H. OF R.] The Tariff Bili. [JAN. 26, 1833. obtain relief from the evils of selling their cotton to laws deliberately and with universal consent enacted, American merchants, or having it carried to market in our whole system of Indian protection, fell into conflict American ships? No, sir, the destroying demon of free with the reserved rights, the transcendental sovereignty trade will visit your ships when he shall have demolished of a slave-owning State, the republic of Georgia; and that your factories. If the English can spin and weave your republic, by the exercise of that sovereignty, repealed cotton so much cheaper than the Americans, are they not your laws, abrogated your treaties, and demolished able also to carry that cotton to market at a much cheaper your whole system of Indian encouragement and pro Yes, sir, Georgia applied to that part of your system what South Carolina is now aiming at all other parts of it-nullification. You beheld the Indian rights perish, and dared not lift up your hand, or so much as whisper, at the lowest note of your voice, against the horrid outrage; and the Almighty, to punish you for your violated faith, seems to have delivered all your own great rights and interests into the hands of another spoiler, and to have taken from you the counsel and the courage now so needful for your own defence. Sir, the great protected and protecting part of your system is the navy. Will that escape the blow aimed at the whole system? It has cost you not less than $108,000,000, and it now costs three or four millions annually. It protects your navigation and commerce, passing and returning from the ports of our own to the most distant harbors of every other country. What then? Do the owners of slaves, the planters of cotton, rice, and tobacco, intend much longer to need this protection? When, by the course of free trade, their production shall become a part of English commerce; when the transportation of What a madness must have taken possession of men's that commerce shall give employment to English naviga- minds, when, to ruin the interests of others, they, without tion; what use, I pray you, will the plantation States have consideration, peril their own! South Carolina, at war for that protection which is now given by the American with protection, carries her hostility against it into every navy? The stars and stripes may be hoisted over the branch of modern industry; and, because agriculture is beef and bread of Ohio and Pennsylvania, or over the one of those interests, and Northern as well as Southern boards and shingles of New England, should any of these agriculture is protected, she would destroy the protection be wanted by foreign nations; but over the cotton, rice, of her own, rather than leave it undestroyed in regard to and tobacco, of the independent South, when sent to Li- the agriculture of the North. verpool or London, you shall see "St. George's banner,| By the repeal of all laws granting protection to manubroad and gay." Why should the United States be at the factures in the North, the whole market for the agriculimmense cost of sustaining a navy, and spreading a flag of tural products of the farming States will be destroyed. their own, on the ocean, merely to protect their naviga- This will leave on the hands of farmers in the North, the tion and commerce while moving on that highway of na- South, and the West, their wheat, their corn, their flour, tions, when British ships and the British flag can and will provisions. Still more will be lost to the farming commugive this protection, either for nothing at all, or at a much nity. Millions of money have been expended to improve cheaper rate than it can be done by the American_navy? our native race of sheep, by importing into the country Sir, the hand which wields the lash of Southern slavery the best Saxon and Spanish merino flocks. If protection will first scourge free white laborers from your factories be withdrawn from your woollen manufactories, their ruin and workshops; then destroy your fisheries; after that, waste and scatter your navigation; and finally pull down the American flag, and give up every ship in the navy. Internal improvement was a part of your system for the encouragement and protection of commerce among the several States. Had that been carried out and perfected, what a relief to the cost of that commerce, by perfecting the great medium of transportation throughout the country! What a cord of union would have been wrought by the extent and frequency of mutual intercourse among all To secure the repeal of every law giving protection, the people of all the several States! That part of the sys- they, in their madness, would abolish that which has entem has been lopped off by the slaveholding influence of couraged and now protects their own favorite production the anti-protection States; and perhaps we shall never see of cotton. Who does not remember, in 1789, when three the common treasury of the nation again open to encou- cents a pound was placed as a duty on imported cotton, rage our domestic commerce by giving aid to that spirit of at the request of South Carolina, to encourage her to buy enterprise which would improve the condition of our com-cotton seed, and begin the culture? Two years after, mon country, by roads, rivers, canals, and railways. is unavoidable, and the American market for wool must be thereby