article to the minimum of a reasonable profit on the capital employed." This accorded, as he thought, "with the reason of the thing, and with experience."*

The great war of Europe had, even then, commenced, and its effects were speedily experienced in an increased demand for food -furnishing the farmer with a temporary market, and relieving him, for the time, from the necessity for reflection upon the fact that the value of his land is wholly dependent upon its exemption from the tax of transportation. Time, however, brought with it the correction of his delusions, in the form of Orders in Council, Rules of '56, and Berlin and Milan Decrees measures having for their object the annihilation of the rights of all the powers not engaged on the side of one or other of the great parties to the war. It was the substitution of

"The good old rule, the simple plan,

That those may take who have the power,

And those may keep who can"

for the universally recognised law of nations. †

The American flag being now driven from the ocean, it became necessary, in self-defence, to prohibit intercourse with either of the parties to the contest. Pressing want of cloth, iron, and other commodities, then forced the people to manufacturing for

* Treasury Report, December 5, 1791. The document from which this quotation is made, is one of the most remarkable of its kind in existence exhibiting, as it does throughout, a familiarity with every department of the question to be discussed such as could have been acquired only under a system so oppressive as was the colonial one of England. That system is yet, however, perpetuated by the descendants of the men who were driven by it to make the Revolution.

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From the breaking out of the wars of the French Revolution to the year 1812, the United States knew the law of nations only as the victims of its systematic violation by the great maritime powers of Europe. One hundred millions, at least, of American property were swept from the seas, under the British Orders in Councii, and the French Berlin and Milan Decrees. For our enormous losses under the British Orders in Council, we not only never received indemnification, but the sacrifices and sufferings of the war were added to those spoliations on our commerce and invasions of our neutral rights which led to its declaration. Those Orders were at that time regarded by the Lansdownes, the Barings, the Broughams, and the other enlightened statesmen of the school to which you belonged, as a violation of right and justice as well as of sound policy; and within a very few years the present distinguished Lord Chief Justice, placed by yourself at the head of the tribunals of England, has declared that the Orders in Council were grievously unjust to neutrals, and it is now generally allowed that they were contrary to the law of nations and to our own municipal law.”. EVERETT, Letter to Lord John Russell, September 17, 1853.

themselves; but, as it is always the first step that is the most costly and least productive, the progress was necessarily slowthe whole policy of the country having, until then, been adverse to the diversification of employments, and to the introduction of the machinery required for obtaining command of steam, or any other of the natural forces, with the single exception of the wind required for driving ships. The nation was then poor, and when, in 1812, war against Britain was declared, it was so entirely unable to clothe itself, that the government found itself driven to the expedient of taking possession of Amelia Island, a Spanish possession on the Florida coast, for the sole and exclusive purpose of enabling its citizens to evade its own laws - by thus bringing within the Union certain cargoes of woollen cloths and blankets, whose regular importation was forbidden by the non-intercourse. laws enacted in retaliation for the Orders in Council.*

The war which followed produced effects similar to those which had been observed throughout Continental Europe — causing the

The entire inability of a nation wholly dependent upon trade, for entering into a war, even of self-defence, is well exhibited in the following article from the London Times, meant to be, and proper to be received as, descriptive of the weakness of the Union at the present time. The power of selfprotection in a community exists in the direct ratio of the development of individuality among the persons of whom it is composed. The greater its amount, the larger is commerce, and the less is the dependence upon trade. "The exports of the United States, then, as now, its main staple, which, in 1807, amounted to £22,500,000, consisted, in 1812, of £8,000,000; in 1813, of, £5,800,000; and in 1814, of £1,443,216 while those of the United Kingdom had risen from £31,000,000 in 1807, to £53,500,000 in 1814, in the early part of which year the great European war terminated—at least for the time. The pressure of the war had, however, now made itself felt in the United States. They had rushed into war totally unprepared: their navy consisted of eight frigates and twelve sloops, not all ready for sea; their army, of twenty-four thousand men, neither organized nor disciplined, and, as the first result showed, totally unfit to meet our regiments in the field. Their mercantile marine was scattered, unprotected, all over the globe. The blockade ruined their customs, their only source of revenue, (with the exception of the sale of waste land;) and the consequence was, that a country which, with great difficulty, had been induced to bear a taxation of £3,000,000, now found itself called upon to support a costly war, whose peculiar character was to destroy the very resources which were destined by nature to form the domestic and external strength of the United States. A resort to heavy excise duties was the only course now open to raise the necessary revenue, and heavy duties were laid upon licenses to sell wine, to distil spirits, on auctions, ships, sugar, bank-notes, bills, and salt. Jefferson's boast as mischievous as it was unfounded — that the tax-gatherer should never enter the house of an American citizen, vanished into thin air; and, with the unpopularity of the excise, speedily came the unpopularity of the war which imposed it."

erection of numerous factories and furnaces, and the opening of many mines and furnishing so extensive a market for food, wool, and other of the raw products of the earth, that, as will hereafter be shown, the price of flour was higher than it had ever been before, although the export trade had almost wholly ceased. With the return of peace, however, manufactures generally, with the single exception of coarse cottons, were abandoned to their fate, and soon sunk under foreign competition. Here, as everywhere throughout Europe, machinery was thrown out of use, and its proprietors were ruined, while the workmen were discharged. Thus at once was lost to the nation the whole of that great capital of skill and experience, that in the past few years had been accumulated at the cost of so much effort.

