in the forms of tobacco and of corn. Carolina and Alabama have the same pursuits; and so it is throughout by far the larger portion of the Union-millions of people being employed in one part of it, in robbing the earth of the constituents of cotton, while in others, other millions are employed in plundering the great treasury of nature, of the constituents of wheat and rice, corn and tobacco, and thus destroying, for themselves and their successors, the power to maintain commerce.

The commerce of State with State is thus, as you see, my dear sir, but very trivial; and the reason why it is so, is, that the commerce of man with his fellow-man, within the States, as a general rule, is so exceedingly diminutive. Were the people of Illinois enabled to develop their almost boundless deposits of coal and iron ore, and thus to call to their aid the wonderful power of steam, the internal commerce of the State would grow rapidly-making a market at home for the food produced, and enabling its producer to become a large consumer of cotton Cotton mills then growing up, bales of cotton wool would travel up the Mississippi, to be given in exchange for the iron required for the roads of Arkansas and Alabama, and for the machinery demanded for the construction of cotton and sugar mills, in Texas and Louisiana.

That, however, being precisely the sort of commerce which Britain so much dreads, and that, too, which our own government desires to destroy, the capitalist feels no confidence in any road dependent upon its growth, whether for the payment of interest upon its bonds, or dividends upon its stock. Hence the almost entire impossibility of obtaining the means of making any road that does not lead directly to Liverpool and Manchester. Look with me, I pray you, into the Report just now published, of the Sunbury and Erie Railroad-running, as it does, through a country abounding in mineral wealth and fertile lands. Its length is 288 miles, 248 of which are already made, and 148 completed by the laying of the iron-the expenditure having somewhat exceeded $8,500,000. There, however, the work stops, it being quite impossible to obtain, even as a temporary loan, either at home or abroad, the trivial sum that is yet required, except at the cost of sacrifices that must be ruinous to those who have commenced the work. Until it shall be obtained, the capital already expended must fail to be productive, and lands equal in extent to a moderate German kingdom, must fail to contribute to the maintenance of our people, and to the increase of the States in wealth, strength, and power.

Thirty years since, Germany did as we are doing, exporting raw materials, and importing finished products. Adopting protection, she has placed herself in a position to compete with Britain for the purchase of wool and cotton, and for the export of knives and cloth. Then she was poor, but now she is so rich that her people take from us bonds by which our roads and lands are bound for the payment of rates of interest so enormous as to ruin the persons whose property has been pledged. -Thirty years since, we paid off all our foreign debts. Adopting free trade measures, we have since created a foreign debt that requires for payment of its interest alone, more than the products of all our farms that go to Europe. Then, we were rich and strong. Now, we appear as beggars for loans in every money market of Europe, and are fast becoming the very paupers of the world.

That our system tends to the destruction of domestic commerce in the Atlantic States, is beyond a question. How it affects the value of land and labor throughout those Western States, in whose favor you now appeal to your Legislature, asking for a continuance of the system by means of which the New York farmer is made to pay the cost of transporting the corn and wheat of his Western competitor, we may now inquire.

Ten years since, Congress created in Illinois a great company of landlords-granting many millions of acres of land, coupled with the obligation to construct a road from north to south, across the State. Two years later, an ex-Secretary of the Treasury, author of the tariff of 1846, was found in London, engaged in peddling off the Company's stock and bonds. While there, he published a book, setting forth the fact that Illinois abounded in rich soils, and in coal and ores, and proving that the land alone would pay for making a road that was to cost, according to my recollection, some fifteen or twenty millions of dollars-the whole of which must, therefore, be clear profit to the stockholders. Eventually, the bait was swallowed, and the result exhibits itself in the fact that Mr. Cobden has been a ruined man-having been led by his free trade friends to invest therein the whole sum of $350,000 paid to him by the Manchester manufacturers, as compensation for his successful efforts at bringing about a repeal of the British corn laws, and of our protective tariff of 1842.