destroyed. These beautiful flocks are doomed to the slaughter; the blood of thousands of hecatombs of them must be poured out to satisfy that black-hearted avarice of the South which vainly dreams that, by destroying the flocks, the fields, the workshops, the labor of the free, more work can be scourged out of the slaves of their own region, or that the product of that work may be sold for more money. they exported one hundred and eighty-nine thousand To extend the benefits of our great system to the Indian three hundred and sixteen pounds of cotton. In 1816, tribes, was the purpose of those intercourse laws of pro- this same South Carolina called for more encouragement tection, which, by encouraging among them agriculture, of her favorite staple; and although she exported to Engmechanic arts, manufactures, and commerce, carried to land, that year, eighty-one million seven hundred and these people science, letters, christianity, and civilization. forty-seven thousand one hundred and sixteen pounds, What has demolished this glorious part of your system, and the rate of duty then excluded all foreign cotton from and pushed these tribes beyond the great river, and our market, yet she, for her own benefit, obtained a law beyond the limits of civilization, so that they may again excluding from the American market East India cotton, be lured back to barbarism by the herds of buffalo, and imported in the form of cloth. Thus encouraged and the joys of the hunter's life, prepared for them on the protected, the South did, in 1830, export to England two prairies of the West? To the intent, no doubt, that they hundred and ninety-eight millions of pounds, and sell to may once more be provoked to war by the savage tribes domestic manufacturers nearly eighty millions of pounds of that region, so that mutual strife and mutual slaughter more of cotton. may finally consume these remnants of those "once mighty What next? Why, sir, since South Carolina has denations of this continent." What has effected all this, clared herself independent, and Georgia has conquered this destroying of the old, and introducing this new and the Cherokees, these two States, in the full blossom of inglorious scheme of policy, so traitorous to the plighted their chivalry, have not only declared Charleston a free faith with those nations, and so ruinous to their rights and port, but have announced, by this bill, that their cotton their civilization? Sir, our treaties solemnly made, our shall bereafter be a free commodity until it reaches Eng JAN. 26, 1833.] The Tariff Bill. [H. OF R. land, when they agree it may pay a tax for the benefit of beautiful and durable filaments, drawn out and almost mathe British treasury. Sir, unless we save these wild, scheming politicians from themselves, they will ruin their own interest by their own mad policy. Can cotton be made free without injury to the production in the American market? England now gets from the West Indies about From the East Indies From Brazil,* Total, 5,000,000 lbs. - 17,000,000 6,000,000 34,000,000 - 62,000,000 This amounts to almost as much as the United States exported in 1816. What shall hinder these regions from increasing their production as rapidly as the like production has been increased in the Southern States? nufactured by the diligent little insect which seems to live for no other purpose than to feed and to work. Silk is increasing in every part of the country. Wherever the white mulberry, a most vigorous and hardy tree, can grow, there the silkworm may be fed, and made to work, and rendered productive. Men, women, and children, the old and the young, the feeble and the athletic, the rich and the poor--all may rear, and all are beginning to rear, either for profit or amusement, this beautiful production. In a few years, the raw material will be abundant in our country; and be assured that skill in the manufacture will keep pace with the raw production, and the fabric will, in time, be not more costly, if we regard its beauty or durability, than well-wrought cotton cloths. Sir, you well remember what we have all read, that silk cloth was, in the time of Augustus, equal in value, pound for pound, with the finest gold. The time, I am persuaded, will come, when, in our country, the ploughman will, as a matter of prudent economy, use silk cloth for his frock and trowsers. Cotton can be grown on a broad belt of region on both sides of the equator, up to perhaps thirty-eight degrees of latitude; but it is a mere annual plant without the tropics, and requires, in such parts of the globe, yearly Sir, the cotton of the South, if left unprotected, and planting. In Brazil, and the East Indies, it is a tree, and exposed to so much other cotton competition, and when requires but little culture. The English have, within a finally run against, in the market, by all the growers of few years, transmitted the best seeds to Hindostan; and silk, in every latitude and longitude of our whole counthe natives of that country, any one of whom can subsist try, must fall in price to less than the present amount of a day on little more than a handful of rice, can work duty on the importation of it. No statesman, who recheaper, and furnish this product, a perennial in their gards the preservation of all the great interests of his country, at a less cost than any other people. Brazil pro- country, would, at this time, remove the