The speakers in advocacy of the bill, almost without exception, confined themselves to discussing specific schedules, and hence their speeches are of little interest. The opposition, however, was rich in oratorical denunciation of the principle of the bill and its political animus, terming it a "bill of abominations." Among the brilliant speakers from the South who opposed the measure as an act of tyranny toward their section were Nathaniel H. Claiborne [Va.], George McDuffie [S. C.], James Hamilton [S. C.], Daniel Turner [Va.], and John Randolph [Va.].

THE TARIFF BILL

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, MARCH 5-APRIL 18, 1828

MR. CLAIBORNE dwelt particularly upon the great masses who had abandoned the cultivation of the earth. This occupation,

he said, is the primitive and favorite pursuit of man.

When the population has advanced to a point where the soil will not maintain it, the eagle-eyed sagacity of the citizen will open to him the road to such employments as will best maintain him. There is no necessity for the Government to resort to a hot-bed system of legislation, to force into premature existence a number of sickly manufacturing establishments that will want constant aid from the Government. When the population advances to that point, Government has only to afford protection to all, secure to every man, by an even-handed justice, the fruits of his labor, whether that labor is devoted to the cultivation of the earth, the navigation of the seas, or the labors of the loom, anvil, or hammer. Need I go further than our own country for a happy illustration of the results flowing from a system of government founded on the mild and philosophical principle I here advocate? Under their influence we have, from small beginnings, grown up into a great people-worthy the respect of the world. Sir, we must become a great agricultural people— we have a sufficiency of arable land for the accommodation of the people of the present day. Nay, more, for the accommodation of our probable population for five hundred years to

come.

If eventually we must become a manufacturing people, let it be by a slow process.

How long did Great Britain exist as a nation before she

soared to unrivaled excellence in commerce and manufactures? I answer, until her population advanced to that point that the soil could not maintain it; then her manufactures and commerce flourished. Do we expect to maintain, in a moment, that which in older countries has been more than equal to the labor of ages? If manufactures are necessary to our independence, they will grow under existing circumstances.

The history of the tariff in this country deserves some notice. There have been four revisals, and they have invariably been effected by compromise. To break in so frequently on the system, and extend the duties, produces jealousy, dissatisfaction, and strife. It keeps the price of labor and property constantly fluctuating. It unhinges the confidence of the people in your laws, and it disorders the circulating medium of the country. This incessant advance in duties entices people to embark in manufacturing establishments with an impression that the Government will sustain them at all events, and make their labor productive. The course pursued by Congress in 1824 has let to this effort to increase the duties. It will be remembered that that enterprising State, now the most extensively engaged in the woolen manufactures, was then opposed to increased duties on foreign woolens. That State, I am told, is now at the opposite point, and for greater increase. Sir, your legislation seduces your citizens to invest time and money in those establishments; and, unless you take a firm stand, you must end in the Chinese system of exclusion. In 1824 the vote of the Massachusetts delegation encouraged a belief that the manufactures there were then prosperous; the increased duties laid that year seduced very many to invest their capital in woolen manufactures. Many entered into the business, no doubt, with borrowed capital. What followed? That which was to be apprehended: competition was encountered at home and from abroad. The profits, at first large, are reduced and now comes the application for further protection; and no doubt, in my mind, it will be continued until it works a total exclusion.

This system of exclusion I can never agree to; a mutual exchange of commodities, or free commerce, makes the most distant people friends, and converts the universe into a community of brothers.

MR. MCDUFFIE.-Mr. Speaker, it is distressing to witness the kind of aristocratic influence by which measures of this sort are obviously controlled. I have witnessed, with astonishment and regret, as a strong proof of the aristocratic tendency of every system of government, the melancholy fact that intelligent and

honorable men upon this floor, in whose congressional districts there is perhaps a single manufactory of iron, owned by perhaps the very wealthiest man in the country, will give their votes, without the least compunction, to impose an odious and oppressive tax upon the remaining thousands of their poor constituents, to increase the profits of one wealthy nabob.

And yet, sir, we talk about a democratic government and the responsibility of the Representative to the people! I speak not the language of a demagogue, but the grave and solemn language of historical and philosophical truth, when I say that it is the very genius of this system, as exhibited in this and every other country, to tax the many and the poor for the benefit of the few and the wealthy. Take up the articles embraced in the scheme of protection, one by one, and I defy any man to point out a single one of them that does not specifically prove and illustrate the proposition I have laid down. Salt, for example, is an article of first necessity, equally consumed by the poor and the rich. The people of the United States now pay about one hundred per cent. on every bushel of salt they consume, amounting in the aggregate to a tax of at least a million and a half dollars, paid by all classes, for the exclusive benefit of the owners of some one or two hundred salt works at the utmost. The same remark is strictly applicable to the duty on iron. It imposes a universal tax, both heavy and permanent, for the benefit of not more than one or two hundred iron masters in the United States. And I appeal to the members from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Western Virginia, to state whether these men have not accumulated princely fortunes by the very business which we are taxing the people still higher to sustain ? I was myself informed by one of those iron masters that the establishment in which he was concerned yielded an annual income of, I think it was, $15,000 or $20,000, and that he could afford to sell iron at ten dollars a ton less than the present prices and do a profitable business. And yet, sir, with all the republican simplicity imaginable, we are imposing a heavy tax upon the whole democracy of the country, to increase the already overgrown fortunes of this single branch of the aristocracy! The high duty on imported sugar is another illustration of the view I am attempting to impress upon the House ; and I am induced to notice it the more particularly because it has been urged as a reason why the Southern States generally ought to submit to the proposed imposition of high duties on other articles. Sir, what sort of logic is that which urges the justice of imposing a tax upon South Carolina for the benefit

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