from office; and, if you use high tariffs, so | euphonious and pleasing were the words graduated as to raise a great and constant "incidental protection." revenue, then you protect not only the pernicious manufacturer, but the farmer too, allowing his produce to go free; when you were striving, with a laudable zeal, to avoid protection of all kinds, as a policy hateful to you, you are compelled to create a host of enemies by breaking down all the manufactories, and are thus again in danger of ejectment!

But the economist is not so easily balked. His forgetive brain teems with expedients. He invents a new phrase-Incidental Protection.

When this became stale, our economist took a new start. It had not yet occurred to him, that every profitable duty on imports, however small, is protective to an extent proportioned to its weight; because it causes in some degree the substitution of home-made articles if low, and of home manufactured, or of other articles, if high. The economist conceived in his imagination a certain happy medium of duties which should not be quite sufficient to create home manufactures, and should yet yield a good revenue; which should not be so heavy as to stop importation, nor so light as to yield less than might be got from them. Now, having attained this point, (for the experiment was tried,) he observed that it coincided most unluckily with the point at which manufactures began to spring up. If the duties were raised to this point of greatest yield, then manufactures began; for this point was found to be itself determined by the beginning of manufactures; and it would soon become necessary to lower the duty. In short, the point itself was one at which in the nature of things you could not remain. It was found that it would be necessary to keep the duties just below the point where protection would begin, and so the tariff, with its ad valorem affix, could never be made to yield as much as it was desired and ought, without giving a protection which undermined it.

The economist, laying down his maxim, that the revenue should be so raised that no one class or body of men should be enriched at the expense of the rest, advanced, in the same breath, this other, that duties should be collected with a view to revenue only, and not to protection. The first required him to regard, and the second not to regard, the effects of different modes of taxation. The first was universally a protective, the second a universally indifferent and selfish maxim. To reconcile these two incompatibles, he forges a new phrase, "incidental protection." He told the people that he was for incidental protection. He was for protection, but it must be incidental. He would raise the revenue as he best could, and if any protection followed he had no objection-this was incidental protection. Some persons, not of the wisest, mistook this for a patriotical testimony; others A word now upon ad valorem, an adsaid, that there could be no such thing-justment of duties according to the value that a tariff for revenue was directly op- of the commodity imported. This is an posite to a tariff for protection; for, after application of a very necessary rule of the first treasury harvest from a high tariff taxation to the collection of tariffs: lands, on imports, manufactures would spring up, houses, valuable furniture, slaves, cattle, and the duties fall off. That then, to raise in brief, all kinds of real estate and chattels, any revenue, it would be necessary to lower must in general be taxed according to their the duties so as to break down the home appraisement, or their market value at the manufactures again, and reap another har- time; it would be gross injustice to tax a vest on imports. That a protective house just so much, because it was a was therefore the opposite of a revhouse, or a clock because it was a clock. enue policy; that the protection which But in the case of duties this ad valorem was incidental to high and profitable principle (admired by the ignorant for its duties was the plague of the treasury, Latin name) often works great injustice. and continually lessened its receipts; and In times of scarcity, when there are large that, if revenue was the sole purpose of a importations of food into a country, it is an tariff, and of its discriminations, it was the inhumanity to suffer duties to rise with mortal enemy of protection. These argu- prices; this is to aggravate the public disments, however, had but little weight, so tress, and voluntarily to assume the office

sion.

There was a time when legislators regarded the wealth and happiness of the people, but now their whole attention is directed upon increasing the revenue: to get money is all their thought; their understandings are corrupted, and emit only contradictions and absurdities. To be good economists for a nation it is necessary for legislators to be just men; without a good conscience and a good heart, the greatest ingenuity produces nothing of permanent value to mankind.

of an avenging angel. In all such in- | surdity, and in its effects a gross oppresstances it should be a rule of political economy to keep the duties at a moderate rate, and lay them by the quantity, and not by prices. But the ad valorem works equal injustice when prices fall, as in the case of railroad iron at this moment: as the English economists were obliged to lower the duty on bread stuffs, to save the operatives from ruin, it is equally the duty of Congress to raise the duty on railroad iron to save the industrious Germans in the iron factories of Pennsylvania from ruin. By the operation of the ad valorem duty, the price of iron has been unnaturally lowered of late, and our valuable factories of iron are failing under the influx of English iron, thrown into this market at unnaturally low prices, through the distresses of the railroad companies in England. To be sure, we mean not to compare the distresses of our own operatives thrown out of employment, with those of the English, at the point of starvation; but if an action of government was right to prevent a great injustice in the one case, it was equally so to prevent a less one in the other: right and wrong are not measured by less and more; he is as truly an oppressor who does a little wrong, as he who does a great one; as our ancestors well knew when they refused to concede Great Britain the right to tax us even in the value of a sixpence. The justice lies in doing all for the good of the nation, with an eye to its present necessities; and he is but a pedant who mistakes adherence to a maxim through thick and thin for a mark of virtue. The ad valorem applied to tariffs, works injustice in every way; not only when prices fall, but when they are excessive; in the one case diminishing the duty absurdly, and in the other increasing it absurdly. But it not only does evil to producers, but also impairs the revenue. For when there is a great importation and prices fall, the treasury, by keeping its duties at a medium, would reap a good harvest and the people be never the worse for it. And when the prices of imports rise, the duties rise with them, and so force the people to manufacture for themselves. In the one case the revenue is impaired, in the other there is an unnatural stimulus upon production, which the fall of prices will soon abate and bring ruin upon the new manufactories. In fine the ad valorem applied to imports, is in theory an ab