protection from duces a species of cotton of a long, coarse staple, and as cotton. Mountebanks in political economy, knights errant fit for cordage and sail cloth as hemp itself. If the im- in free trade, and market politicians, may call for this repost be repealed, that cotton will be largely imported, peal; and these men, who would suffer a little themselves, and a new fabric to dress all our ships and vessels will be that they might be enabled to ruin others, may repeal speedily wrought from it by our manufacturers. The protection on cotton, to obtain a repeal of it on wool, jurisdiction of Egypt is now extended along the Levant woollens, and on the manufacture of cotton and woollen through all Syria, and Ali Pacha, now the Sultan of that cloths. The one would destroy the capital and free labor fruitful country, already knows the value, and will increase the amount of the cotton production in his own dominions. England has lately explored the course of the Niger to the ocean, and thus opened to her own commerce the rich and populous interior of Africa. Here is a country abounding in all tropical products, and especially in cotton. of the North; the other might injure, but could not ruin the wealthy owners and workers of Southern slaves. Shylock might lose his three thousand ducats, and still be rich as a Jew; but Antonio, when that Jew's knife had severed from his breast, and nearest to his heart, "the pound of flesh," would hardly have blood enough left to preserve his life. A country west of our own is now in a course of settle- Is the defence of our country, a part of our great sysment from all the free States. Texas is a part of Mexico, tem of protection, devised for security of the labor and and, therefore, slavery will not be tolerated in that terri- capital of all the people? Then does this bill, anti-protory. It is, perhaps, the most fertile region on the earth, tection in its very principle, remove that defence. Destroy and is peculiarly adapted to the culture of cotton. In those interests, which have called the people together that region, one New England farmer (and many have in cities, towns, villages, hamlets, near your waterfalls, migrated thither) will grow twelve bales of cotton in a bays, and harbors, and covered the agricultural districts, summer. In fifteen years, the cotton production of the around them, with a dense population; and these people, world will, as it has in the last fifteen, be increased more like the oppressed Hebrews, while gathering straw, will than threefold. What will be the price? At what can a be, in pursuit of labor and bread, scattered abroad, Yankee of Texas, who raises with his own hand four thou- throughout all the land. Where will be your militia, once sand two hundred pounds a year, sell his cotton by the in the neighborhood of your fortifications, and ready to pound? At five cents, his crop will give him two hundred man them on the approach of the enemy? Gone, sir, and ten dollars; at four, one hundred and sixty-six dollars; dispersed; and, perhaps, on your other frontier, conflictand at three, one hundred and twenty-six dollars. Sir, he ing with the savages of the Western prairies. If your will live and grow rich if he can sell his product at three forts are defended, it must be by a standing army. At all cents a pound. events, the troops of your present military establishment must be recalled from those stations, in the South, where they have been located, to protect the master and his family from the insurrectionary spirit of his slaves. Let South Carolina have her will, and reduce all impost to fifteen per cent. ad valorem; the destruction of the sugar production of Louisiana, effected by this, will send into the cotton fields of that State seventy-five thousand laborers, and their annual production will not be less than six bales each on the rich lands of that State. This will annually throw into the market of the world one hundred and thirty-five millions of pounds of cotton. The growers of cotton would do well to remember that their product has a rival, gradually gaining strength, and which must finally exclude a great proportion of the amount of cotton now used from the consumption of the world. It is not flax, nor hemp, nor wool, but it is the VOL. IX.-88 To this protection, though hardly to be found in the constitution, the free people of the North have never objected. They have felt a deep and anxious interest in your safety. I know your Southern chivalry scoffs at all this, and holds our sympathy in utter derision. Be assured that I am not ignorant of the contempt you feel, and the scorn you express, when any New England man happens to speak of you, on this floor, in terms of fraternity. For myself, I claim brotherhood with no man; unless, by blood or affinity, I stand in that relation with him. H. OF R.] The Tariff Bill. [JAN. 26, 1833. Be assured that I shall never affront any of your lofty this country, does in fact depend on the protecting power feelings, by any expression of any relationship with any and arms of that free labor. Take from them the shelter of of you, other than that of citizenship and humanity. We the power and arms of the American people, whose comare Americans, and we are men. There is no alienage mon welfare they are striving to destroy; leave them with between us. The freemen of the North, and I as one of their slaves to themselves, for