The advocates of dependence on foreign manufactures tell us that it is as well to sell gold and buy iron, as it would be to sell iron to buy gold. I reply, 1st. That, to the extent of our necessary consumption, having exhaustless resources and adequate industry or ability to procure both, we ought to buy neither. 2d. When Boulton, the associate of the great Watt, showed his iron manufactory, he said, "I sell here what all men are anxious to buy, Power." It has been proved that a nation may sell gold for iron without gaining power, as many a nation has bought iron without securing it. But it is clear, that the nation that makes its own iron creates its own power.

It seems to be understood by the advocates of foreign manufac tures here, that only those branches languish which have not suffi cient vigor to be brought to maturity, by never so much protection. This is opposed to the experience of all mankind. There is not, in France or in England, a successful culture or manufacture that has not been made so by the application of national protection and patronage. The manufacturers of England are sustained, even now, by the sacrifice of agricultural labor there. The decline of agriculture is proved by a rapidly increasing emigration from the British islands. What England calls free trade is, indeed, a new form of protection, but it is protection, nevertheless. She finds it equally effective and expensive. British commerce and British manufactures do indeed flourish, but British empire declines. The decline is seen in the tameness of England, now, toward Russia, France, and our own country, compared with the different attitude she maintained against all offending powers in the age of the elder Pitt and the younger Pitt.

It is insisted, however, that encouragement yielded to the industry of one class of citizens is partial and injurious to that of others. This cannot be in any just sense true, since the prosperity and vigor of each class depend in a great degree on the prosperity and vigor of all the industrial classes. But all experience shows, that if government do not favor domestic enterprise, its negative policy will benefit some foreign monopoly, which, of all class legislation, is most injurious and least excusable.

Once more, it is said that the present system must be right, because predictions of disasters that should result from it have been falsified. I do not dwell on the signs which seem now to portend a fearful fulfillment, nevertheless, of those predictions. Let it suffice to say,

that it is as common an error to look prematurely for the blights which must follow erroneous culture, as it is to expect propitious. fruits from that which is judicious. This nation is youthful and vigorous. It cannot now suffer long and deeply from any cause, for it has great recuperative energies. It is not destined to an immediate fall, or even to early decline. It is the part of wisdom, nevertheless, not to try how much of erroneous administration it can bear, but to adapt our policy always so as to favor the most complete and lasting success of the republic.

Gentlemen of the Institute: I refrain from discussing the details of a protective policy. Circumstances are bastening a necessity for an examination of them, in another place, where action follows debate, and is effective. I shall not be absent nor idle there. But I will not attempt to delude either myself or you into the belief that the opinions I have expressed, which, I trust, in some degree correspond with your own, will soon become fully engrafted into the policy of the government. I shall perform my duty better by showing you that it is not wise to expect, nor even absolutely necessary to depend on, the exercise of a just patronage of our industry by the government.

This republic, although constituting one nation, partakes of the form of a confederation of many states, and, for the purpose of securing acquiescence, allows great power to minorities. Although there is no real antagonism of interests, there is, nevertheless, a wide divergence of opinion concerning those interests, resulting from the different degrees of maturity and development reached in the several states. Massachusetts and Virginia, New York and South Carolina, scarcely differ in their ages; but, nevertheless, they differ in their industrial systems as widely as Pennsylvania and Arkansas. The old free states have passed through the stages at which the merely agricultural and planting states have only arrived. It would practically be as impossible to bring these latter states immediately up to our proper policy, as it would be to carry us backward to the system which they are pursuing. They will resist all such efforts, earnestly and perseveringly, so long as they shall feel that they are unable, like us, to distribute their industry, and so to share in the benefits of that policy. All that we can expect, under such circumstances, from the government, is some occasional and partial modification of its financial policy, so as to favor the success of the efforts