Why is this? Why is it, that the proprietors of so many millions of acres, and of a road crossing so many beds of coal and ores of various kinds, are ruined men? Because the road runs from north to south, and not from east to west, and cannot, therefore, be made a part of any line leading through New York to Liverpool. Because, the value of the land depended upon the development of domestic commerce that commerce which "Britain has so much cause to dread." Had the tariff of 1842 continued in existence, the coal of Illinois would long since have been brought into connection with the lead, iron, and copper ores of Missouri, and the country of the lakes, and with the cotton of the South; and then, all the promises of Mr. Walker, and all the hopes of Mr. Cobden, would have been fully realized. Had, however, that tariff been maintained, the people of Illinois would have made their own roads, and the country would have been spared the disgrace of having ex-Cabinet ministers engaged in the effort to persuade English bankers to lend the money required for their construction. They would have been spared, too, a succession of financial crises, bringing ruin to themselves, while enabling their British free trade friends to denounce them, in common with all their countrymen, as little better than thieves and vagabonds.

The less our domestic commerce, the greater is our dependence upon Liverpool and Manchester, and the less our power to construct any road that does not lead in that direction - the general rule being, that north and south roads can never be made to pay. Look to your own State, crossed by two railroads, leading through your city to Liverpool, while your people are being heavily taxed for an enlargement of your canals, which has for its only object an increase of competition on the part of Western farmers; that increase, too, established at the very moment when your railroad owners are compelling your farmers to pay all the

losses they incur in carrying Western produce at less than the mere cost of transportation. Passing south, you find a Pennsylvania road, running east and west, to compete with yours, Maryland and Virginia roads to compete with all, and South Carolina and Georgia roads intended to do the same; but of local roads you find almost none whatever. Why is this? Because Liverpool is becoming more and more the centre of our system, with New York for its place of distribution. Because we are fast relapsing into a state of colonization even more complete than that which existed before the Revolution.

For the moment, your city profits by this British free trade policy, the prices of lots rising as the taxation of farming lands augments, but, is it quite certain that her services will always be required, as distributer of the produce of British looms? May it not be, and that, too, at no distant period, that Manchester and Cincinnati will find it better to dispense with services that require the payment of such enormous sums as are now required for the maintenance of so many thousands of expensive families, the use of so many costly warehouses, and the payment of such enormous rates of interest? The Grand Trunk Road has already, as we are told by the Daily Times,

"Seized upon our Western carrying trade, and linked Chicago and Cincinnati to Portland and Boston by the way of Canada, and on terms which almost defy competition from the trunk lines of Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York. They are delivering flour and grain in New England, and both domestic and foreign merchandize in Ohio and Illinois, cheaper than they can be profitably transported via Philadelphia, or New York, or Albany. Not content with this, they have entered into competition with our coasting-trade from the Gulf to the East, and, using that other Anglo-American enterprise just alluded to, the Illinois Central, are delivering cotton from Memphis to the New England factories cheaper and with more expedition than it can be forwarded by the Mississippi River to New Orleans, and thence by sea to New York and Boston. Nor have they been unmindful of their own direct steam communication with England from Quebec and Portland-the last-named point being converted into a mart of BritishAmerican commerce by reason of the perpetual lease or virtual ownership by the Grand Trunk Company of the Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railway from Portland to the Victoria Bridge. They are now using the Quebec line of screw steamers, already one of the most successful between England and this continent, for delivering produce from Cincinnati and Chicago at Liverpool in twenty days! — to which end they issue their own responsible bills of lading in the West through to Liverpool. A sample of this operation may be seen in Wall Street almost any day attached to sterling bills of exchange made against breadstuffs and meat and provisions from the West on England. And it is by no means certain that in another year the cotton of Tennessee and North Mississippi will not be made to take the same extraordinary direction, say from the planting States to Manchester through Canada.”

Such being the case now, at the end of fourteen years of British free trade, what will it be ten or twenty years hence? Arrangements are already on foot for connecting Southern cities with Liverpool by means of Portland, while, throughout the West, the managers of the road "have not," as we are farther told,

"Failed to effect the needful alliances in the West, to make the connexions at least temporarily complete. The Illinois Central, from Cairo to Chicago, is their natural ally by reason of its English proprietary, and they bridge the peninsula of Michigan by another English work, the Detroit and Milwaukee Railway. As this last connection will not fully answer the designs of the company on the

winter and early spring trade of the West, while the lakes are closed, it is not impossible that one of the older Michigan roads may be leased, like the Atlantic and St. Lawrence, or a controlling interest purchased in its shares and mortgages. The Michigan Southern has been named in this connection, because of its present financial embarrassments, which have cheapened almost to a nominal value its stock and bonds, and because, too, of its terminus at Toledo as well as Detroit; the former point being essential to the Cincinnati connections of the Grand Trunk."