security and protection, and them, claim it as a right, to desire the safety of all men. how would their labor differ, in ten years, from that of the We will travel far, and labor hard, to achieve that safety West Indies and Mexico? for all the American people. If the safety of Southern planters cannot be secured without aid from the troops of the United States, that aid will not by us be refused for their protection. Remember, sir, man lives not by the voluntary bestowments of man. One Being only, in the universe, gives all, and always, and receives nothing. Men live by mutual aids. Something for something is the great law of It must, nevertheless, not be forgotten by them, that if reciprocity and exchange, throughout the world. Those we are at last to protect them, and their families, by who expect to receive, must be ready to bestow. Do armed force, they must not feel themselves at liberty to the South expect a protection of their labor from the withdraw the protection of the laws from us and our la- North, then let them be ready to bestow what they canbors. Under these conditions, the arm of our strength not want, and not receive without utter ruin. will always be near to you, and lifted up for your de- Sir, it has been seen that one branch of our great sysfence. Do not expect more from the working men of tem of encouragement and protection, provided by our the North than can be performed by man. Dare you laws and policy for aiding the labor of our country, is the repeal the laws enacted for your protection? Will you national coin and currency, sustained by the institution break up the instruments of your labor and livelihood? of the United States Bank. It does almost seem as if Shall our free working men, with their wives and chil- men imagined our country might be too prosperous, and dren, be turned, by you, into the world naked, and with- that a wholesome adversity would relieve and refresh, and, out shelter or food? Do you expect their sympathy will perhaps, preserve the nation. Under the advisement of be alive to the cry of your distress, when their children some such wild imagining, the coin and currency have, cry to them for that bread which you have plucked from by refusing to recharter that bank, been given up to the their mouths? When your wives and daughters fly from power of the States. In place of one, we shall have that servile brutality which has cloven down their hus- twenty-four regulators of coin and currency in our counbands and brothers in their defence, can the shrieks of try. What will they more resemble than so many wooden their agony reach the ear of those whom you have left out to the winter storms, in houseless nakedness and famine? The men whom you have maddened with the bitterness of that misery which you have heaped upon them, who, but for that, would die for your safety, will laugh when ruin visits your abodes; and shout, and clap their hands, when the whirlwind of retribution sweeps through your land. clocks, made in so many different shops, and carried to market by an equal number of tin pedlars? Each State will have its own system of making currency. How will it, as it is now, be kept at one great national level? There must be at least twenty-four different levels, in all the different States. Will there not be as many different rates of exchange between State and State? Money may be, and will be, at different rates of abundance or scarcity Sir, can it be expected that the free people of the in one State, from what it may be in another. The great North will be annually taxed, to purchase a protection movements of the travel and commerce of our country for you, when you will not permit a law, which costs you must pass from one of these levels to another; and it will nothing, to remain unrepealed in your statute book; be- pass very much as boats are locked up and down through cause that law gives protection to the labor and the in-a canal, in some very uneven country. Every lock will struments of industry, by which they feed and clothe be encumbered, not only with much delay, but also with themselves and families? How do you hope to be secur- a heavy toll of exchange. ed in the possession of that labor, which gives you wealth, Already enormous State institutions are forming. You and enjoyment, and political power? How but by the will soon see these leviathans of factious wealth rolling, provisions of that constitution, which makes us a nation, and wallowing, and spouting in oceans of paper; and that, and protects your interests, by the whole power of our too, quite as valuable, gallon for gallon, as the deep sea national arms? In no other christian nation are such rights water blown out through the spiracles of their kindred as you enjoy in this country, made a part of the national monsters, when they come up to visit the sunshine on the polity, and secured by the provisions of the constitution. surface of their own element. The spirit of emancipation is abroad in the earth. What How will this various currency affect your revenue? is now doing in England, the most free and powerful na- Will those who pay that revenue pay, in the same numtion on earth? Ay, sir, in England, to which, as it is said, ber of dollars, an equal exchangeable value? Not so. some States in the South already look for aid against our The currency may differ in value from six to ten per own country? What question, as