of the friends of home industry in establishing it on a safe basis, without the immediate and direct aid of congress. And this will be sufficient. It is not yet forty years since New York applied in vain to the United States to construct the Erie canal, which was acknowledged to be the incipient measure in a system of internal improvements to be coëxtensive with the republic. Now, not only that canal has been built, but the whole system is in a train of accomplishment, although congress has not only never adopted, but has almost constantly repudiated it. Private and corporate enterprise, sustained by the states, has worked out what the federal government has refused to undertake. The same agencies will establish the American system. Capital, labor, science, skill, are augmenting here. Power is daily becoming cheaper, and consumption more extensive. New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Ohio, have become manufacturing states. The advantages resulting from the policy are indicated, not more by the universal improvement of the agricultural districts in these states, than by the prosperity and growth of their towns and cities. Here are Boston, Lowell, Lawrence, Springfield, Providence, New Haven, Rutland, Bennington, New York, Albany, Troy, Rochester and Buffalo, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, Newark and Paterson, Wilmington and Baltimore, Cincinnati and Cleveland; contrast with them the towns and cities of those states which practically adhere to the policy of employing foreign industry, and you see plainly the results of that error. This contrast excites inquiry, and inquiry will go on, until it shall correct the great mistake, and introduce universal emulation. Persevere, then, Gentlemen of the Institute; for, while you are represented as hindering the prosperity of the country, you, and none so much as you, are securing it, and rendering it universal. While you are regarded as favoring privileges and monopolies, you, and none so much as you, are counteracting pauperism and class legislation. While you are censured for opposing the interests of commerce, you, and none so much as you, are laying sure foundations for a commerce that shall be broad as the limits of the earth, and lasting as the necessities and the enterprise of mankind. While you are represented as checking the rising greatness of the nation, you, and only you, by lifting labor to its rightful rank, are elevating the republic to true and lasting independence.

THE PHYSICAL, MORAL, AND INTELLECTUAL DE

VELOPMENT OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.1

A POLITICAL discourse may seem out of time and out of place at a classic festival and in academic groves. Nevertheless, the office of instructor to a prince brought something more of dignity even to the learning and piety of Fenelon. To study the forces and tendency of a republic which is not obscure, cannot, therefore, at any time or in any place, be unbecoming an association which regards universal philosophy as the proper guide of human life.

Nations are intelligent, moral persons, existing for the ends of their own happiness and the improvement of mankind. They grow, mature, and decline. Their physical development, being most obvious, always attracts our attention first. Certainly we cannot too well understand the material condition of our own country. "I think," said Burke, sadly, addressing the British house of commons, just after the American war, "I think I can trace all the calamities of this country to the single source of not having had steadily before our eyes a general, comprehensive, well connected, and well proportioned view of the whole of our dominions, and a just sense of their bearings and relations."

Trace on a map the early boundaries of the United States, as they were defined by the treaty of Versailles, in 1783. See with what jealousy Great Britain abridged their enjoyment of the fisheries on the northeast coast, and how tenaciously she locked up against them the St. Lawrence, the only possible channel between their inland regions and the Atlantic ocean. Observe how Spain, while retaining the vast and varied solitudes which spread out westward from the Mississippi river to the Pacific ocean, at the same time assigned the thirty-first parallel of north latitude as the southern boundary of the United States, and thus shut them out from access by that river or otherwise to the gulf of Mexico. See now how the massive and

1 An Address before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Yale College: New Haven, July 26, 1854.

merce.

unpassable Alleghany mountains traversed the new republic from north to south, dividing it into two regions-the inner one rich in agricultural resources, but without markets; and the outer one adapted to defense and markets, but wanting the materials for comWere not the Europeans astute in thus confining the United States within limits which would probably render an early separation of them inevitable, and would also prevent equally the whole and each of the future parts from ever becoming a formidable or even a really independent Atlantic power? They had cause for their jealousies. They were monarchies, and they largely divided the western hemisphere between them. The United States aimed to become a maritime nation, and their success would tend to make that hemisphere not only republican, but also independent of Europe. That success was foreseen. A British statesman, in describing the American colonies just before the peace, had said to his country men: "Your children do not grow faster from infancy to manhood than they spread from families to communities, and from villages to nations."

The United States, thus confined landward, betook themselves to the sea, whose broad realm lay unappropriated; and, having furnished themselves with shipping and seamen equal to the adventurous pursuit of the whale fishery under the poles, they presented themselves in European ports as a maritime people. Afterwards, their well-known attitude of neutrality, in a season of general war, enabled them to become carriers for the world. But they never forgot, for a moment, the importance of improving their position on the coast. France was now the owner of the province of Louisiana, which stretched all along the western bank of the Mississippi. She wisely sold a possession, which she was unable to defend, to the United States, who thus, only twenty years after the treaty of Versailles, secured the exclusive navigation of the great river; and, descending from their inland frontier, established themselves on the coast of the gulf of Mexico. Spain soon saw that her colonies on that coast, east of the Mississippi, now virtually surrounded by the United States, were thenceforward untenable. She, therefore, for an equivalent, ceded the Floridas, and retired behind the Sabine; and so the seacoast of the United States was now seen to begin at that river, and, passing along the gulf and around the Pensacola, and beyond the capes, to terminate at the St. Croix, in the bay of Fundy.