The more frequent and severe our financial crises, the more perfect must become the control of British traders over all our roads, and the greater the tendency towards diminution in the necessity for profiting of the services of New York stores and New York merchants. least, it seems to me.

So, at

For seven years past we have talked of the construction of a road to California, but, in the present state of our affairs, becoming poorer and more embarrassed from year to year, it is quite impossible that we should ever enter upon such a work. The wealth and power of Britain, on the contrary, become greater from day to day—all her colonies, ourselves included, being compelled to add to the value of her land and labor, while their own soils become more and more impoverished, and their own laborers are less and less employed. Let our existing commercial policy be maintained, and we shall see the Grand Trunk Road extended to the Pacific Portland and Quebec becoming the agents of Liverpool and Manchester, and taking the place now occupied by New York. Looking at all these facts, is it not clear

That all our tendencies are now in the direction of colonial vassalage? That, as your city has grown at the expense of others, because of its proximity to Liverpool, so other places, furnishing means of communication that are more direct, may profit thereby at its expense?

That as Liverpool has taken the place of New York in regard to ships,

it may soon do so in regard to trade? And therefore,

That the real and permanent interests of your city are to be promoted by an union of all our people for the re-establishment of that industrial independence which grew so rapidly under the protective tariffs of 1828 and 1842?

Begging you to be assured of my continued determination to give to the answers you may make to these questions, the widest circulation among protectionist readers, I remain, my dear sir, Yours, very truly,

W. C. BRYANT, Esq.

HENRY C. CAREY.

PHILADELPHIA, March 6, 1860.

LETTER ELEVENTH.

From the Evening Post, Tuesday, Feb. 28.

"AN EXAMPLE OF THE EFFECT OF PROTECTION.-Among the commodities which have hitherto not been permitted to be brought into France from foreign countries is cutlery. It is now included in the list of merchandize to which the late treaty with Great Britain opens the ports of France.

"Those who have made a comparison of French cutlery with the cutlery of the British islands must have been at first surprised at the difference in the quality. Nothing can exceed the perfection of workmanship in the articles turned out from the workshops of Sheffield. The symmetry and perfect adaptation of the form, the excellence of the material, the freedom from flaws, and the mirror-like polish which distinguish them, have for years past been the admiration of the world. French cutlery, placed by its side, has a ruder, rougher appearance, an unfinished look, as if the proper tools were wanting to the artisan, or as if it was the product of a race among whom the useful arts had made less progress.

"This is not owing to any parsimony of nature, either in supplying the material to be wrought or the faculties of the artisan who brings it to a useful shape. The ores of the French mines yield metal of an excellent quality, and the French race is one of the most ingenious and dexterous in the world. In all manufactures requiring the nicest precision and the greatest delicacy of workmanship the French may be said to excel the rest of mankind. Out of the most unpromising and apparently intractable materials their skilful hands fabricate articles of use or ornament of the most pleasing and becoming forms. What, then, is the reason that their cutlery is so much inferior to that of Great Britain?

"In all probability the reason is that which at one time caused the silk trade to languish in Great Britain, which at one time made the people of the same country complain that their glass was both bad in quality and high in price. In both these instances the competition of foreign artisans was excluded; the British manufacturer having the monopoly of the market, there was nothing to stimulate his ingenuity; he produced articles of inferior quality, his vocation did not flourish, and both he and the community were dissatisfied. So with regard to the cutlery of France, the difficulty has been the prohibition of the foreign article. Let the foreign and the French commodity be looked at side by side for a few years in the shop-windows of Paris, if the duty to which cutlery is still to be subject will permit it, and we think we may venture to pledge ourselves that the French workmen will show themselves in due time no way behind their English rivals. We may expect the same result to take place which has so much astonished and puzzled the friends of protection in Sardinia, where the removal of prohibitions and protective duties has caused a hundred different branches of manufacturing industry to spring to sudden and prosperous activity."

DEAR SIR: Anxious that all the protectionists of the Union should, as far as possible, have it within their power to study both sides of this question, I here, as you see, lay before my readers your latest argument against protection, thereby affording them that opportunity of judging for themselves which you so systematically deny to the readers of the Post. Why is it that it is so denied? Is it that the British system can be maintained in no other manner than by such concealment