a test of political ortho- cent. between Boston and New Orleans; and men who pay, doxy, is now put to a candidate, before he can be elected each of them, bonds, at these two places, of equal amount, to the House of Commons? Are you for universal emanci- and on the same day, may, in paying ten thousand dollars, pation? What a test! Who would have dreamed of it twenty pay sums differing, in value, from 600 to $1,000. Will years ago? And yet more than four hundred and fifty Eng- it not be precisely so with those to whom this revenue is lishmen have been elected to Parliament, under that so- disbursed? Your public servants, men, all equally dililemn pledge. How long will West India colonial slavery gent and faithful in the service, shall, at different places, continue to exist, under the legislation of such a Parlia- receive very different rates of compensation. These evils ment? Let South Carolina, or any or all the slave- cannot and will not be endured; and the Government holding States of the South, separate from the other States medium, the currency for paying the revenue, must be in this Union, and take or not take shelter under the arm gold and silver coined into money. Will this remedy the of any European nation, and how long do you believe evil? No. For gold and silver must rise and fall in value that, or the other nations of that continent, would permit according to their abundance or scarcity; and so long as slavery to exist among their republican allies? Sir, it bank paper bills are convertible into dollars at the pleacannot be disguised, nor should it be left untold, in this sure of their holders, so long will the abundance or scargreat question, that the very existence of that labor, in city of these bills affect the value of them, and of coined the South, for a more profitable condition of which those money, which is their basis. The evil has no remedy in States are now struggling to destroy all the free labor of the nature of things, except by the restoration of that JAN. 26, 1833.] The Tariff Bill. [H. OF R. bank which this new policy is about to destroy, or by the prohibited in Europe, or excluded by prohibitory duties. establishment of another national institution on the same Will you pay in cotton, rice, and tobacco? Why do you principles. not pay the balance now against us in these products? One other part of our great national system, as it re- Simply because those nations want no more of them; and, lates to the public lands, is to be destroyed by that new therefore, if you send out double, nay, ten times the policy, of which this bill forms so considerable a part. amount in quantity, that augmented quantity will bring These lands are to be sold under a graduated price; or, no greater amount of money. Your national debt will if not so wasted, and lost to the nation, they are to be dis- have been paid and cancelled, and you will have no stocks tributed and conveyed to the several States where they of that kind wherewith to pay. Your United States Bank are located. By the first project, the total quantity of stocks are going out of existence. You must, like all perhaps 200,000,000 acres of land is to be graduated other honest men, pay your debts for your foreign imat a price, first 125, second 100, third 75, fourth 50, and portations in coin, and that money which is in your State fifth 35 cents an acre. All which shall not be sold the banks, and is the great basis of your currency. Every first year at 125 cents, will be offered the second at 100; silver dollar drawn from these vaults must withdraw four if not then sold, at 75, and so on till the fifth year, when dollars from your currency in circulation, every million all are to be struck off at 25 cents an acre. Does it re- must withdraw four millions, and every ten millions must quire a prophet, or the son of a prophet, to inform us that take out of circulation forty millions of your currency. we shall sell no lands during the first four years; and that, Such a reduction of the quantity must bring on a scarcity for the whole, we can never obtain more per acre than of money, and thus diminish the money price of all our twenty-five cents? Thus, a fund now worth, at least, products. What effect will this have on your outstand$225,000,000, will be sacrificed for $25,000,000. ing debts, contracted for the purchase of imported manuThe other proposition is still more unjust and ruinous. factures? You pay, in a currency worth from five to forty It disposes of all these lands to the States where they lie; per cent. more, dollar for dollar, than it was when you and that for no consideration at all to be paid to the na- made your purchase. Let those who shall aid in bringtion. This part of the policy, although but two months ing such a state of things on our country not be unmindold, is already in its dotage. It proposes to give the whole ful that the betrayers and ruiners of nations never escape estate to the youngest children, who helped to earn no- the wrath of man, nor the righteous displeasure of God. thing of it. Shall our half; nay, shall all our goods be Sir, this bill is brought before us as a mere revenue thus given, to be wasted in the meretricious prodigality measure. Its enactment is required of us, not for any of speculation? Sir, first or last, under either of these benefit to the people, but simply "to supply the wants provisions of the new policy, all