Commerce then gradually declined, and trade became again master of the fortunes of the people, with great decline in the value of labor, and so great a diminution in that of land that throughout the country it sold at prices not exceeding a third, or even a fourth, of those it had before commanded. Universal distress brought with it a remedy in the form of the semi-protective tariff of 1824, followed by the really protective one of 1828, by which the policy of Colbert was, for the first time, installed as that of the American Union. Remonstrances, and threatened resistance on the part of the cotton-growing States, caused the abandonment of that policy, before it had had even a five years' trial, and early in 1833, it was suspended by the compromise tariff, in virtue of which protection was gradually to be withdrawn, and by 1842 was entirely to cease. Before that time arrived, however, commerce had almost ceased to exist. the demand for labor having died away, and with it the power to purchase labor's products. Universal distress brought with it a change of administration, followed by a change of policy, protection being again, in 1842, adopted as the law of the land. Again, in 1846, however, the system was changed-protection being, to a great extent, withdrawn. Here, however, we may mark the gradual tendency towards its final and complete adoption, as exhibited in the fact that, whereas 20 per cent. had on the previous occasion been taken as the revenue standard, 30 per cent. was now more generally adopted as the rate in all those cases in which protection was deemed to be required.

In brief, it may now be stated, that the expediency of protec tion has been recognised in every tariff since the formation of the Federal Constitution in 1789; and that it has, more or less, existed at every hour, except for a few weeks in 1842; but that it has, on only two occasions, been made adequate to the accomplishment of the object for which it is intended that of raising the prices of the raw products of the earth, and reducing those of manufactured ones. In both those cases - 1828 to 1833, and 1842 to 1846-the laws were repealed almost at the moment when they had fairly begun to become operative.

§ 3. Such is the history of the United States, considered in regard to the great question of the approximation of the consumer and the producer, and consequent relief of the land and its owner from the exhaustive tax of transportation, to be accomplished by means of that simple prescription of Adam Smith, which requires the combination of tons of food with pounds of cotton - thus enabling both to travel cheaply "to the remotest corners of the world." When, however, we come to the question of transportation itself, we find a policy widely different. Here, Colbert and Cromwell were adopted as the guides-the policy of the British Navigation Laws having been adopted in its fullest extent, and persevered in with a tenacity nowhere else to be exceeded. Home-built shipping in the foreign trade was adequately protected, and in the domestic market foreign shipping was absolutely prohibited; and the effect is seen in the establishment of a mercantile marine unequalled in the world for its efficiency, whether as regards the ships themselves, or the men by whom they are commanded.*

"America is the country which enters into this competition with the greatest energy and skill. There is no doubt that all branches of the American navy have the benefit of an education far superior to that which can be obtained by the corresponding class in Great Britain. In reference to this, it may be remarked that papers have been supplied by the American government to the masters of great numbers of merchant vessels, containing a system of directions with respect to observations to be made during their respective voyages. Aided by these, and the logs of the vessels, Lieutenant Maury has been enabled to obtain such a knowledge of the currents of the ocean and the trade-winds as to reduce the length of certain voyages by almost one-third. A discovery of this nature has the effect of giving the Americans something very like a monopoly of a particular trade for a certain time. It is not too much to assert that the logs of the greater number of English merchant vessels would have been utterly useless in investiga tions of this nature. The general education of masters of English vessels is, no doubt, lamentably defective."- London Daily News.

Adequate and long-continued protection in the foreign market, and prohibition of competition in the domestic one, have here produced in regard to ships precisely the effect already witnessed in relation to cloth and iron, in England, France, Germany, and other countries that have been examined that of making ships cheap, while the raw material of ships-the timber- has steadily risen in price.

That, however, has not been the sole result. The object of Cromwell's laws was that of giving to British ships advantages in the trade of Britain with the world at large, and thus excluding other ships from competition even for the trade of their respective countries. The object of the American laws was that of establishing an equality of rights on the ocean, and in the ports of Britain. "To counteract them in this effort," says Mr. McCulloch, "various devices were fallen upon, but they all failed in their object; and at length," as he continues, "it became obvious to every one that we had engaged in an unequal struggle, and that the real effect of our policy was to give a bounty on the importation of the manufactured goods of other countries into the United States, and thus gradually to exclude our manufactures and our shipping from the ports of the republic"-and then the equality of rights was most unwillingly conceded. The example thus set by this country was quickly followed by Prussia, and freedom of trade was thus conquered by means of protection-the same protection by means of which Germany, France, and other countries, are now gradually conquering freedom of commerce.

Here, again, we have one of those "contrasts" to which reference has above been made. Of all the pursuits of man, transportation is the one that tends least to the development of the mind; and the more the energies of a country are forced in that direction, the greater is the tendency towards centralization, weakness, and slavery. Of all the European communities that have devoted themselves to it, Holland and England alone survive — and both decline in strength from year to year. Of all pursuits, conversion is the one that tends most to the diversification of employments, the development of individuality, and the improvement of agricultural wealth and knowledge; and the more free the powers of a country to take that direction, the greater is the tendency towards the development of the treasures of the earth towards the