In this cultivated and reasoning age the great qualities of the soul are skillfully imitated by the moral theorist ; instead of patriotism we have a grand philanthropy embracing the whole human race ;-persons infected with this bloating of the heart, lose all the pith and power of affection; their own family, city, or country is too small for them; they must be citizens of the universe, and fraternize with the Calmucks, the Lunary people, and the devil himself. All things must be free-not only trade but the nether limbs of women; and in one breath they propose one universal peace and a masculine costume for ladies. Observe the dullness of these metaphysical sots, who propose a policy for all the world in regard of the condition of men in general, and apply the same to their own nation without regard to its condition in particular. The greatest mark of folly in a man, is to engage in any business on an hypothesis without an eye to conditions. None but madmen will try experiments in business affairs. He who wishes to benefit himself inquires first into all matters concerning himself, and then proceeds by his knowledge of them, and not by any theory of free trade between John and Thomas. On the contrary, John will take good care to give Thomas no advantages; he will have all fair, and make as few affectionate proposals as possible, lest Thomas judge him to be a cheat.

Nothing could better exemplify the necessity of a strict regard to circumstances in a business transaction, or a policy, than the policy of the present Administration in adopting the free trade maxims put forth by British economists. Without entering now upon the question whether the private motives of those English statesmen who have carried the late policy of the English gov

and Cobden policy, so philanthropical to appearance, and so politic and partial in

the fact.

The total value of articles manufactured in the United Kingdom in 1838, is estimated by McCulloch at about £117,000,000 sterling, of which at least fifty millions were exported; producing, at 10 per cent. profit, an income of five millions sterling to the capitalists, which gives an average of £1000 each, to five thousand families among the educated classes. Here we have an immense body of influential persons enjoying an income by the export of manufactured goods, many of them too, like Peel and Cobden, possessed of vast wealth, accumulated, principally, by the employment of capital in manufactures.

reasons

It is surely unnecessary to attribute the motives of a mere agitator, or of a closet theorist, to the leaders of the English free trade party, compelled as they are by the rivalry of our own manufactures in the foreign markets, to furnish everything at the lowest possible rate. It is unnecessary, at least, to attribute any theoretical motives to them, and when the common causes of political movements are considered, it is absurd. There are enough to be found, why they should lighten the duties on imported bread stuffs and on certain raw materials of manufacture, without even the arguments of a famine, much less the idle declamations of a few enthusiasts, as ineffectual to change the course of English legislators as would be a mesmeric spell to draw the gold out of their purses. They are not of that persuadable stuff to be led away from their interests by a free trade hypothesis.

of taxation; and should the democratic spirit gain ground in England, we may live to see the whole interest of the debt paid in this way by the rich, instead of being paid as now by rich and poor alike. The income tax yields, at present, about five and a half millions; that it might easily be increased to twenty-seven, may be guessed from the fact, that the total income of capital in railways, funds, banks, manufactures and commerce in the United Kingdom, is reckoned (at 3 per cent.) at about forty-five millions. Now as far as funded property is concerned, a well distributed income tax is but a cancelling of so much of the national debt; and this policy seems likely to gain ground.

To pursue the illustration: in the days when the landed proprietors, the merchants, and the manufacturers, bore an equal sway in the councils of the nation, before the rise and predominance of the manufacturing interest, none of the great businesses of the nation failed of their due protection. But now a new power has arisen, a new manufacturing power, and the vast body of rich manufacturers who command the markets of the world, are in danger of losing those markets, by competition with ourselves-could we by a protective policy, so far encourage our miners and manufacturers as to undersell them at home and abroad. They command and can use the great body of the movable capital of the United Kingdom; they employ millions of pauper operatives, in constant danger of starvation; they are in a situation which compels them to strain every nerve, and exert every influence to save themselves from ruin; they will stick at nothing to accomplish their purposes. They cannot go to war, for that would spoil all; they cannot beat down the wages of their workmen, for A tax upon the incomes of the rich is these are already at the lowest; they have democratic, and popular, beyond a doubt; but two means left, and these are to buy and it has the advantage of drawing back in the cheapest and sell in the dearest into the treasury a part of the interest of market; to feed their operatives, and supthe national debt; it is a quiet way of ply their mills duty free, and to sell their equalizing the burthen of the debt: the products in America and elsewhere duty nation at large is taxed twenty-seven mill-free: they are, therefore, free traders on ions for that debt, which is paid by the Treasury to the stockholders. Now if a good part of this tax is levied upon the rich, by a graduated income tax, it is but making a number of rich men pay the interest of the debt-a very popular kind

The policy of the Peel party has been to lighten the duties on imported articles and supply the consequent deficiency of revenue by taxes on incomes.

instinct, and having the instinct, they pass, by a natural effect, to the theory. In a word, the great object of English manufacturers, just at this crisis, is to persuade the world that free trade is a capital thing.