these lands will fall into of Government." The Ways and Means Committee tell the hands of sharpers in this trade; the speculators of us that they can dispense with the tariff of 1828 and of this or other countries will obtain the control of this 1832, and give up all protective legislation. Just give us, immense territory; and your great land market, now go- say they, fifteen millions of dollars only: that is all. verned by wisdom and liberality, in favor of the genuine In God's name, I say piously, and not profanely, no settlers from all parts of the country, will fall into the matter how little, if nothing is to be done by it for the hands of a gigantic land company; and its movements will people. Will not the people soon learn that Government be governed by all the tyrannical principles of an over- is doing nothing for them? Will they not discover that whelming monopoly. their own magistrates, under their own laws, in their own Sir, let us again return more immediately to that part State, can and do secure them in life, liberty, and proof the new policy which is comprehended in the provi-perty? And will they not, when this Government ceases sions of this measure. This bill has been called, and very to visit them with its benefits in the encouragement and justly called, the submission bill. It is, indeed, more; protection of their labor, will they not learn that it is a for we must give up all our great system of protection for Government of burdens, and not to be supported at the free labor in our own country to the slave policy-the cost of continual taxation--and that merely to keep on mere cotton-growing policy; and then adopt that policy foot the pride of national establishment, and the parade in our intercourse with foreign nations. What is this po- of congressional legislation, the power of judicial decilicy? Your pure cotton planter makes all for market.sion, and the array of Executive departments? Sir, perHe sells all which he makes, and buys all which he con-mit me to repeat what I have said here five years ago: sumes. Pass this bill, and, so far as it abandons protec-"Whenever this Government comes to live by mere taxation, you adopt this cotton-growing policy. You abandon tion on the people, it will speedily expire, or cease to manufacturing labor, return to the mere culture of the have any efficient existence. You may, for a while, or at soil; and you expect to sell the production of your agri- times by extraordinary appliances, give to it seeming vi cultural labor to foreign nations, and to purchase from tality, but it will not be wholesome and efficient animathem your manufactured fabrics. tion, but merely a succession of convulsions and grimaces, such as a galvanic battery may give to the naked carcass of an executed felon." What are Sir, excessive importation has been the curse of our country. Not to mention many intervening years, let every man call to mind the ruin which covered our coun- A bill to supply the wants of Government! try, from these excessive importations, after the revolu- they? Fifteen millions will cover them. Let us, for a tionary war, and, in like manner, after the last war; and moment, examine this measure. Will it supply those then you may conjecture, with sufficient certainty, what wants? I think it may be demonstrated that this bill will will come upon us, by the same cause, from the adoption not, if enacted, raise fifteen, or even twelve and a half of the policy of this bill. millions. In determining this inquiry, we should first exaIf you cease to manufacture your own fabrics, and im- mine and ascertain the probable amount of importation, port them from foreign countries, you must pay for them; and then the rate of impost, according to this bill. and in what products can this payment be made: in wheat, Our consumption of foreign commodities must be goin corn, in flour? England and France buy no foreign verned in its amount by our export of domestic producbreadstuffs unless famine press hard upon them, and com- tion. What has that been from 1818 up to this time? Of pel the purchase. In that event, the fertile lands and domestic products, we exported, in round numbers-abundant harvests of all Europe are nearer to their marIn 1818, $73,000,000 ket, and will fill and crowd that market with abundance before we can arrive in their ports. Will you pay in fish, in oil, in bone, or provisions, or sugar? These are all 1819, 1820, 50,000,000 51,000,000 43,000,000 H. OF R.] In 1822, 1823, Average, In 1824, 1825, 1826, 1827, 1828, 1829, 1830, Average, In 1831, 1832, Average, General average, The Tariff Bill. 49,000,000 47,000,000 52,166,666 50,000,000 66,000,000 53,000,000 58,000,000 50,000,000 55,000,000 59,000,000 61,000,000 61,000,000 63,000,000 62,000,000 $58,333,333 By this export our consumption of foreign commodities must be, in some degree, governed; for whatever we may import, we must export it again, if we cannot furnish domestic production enough to pay for it. What has been the amount of our importation since 1821? It was in that year, In 1822, 1823, 1824, 1825, 1826, Average, In 1827, 1828, 1829, 1830, 1831, 1832, Average, 62,000,000 83,000,000 77,000,000 80,000,000 96,000,000 84,000,000 80,333,333 79,000,000 70,000,000 89,000,000 $84,500,000 [JAN. 26, 1833. Suppose our importation be 84,500,000 dollars, onesixth part of all this is, by the laws anterior to last July, free