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of Massachusetts, because a tax has already been imposed upon both South Carolina and Massachusetts for the benefit of Louisiana? I do not understand this system of sectional combination-I am sure it is not founded upon the principles of the Constitution by which South Carolina is to be made responsible to Massachusetts for the duty on sugar, any more than she is responsible to Louisiana for the duty on woolens. By all the ties which consecrate this Union, my State stands in as near a relation to Massachusetts as to Louisiana, and he does not consult either the spirit of the Constitution or the harmony of the Union who deduces such an argument as that which I am considering from geographical juxtaposition merely. I, sir, complain of the duty upon sugar as much as any other member of this House. It is obnoxious, in a peculiar manner, to the objection I have urged against the duties on salt and iron; it is a tax on the great body of the people for the benefit of some two or three hundred sugar planters who are men of immense wealth; for the fact is notorious that the business is almost conclusively confined to large capitalists. Every family in the United States that consumes 33 1-3 pounds of sugar pays a tax of one dollar to these wealthy monopolists; and I know a single individualhe is a personal friend-worth between two and three millions of dollars, who receives annually about $30,000 as his dividend of this national bounty.

Can there be a more striking proof of the injustice, and impolicy, and anti-republican tendency of this system? It imposes a tax of at least four millions five hundred thousand dollars upon the mass of the people in every State in the Union, for the sole and exclusive benefit of the iron masters, sugar planters, and owners of salt works, not amounting, in the whole Union, to more than from five hundred to one thousand persons; and, if we add all the owners of cotton and woolen manufactories in the United States, it would not swell the number to two thousand. Sir, the foundation of an aristocracy of wealth was never more distinctly laid in the legislation of any country on earth; nor was the democracy of any other country ever subjected to such an enormous tax to sustain a privileged order. There is nothing in the legislation of England, not excepting the oppressive system of the corn laws, more justly obnoxious to condemnation.

But, sir, the manufacturers, with an art common to all those who, by the various devices of human cunning, have made subservient to their purposes the credulity of the multitude, allege that the great body of farmers, constituting, perhaps, three

fourths of our population, are interested in the establishment of manufactures as a means of obtaining a market for their wool. Conceding, as I readily do, that the establishment of manufactories, when not forced by artificial means, is beneficial to such farmers as live within their vicinity and have capital sufficient to embark in the business of wool-growing, yet I confidently appeal to every member from the wool-growing portions of the Union to say whether the business of growing wool for the manufacturing establishments is not confined to a very small portion of farmers, consisting of those who have the largest capital? Yes, sir, I have been assured by members on this floor, engaged in the business of wool-growing, that the small farmers do not even raise wool for their own consumption, but actually buy it from those of the more wealthy class. I may venture to assert that, taking the average even of the wool-growing States, there is not one in fifty of the farmers who raises wool for sale; and that the whole number of wool growers in the United States who would be at all benefited by the duty upon raw wool and woolens would not exceed ninety thousand persons. Thus it is, sir, that this bill maintains a consistent character throughout all its provisions, and the great democratic farming interest, represented as constituting nine millions of our population, dwindles into an aristocracy of ninety thousand of the most wealthy farmers. It is to provide a small bounty for those wool growers and a very large one for the still smaller number of woolen and cotton manufacturers, iron masters, sugar planters, and owners of salt works, that the other classes of the people, including more than eight millions nine hundred thousand of the people of the farming States, are compelled to pay an annual tax of about fifteen millions of dollars. Such, sir, is the operation, and such the political tendency of this system. I shall be probably asked how it happens that the capitalists of the South, the wealthy cotton planters, are arrayed on the side of the great mass of the people in this contest between capital and labor? Sir, such is our position in this contest that our interest throws us into a natural alliance with the great body of the people in the farming States. The wealthy cotton planter of the South fights by the side of the small farmer, the mechanic, the merchant, and the laborer, in New York and Pennsylvania, because they all have a similar interest in opposing a system of which the burden falls upon them and the benefit on others. And this accounts for the fact -notorious in our political history-that what some are pleased to call the aristocracy of the Southern States has always been

found on the same side with the democracy of the Northern States in the political controversies by which the country has been divided. It is a natural alliance. The Southern States, depending on free trade for their prosperity, must always be opposed to any attempts on the part of this Government to build up, by commercial prohibitions, an aristocracy of favored monopolists. Sir, this is not a contest, as some are anxious to represent it, between the Southern and Northern States. It is a contest of less than one hundred thousand manufacturers and farmers against all the other farmers and manufacturers in the Union, and against the whole population in the Southern States.

Mr. Speaker, such are the disguise and delusion incident to this sort of legislation that baseness and treachery are not unlikely to receive the reward appropriate to disinterested patriotism.

