liberty of exporting wheat to Canada- that is, of carrying coals to Newcastle and other privileges of equal value.

--

What is true of a nation is true of an individual farmer. He may sell a part of his wheat to feed weavers and miners in his immediate vicinity, at sixty cents a bushel, and send the surplus to New York, where he sells it at a dollar, which, after deducting the cost of transportation, nets the same price as that sold at his door. The New York merchant pays more than the neighbours of the farmer, by the cost of transportation, and may thereby be led to think that its burthen falls on him and not on the producer. But the reason why the farmer sells grain to his neighbour at sixty cents is, that unless he did so he would be obliged to send it to New York. However small the surplus that must be sent to a distant market, its net price regulates the gross price of all that remains. It is for this reason, among others, that the producer can afford to tempt consumers to his side, and thus make a home market, by paying them higher prices for their labour, embodied in commodities, than would suffice to obtain the same from abroad.

If, on the contrary, a nation is compelled by the insufficiency of internal production to import a portion of its supply from abroad, it is plain that the demand for this supplementary quantity pushes up the price of all that is made in the country; and the price at which it is sold must determine the price at which the native product is also sold. We are under a present necessity of procuring railroad bars from Wales, and must therefore pay for rails made in Pennsylvania, a price which is enhanced by the duty on those imported. As the internal production approximates to the wants of the country, the price must fall; and when the supply from our mines is adequate, those who import rails from abroad must do so at the expense of paying the duty themselves, without enhancing the price to the purchaser. Lead is now imported under an ad valorem duty of twenty per cent. When the duty was three cents a pound, the price upon the Mississippi was generally less than the duty, and lower than it now is; it being then exported at as low a price as it is now imported. The effect of a duty in respect to price depends upon the question, whether it increases or diminishes competition. The reduction of a duty may so diminish domestic com

petition as to increase price; the imposition of a duty not sufficiently high to stimulate domestic production, must infallibly tend to enhance price, for it puts the duty upon the purchaser, while a higher rate might extort it from the foreign producer. In support of the general doctrine of this and the preceding paragraph, Mr. M'Culloch, commenting on the modifications of our Tariff, proposed by Mr. Meredith in his first Treasury Report, gives his opinion as follows: "Freedom of importation is, speaking generally, the best rule to follow; but there are no absolute rules in politics, or, indeed, in most other things. The Americans formerly compelled us, by their retaliatory proceedings, to make, greatly against our will, though greatly for our advantage, important changes in our navigation laws. And are they quite sure, since they will not follow our example, that we may not diverge a little from the course on which we have entered, to profit by their example? Suppose we laid a discriminating duty of 3s. or 4s. a quarter on corn and flour from America, to continue as long as the proposed new duties (if passed) on cotton goods, iron, &c., imported into the Union are to continue, what could the Americans say against such a duty? To be consistent, Mr. Meredith should write a report in its favour. And yet it would be far more severely felt in the States, than the duties they propose to lay on imports will be felt here. The Americans must come to us for iron and cottons, and must, therefore, themselves pay the duties imposed on them. But we may supply ourselves with corn in fifty other places besides the Union; and hence the duty on it would fall entirely on the United States' grower and exporter, and not on the English

Mr. M'Culloch fails to remark, that when our necessity for importing iron and cottons disappears, it will relieve us from the necessity of exporting corn and flour. It will then be a matter of supreme indifference to us, what duty England may impose upon breadstuffs which we do not send her. Her power to fix the prices at which we shall sell, and at which we shall buy, will then have gone. The producers of American corn and flour will exchange with the producers of iron and cotton, at prices fixed by themselves, and will thus have won freedom of trade.

* Supplement to Commercial Dictionary for 1850.

CHAPTER IX.

GOVERNMENT.

THE widest form of association known among men, is the political. Families grow into tribes, the tribes combine into nations; sometimes, as in the case of the United States, nations are confederated for. so many purposes, that they are spoken of collectively as one nation, instead of thirty-one. In all the forms, a body of agents, denominated in the aggregate the government, is charged by the society with certain duties, and necessarily entrusted with powers adequate to their performance. The general limitations of those powers are established in some instances by written constitutions, in others by prescription; while there are still others, in which, while scarcely any limit is recognized in theory, to the powers of the government, their practical exercise is restricted within narrow bounds, and the individual members of society, though nominally the subjects of a despot, enjoy as much freedom, and exercise selfgovernment in a greater degree, than the citizens of what have been called Republics. The Danes are in this situation, compared with the people of France under the Republican administration.

