States on any terms, and but one of our citizens offered to lend it any at six per cent. Mr. John Barnes, of Washington, offered $3,500 at that rate. The other thirty-nine bids ranged from seven per cent. to thirty-six per cent. per annum. I present the list of bids as historical evidence of the destructive effects of a tariff for revenue only on national credit. They were as follows: Thomas J. Warren, New York, offered $60,000, at 25 per cent. Field & McLane, New York, $25,000, at 15 per cent. Field & McLane, New York, $5,000, at 30 per cent. Amos Townsend, cashier New Haven Bank, $10,000, at 8 per cent. William E. Brown, New York, $1,000, at 7 per cent. J. F. Huntingdon, New York, $30,000, at 18 per cent. Farmers' Bank, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, $7,000, at 8 per cent. George S. Bishop, $20,000, at 10 per cent. F. P. James & Co., New York, $25,000, at 12 per cent. F. P. James & Co., F. P. James & Co., New York, $100,000, at 24 per cent. George H. Norman, $20,000, at 8 per cent. Sayre & Brother, $3,000, at 10 per cent. Levi Hasbrouck, $2,000, at 8 per cent. William H. Slocum, $3,000, at 10 per cent. This rapid résumé of the tariff legislation of the first century of our national existence, and of the industrial effects that have followed each alternation of revenue and protective tariffs, proves as a general proposition that idleness and bankruptcy have overwhelmed us under each successive revenue tariff, and that general prosperity has prevailed under every adequately protective tariff. Yet, in view of these recurring lessons of experience, the purpose of the daring promoters of the |