Indeed, sir, when I contemplate the extraordinary infatuation which a combination of capitalists and politicians have had the singular art to diffuse over more than one-half of this Union-when I see the very victims who are about to be offered up to satiate the voracious appetite of this devouring Moloch paying their ardent and sincere devotions at his bloody shrine, I confess I have been tempted to doubt whether mankind was not doomed, even in its most enlightened state, to be the dupe of some species of imposture and the victim of some form of tyranny. For, sir, in casting my eye over the history of human idolatry, I can find nothing, even in the darkest ages of ignorance and superstition, which surpasses the infatuation by which a confederated priesthood of politicians and manufacturers have bound the great body of the people in the farming States of this Union, as if by a spell, to this mighty scheme of fraud and delusion.

MR. HAMILTON.-Sir, one of the great masters of human knowledge, who with a ken little short of the spirit of prophecy, perceived some of the causes of the success of our revolution in the very turn of thinking of our people on the subject of taxation, has told us that "Liberty inheres in some sensible objects; every nation has formed for itself some favorite point, which, by way of eminence, becomes the criterion of their happiness. It happened that the great contests for freedom, in this country, were, from the earliest times, chiefly upon the question of taxing. It is not easy to make a monopoly of theorems and corollaries. The colonies draw from you, as with their life blood, these ideas and principles. Their love of liberty is fixed,

and attached, on this specific point of taxing." And so, sir, it has continued, down to the present day, in our transit from colonial dependence to sovereign States. This habitual sensibility, which belongs to a free people, you have aroused, by observing no sort of moderation in your objects, until you have fixed the conviction in the public mind that the difference between "taxation without representation" and taxation with representation, in violation of the spirit if not the letter of the constitution, is too idle, in the abstract, to mitigate the evils which, in practice, are common to both; and depend upon it that it will require a more ingenious and talented casuist than even such a man as the pensioned author of "Taxation no Tyranny" to satisfy our people that you are not doing the same thing, in a different form, with the superadded burden of an amount of impost, which never arose even in the imaginations of Grenville and of North, to stimulate their cormorant appetites for American revenue; aggravated, as all this is, by the irrepressible sentiment that you are breaking the faith of that equal compact by which this Union can alone hope to live "the fountain from which its current runs, or bears no life."

But I trust, sir, that this cup may pass from us; that in our firmness and enlightened patience-not base submissionand in your returning sense of justice, we shall find our remedy and relief; that the spirit of concord and affection may again be breathed into this Union, animating it with the durability of eternal life. But, if an adverse destiny should be ours -if we are doomed to drink "the waters of bitterness," in their utmost woe-if we are doomed under a tyrannous legislation to be reduced in effect again to a condition of colonial vassalage, by your compelling us to purchase, in one quarter of this Union, all that we may consume, and of selling all that we may procure by the sweat of our brow to the same favored portion, you may rely at least on one thing-that, in a juncture so full of difficulty, South Carolina will be found on the side of those principles, standing firmly on the very ground which is canonized by that revolution which has made us what we are, which has imbued us with the spirit of a free and sovereign people.

MR. TURNER.-This Government was formed for great and noble purposes; it was formed upon the principle that the people should be able to control their rulers; it was formed for the benefit of the whole; it was not formed for a majority to promote their own views, as their private interest may direct.

And, sir, these political schemes, which I conceive to be entirely hostile to our institutions, are doing more to weaken the Union of these States than any plan that could be devised. Instead of leaving the people to manage their own affairs in their own way, we must administer our medicine most profusely; and God grant that we may not inscribe on the tomb of our patient the old Spanish epitaph: "I was well, would be better, here I am." It is but too evident that both in our general and State governments we have too much legislation. Let us pass only those laws that are absolutely necessary, and no more; leave the rest to the people-let nature take its course; this is the correct policy of this Government. For all these fine-spun political schemes, which appear so well in theory, when reduced to practice, nine times in ten bring misery and oppression upon some one portion of the community. Something is left out of the calculation which was not foreseen-it produces too artificial a state of authority; and the machine ultimately becomes so complicated that no political juggler, however expert he may be, will be competent to its management. It is upon these principles that I am opposed to all those political measures which, in a country so extensive as this, where the interest of the people is so diversified, must have a tendency to build up one portion of the community at the expense of the other. For the justice of these remarks I would instance England, that glorious but unfortunate country, where political legerdemain has been exercised, until their tricks can no longer conceal that they have brought their country to the brink of national bankruptcy.

It appears, sir, that we, too, like England, must have our schemes; and to render them the more palatable great names are given the American system. But gentlemen differ widely as to what is the American system. Just as the supposed interests of particular portions of country, which gentlemen happen to represent, require, so they speak. Sir, we all know and feel the influence and magic of a name; but the veriest minnow, to whom this bait is thrown, will, I hope, discover too much sagacity to be deceived. The American system! Sir, we disclaim the name; and denominate it a system to use this Government to promote the views of particular sections of country. The true American system consists in the Government not interfering in matters which are calculated alone to promote the interest of comparatively few individuals, and those confined to particular sections of country, at the expense, nay, sir, the ruin, of other portions of the Union.

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