It is only the Economical functions of government with which we are concerned. In considering them, we have a great advantage over the writers of the Old World. They cannot help regarding the government as something distinct from the people, upon whom and among whom it operates as imposing regulations upon the latter without consulting its will—as controlling affairs by an inherent force. Even where representative institutions exist, as in Great Britain, the elective franchise is restricted to a portion of the popu lation, and its members are denominated "the governing classes." We, however, have before our eyes the working of things under a system, in which the whole people appoint the administrators of government, portioning out to them such powers as they deem expedient; restricting their exercise, or resuming them at will; holding the public servants to strict responsibility for their conduct, and

changing them whenever they exercise their acknowledged powers wrongfully, or fail to exercise them in such a manner as to promote what the entire community regards as its interests at all events, what a majority regard as the general interest. Something of this kind has been imagined by European writers, for the purpose of deducing from the theory of a social contract, the functions and powers which men would be likely to assign to government. But what is theory with them is with us a dry fact. We need not conjecture what men, acting freely, would seek to accomplish by State agency—we have only to inquire what duties they have, in point of fact, assigned to the general agents of the State associations they have formed. As we are constantly seeing constitutions amended, and new constitutions formed by communities passing from the Territorial condition to the full assumption of sovereignty in State organizations, we can also study the tendency of humanity in respect to the reservation of power, or the grant of it to common agents.

A writer who has most thoroughly investigated the antiquities of England, informs us that the primitive germ or unit of an AngloSaxon kingdom, was the Mark or March. It was a district comprising arable lands held in severalty, and pasture lands occupied in common, fenced in by an exterior boundary of forest, heath, or marsh. "It was a miniature State; the principles of whose being, as regarded other similar communities, was separation-as regarded itself, was an intimate union of all its individual members." The process of association between adjoining Marks is thus traced by Mr. Kemble:

"Take two villages, placed on such clearings in the bosom of the forest, each having an ill-defined boundary in the wood that separates them; each extending its circuit woodward as population increases and presses upon the land; and each attempting to drive its Mark (the word is used as indidating the boundary, as well as the territorial district itself,) farther into the waste, as the arable land gradually encroaches upon this. On the first meeting of the herdsmen, one of three courses appears unavoidable; the communities must enter into a federal union; one must attack and subjugate the other; or the two must coalesce into one, on friendly and equal terms."

The reader cannot fail to be struck with the exact correspondence between the course of things here described, and that in the forma

* J. M. Kemble: "The Saxons in England."

tion of our New England States. Plymouth, Boston, Salem, &c., were entirely independent towns, settled by the emigration of distinct colonies, each exercising all the powers of self-government within its own limits, and subsequently coalescing into the Province of Massachusetts Bay, now the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. In like manner, Hartford, Windsor, and New Haven combined by voluntary compact to form the Province of Connecticut. In these unions, each of the former petty sovereignties retains the management of its internal affairs, and the large power of local self-government, with which De Tocqueville was so much impressed. The instinct of "separation as regarded other similar communities, of intimate union of all its individual members, as regarded itself," controlled after the union as before; the union affording fresh security for its indulgence, against the interference of the surrounding savages, or of the British Crown. When the Revolution occurred, the Provinces became independent nations - each as distinct from the other as India and Canada will be, when their connection with Great Britain shall have been severed. The citizens of any one were aliens in all the others, and each formed its own institutions according to its own wants and enlightenment. When the Constitution was formed, the States confederated for certain determinate purposes, and each retaining to itself the general attributes of sovereignty, created a body of common agents in the Federal Government, to which they granted special and limited powers, carefully enumerated, with a jealous reservation, in terms, of all poters not delegated by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States. The result is, that while the Federal Government possesses no power for which there is not an express grant, the State governments possess all power which is not expressly prohibited to them by the people.

This course of things in the organization of government, and the distribution of its functions among different orders of agents, seems to us to correspond with what might be anticipated in the natural development of society. In point of fact it has been a natural development. Constitutions, it has been said, are not made, they grow. The proposition contains most truth, when men have had most freedom to adapt their systems of government to their wants;