and Louisiana voted solidly against it. In the nullification period the tariff was a compromise. In 1842 the South was largely against the protective act of that year. In 1846 the revenue tariff was Southern in great measure. And the attempts in late years to get rid of the inequalities and iniquities of the war tariffs have had the support of an almost undivided South.'

Under the delusions of the so-called "American system," under the temptations to use public revenues for local and individual benefit and the corruptions of "log-rolling," the Government engaged largely in making internal improvements with Federal revenues. Vetoes, party platforms, absence of constitutional authority, offered no obstacles, and under vagrant powers and the elasticity of the "general welfare" clause, roads have been built, rivers

1 President Cleveland voices very clearly Southern sentiment: "I believe that the theories and practices which tariff reform antagonizes are responsible for many, if not all, of the evils which afflict our people. If there is a scarcity of the circulating medium, is not the experiment worth trying as a remedy of leaving the money in the hands of the people, and for their use, which is needlessly taken from them under the pretext of necessary taxation? If the farmer's lot is a hard one in his discouraging struggle for better rewards of his toil, are the prices of his products to be improved by a policy which hampers trade in his best markets and invites the competition of dangerous rivals? Whether other means of relief may appear necessary to relieve present hardships, I believe the principle of tariff reform promises a most important aid in their satisfaction, and that the continued and earnest advocacy of this principle is essential to the lightening of the burdens of our countrymen."

improved, harbors opened, and nearly everything done which general or sectional needs and wishes have suggested. Rightly to define the authority of the Government in this particular, and fix a safe or just limitation, is conceded to be a difficult problem. In 1843, a meeting was held at Memphis, and a report was submitted by Mr. Calhoun, and adopted, which placed the question on impregnable grounds, but the loose views of construction which prevail, and the advantage of having other people to pay for what should come out of one's own pockets, have left the whole matter without any safe controlling restrictions. Mr. Calhoun, in a letter to myself, never before published, says: "I send you a copy of my Memphis report, and hope the view I have taken of the important subjects of which it treats will meet your approval. I feel assured that on no other can they be permanently settled, and that they must exercise a powerful disturbing influence over the regular action of the Government until they are settled. I am not surprised that some of my warm political friends should still entertain doubts. I have lived too long not to know how reluctantly the clearest proposition is admitted against preconceived opinions. But I have great faith in the final triumph of truth, and never have I been more certain of triumph than in this case. I regard the Report as one of the most effective States-Rights papers I ever put forth,

and that too on a portion of the Federal Constitution heretofore the least understood. It draws a broad line between internal and external improvements, and restricts the Federal Government more rigidly to those belonging to the external relations of the States than any other view ever taken. Indeed, I have heard no objection to the argument, as it relates to the improvement of the navigation of the Mississippi."

The South, from her opposition to the use of such doubtful powers, and from being in a minority, has been greatly the sufferer from the discriminating inequalities of the Government.' As the result of Federal appropriation,

1 While the South by the war was decimated in men and bankrupted in property, the North made money, and at the end of the stupendous conflict was richer than at the beginning. No hostile enemies tramped over her soil; no armadars blockaded ports and threw fiery shot and shell into maritime cities; currency was redundant, speculation was rife, prices were high. The profuse expenditure of the Government kept trade busy in every department, and Mr. Seward said that not only had the war not impoverished anybody but that it “ 'had largely augmented the national resources. As early as July, 1861, James. A. Hamilton, writing to the Secretary of the Treasury, quotes from a letter of Governor Fish, "Can he live amid the extremists and the corruptions that have taken possession of the Government?" and then adds: "This letter is filled with the most painful statements of corruption, which I am not at liberty to repeat. Let us have a proper Committee and the scoundrels will call upon the mountains to crush them ; I could mention names of men in the community, hitherto held above reproach, who have been putting thousands and tens of thousands in their already well filled pockets." In December, 1871, Mr. Van Wyck made a report to the House of

the North has had her harbors and rivers and roads and bridges and buildings, facilitating commerce, lessening the cost of transportation, increasing circulation of money, while the South, in these respects, has had only "the crumbs which fall from the rich man's table.”

Representatives, exposing in disgraceful detail how greedy patriots supplied vessels, arms, stores, horses, clothing, etc., and by clever and atrocious swindling perpetrated gigantic frauds. The aggregate State revenues collected in 1892 by the Northern States from all sources, from real and personal estate-banks, railroads, licenses, and polls-were $103,192,922. In 1893, the money paid for pensions was $156,740,467, besides the $3,703,563 paid for soldiers' homes, of which the North, excluding Delaware and Missouri, received near $127,000,000. Not simply individuals but whole States are pensioners upon the Government—Illinois receiving $11,019,932; Indiana, $11,703,434; Kansas, $7,103,003; Ohio, $17,326,682; Pennsylvania, $15,177,339; Wisconsin, $4,378,353; Michigan, $7,760,227; and Massachusetts, $6,881,243. It is hardly to be wondered at that pension frauds are perpetuated, and all attempts to remedy or prevent them are traduced as disloyalty to the Union. In his Message of December, '93, President Cleveland says: "I am unable to understand why frauds in the pension rolls should not be exposed and corrected with thoroughness and vigor." Every attempt to displace men put fraudulently upon the rolls meets with a howl of simulated indignation, fierce waving of the "bloody shirt," and unstinted reproaches. The proposition is gravely maintained in Congress and by the press, that a pension is a vested right, and cannot be vitiated by incontestable proof of fraud in its obtainment. Subsidized States refuse to yield the subsidies on which they fatten. Mr. Putnam, in his 4th of July address before the city of Boston in 1893, speaks of “ a pension-list swollen to uncounted and ever-growing millions of money, making peace more expensive and more demoralizing than war, and converting the nation's roll of honor into a sordid list of grabbers at the Government's money bags."

CHAPTER XII.

THE principles, policy, and necessity of the South led her to rigid conservatism. A thoughtful scholar notes as a striking antithesis that "a feudal aristocracy like that of slave-holding Virginia produced the most pronounced and inveterate type of democratic politics that has ever existed in our party formations," and that after the Declaration of Independence "the socially aristocratic and prelatical State of Virginia hastened to declare religious liberty." One has not far to go to find solution for these seeming paradoxes. Purest freedom and strongest restraint are in entire harmony. A denial to the Federal Government of a right to resort to and use undelegated powers, and an insistence upon an adherence to the imposed limitations, naturally reacted in favor of State rights and home rule and the individual liberty of the citizen. This home rule, and slave-holding, and personal freedom created a sentiment of individualism, of self-control, of local Government, of opposition to interference of Government with individual and property rights, of manly, chivalrous independence, of family sacredness, of voluntaryism in action, of freedom of conscience. In the Southern States,