of duty. Call this, though it is more, 14,000,000; this leaves 70,500,000. By the law of last session, and by this bill, 3,000,000 dollars more are made free of duty; this, deducted, leaves 67,500,000. One-fifth part of the whole importation is usually exported: this amounts to 16,900,000 dollars; but from this should be deducted one-sixth part of the free goods, equal to 2,300,000 dollars, leaving 13,600,000 dollars to be deducted from the last balance. This leaves 53,900,000 dollars. Deduct from this sum the capital likely to be employed in the importation of cotton, indigo, wool, and cotton yarn, amounting to 4,900,000 dollars, and the amount left, on which to charge your average duty, as you must admit, but twenty per cent., will be 49,000,000 dollars. At that rate of duty you will realize from this importation 9,800,000 dollars of revenue. Should your importation rise up to 87,000,000 dollars, you might realize a revenue of 10,300,000 dollars. If you raise imports by this bill to thirty per cent., and do not obtain more than 84,500,000 dollars of annual importation, your revenue will not exceed 14,700,000 dollars. One deduction further, after all those already made, must be made from the amount of revenue to be produced and brought into the treasury by this measure. South Carolina has ordained the non-payment hereafter of all revenue. A State so burdened with import! A State so burdened with export, paying 40 per cent. on $7,000,000 of exported cotton, equal to 2,800,000 dollars, and 60 per cent. on a like amount of imports, equal to 4,200,000 dol- . lars; what could she do under such a load of taxation? Seven millions annually! How can the nation exist, and want such a large portion of all the public revenue? It must be surrendered, however: for South Carolina has taken her stand behind her own ordinance, and on the eternal bottom of her own reserved rights, her indomitable sovereignty. She has-let who will pay for the music of Government, she has resolved, henceforth, to keep all her own money in her own pocket. What will the loss be to the treasury? What it might be, we cannot tell; but we can ascertain what this mother of all chivalry did pay in 1831. The foreign imports of that State were, in that year, 1,238,133 dollars. Of this, 46,596 dollars were exported, and 1,191,537 dollars left; on this, after deducting one-sixth part free, duty was paid into the treasury. Say the amount was 1,200,000 dollars, the deduction for Of this amount of importation, more or less is annually free goods, one-sixth part, or 200,000 dollars, and a duty exported, according as our domestic exports, with the of 21 per cent. was paid on this 1,000,000 dollars of foprofit on their sale in foreign countries, and the amount reign importations; this duty equalled 210,000 dollars, of freight, may enable us to use and consume foreign pro-and this amount must be deducted from your revenue of ducts. We generally send abroad one-fifth part of our 10,300,000: for, according to the new tariff made by the importation; but, in 1831, nearly one-fourth was exported. ordinance of South Carolina, that State will hereafter pay What is the average rate of duty by this bill? On su- no more revenue to the United States. You will, theregar, from thirty to one hundred, in some cases two hun-fore, have a clear revenue, under this bill, of 10,100,000 dred per cent.; on hammered bar iron, thirty; rolled, dollars, and no more. It must be admitted that the blank eighty; on cast iron, fifty; and on hardware, thirty per left in the revenue account by this famous ordinance does cent. Capital will not be employed in excessive impor- not create, if I may be allowed the phrase, a very great tation of these commodities when others are free, or void in the treasury; but this State seems to think it is encumbered by a light duty only Cotton is free, and, doubtless, two millions will be employed in importing that product. Indigo, under a heavy duty, was imported last year to the amount of 900,000 dollars. If this bill go into operation, not less than that amount will be used in the importation of indigo. Cotton yarn is ten per cent. and coarse wool is free. At least 2,000,000 dollars will be employed in the importation of these commodities. General average, wise and honorable, the less money she has to pay, to make the more noise at the payment of it. Rhode Island, with less than a fifth part of the population of South Carolina, and with not a fortieth part of the land, has annually paid into the treasury more than this amount, to avoid the payment of which, South Carolina, with all her chi- ' valry, now wages war with the United States. Sir, we are told that diminished imposts, under the proWhat, under all these circumstances, will be the ave-visions of this bill, will set at liberty 12,000,000 dollars; rage rate of duty under this bill, should it be made a law? and that our present quantity of imported commodities It is called a bill to reduce the duty on imports: it should being reduced, in cost, by that amount, we can import then render them less than they are by the law of July, and consume 12,000,000 more of those commodities. 1832. By that law, the rate of duty on all importations This additional importation, as we are told, will give us is twenty-one per cent.; by this, twenty per cent. should an addition to our revenue. If our imported merchandise not be exceeded. |