THE tariff law enacted by Congress at the last session, is of itself important, not because it actually diminishes, to any great extent, the taxation upon consumable goods, but because it renounces the theory of protection to certain branches of industry. It overthrows a principle, more or less acted upon since the formation of the government, and marks the emancipation of the people of the United States from one of the heir-looms of monarchy. It is, as it were, a second declaration of independence. It is the assertion, on the part of the American people, of a just confidence in their own skill, resources, and industry; that, while for the support of government, they resort to indirect taxes upon imported goods for a revenue, they do so, not to defend their artisans from the supposed superior skill of foreign operatives, but simply to supply, in the least troublesome way, the moderate wants of the government. The degrading idea that, possessed of a most prolific soil, capable of supplying every possible variety of raw materials, and enjoying every facility for their manufacture, intelligent and industrious Americans have not intellectual capacity sufficient to compete with Europeans, is repudiated. The experience of the last 40 years has, indeed, been fatal to the protective theory, which so long overshadowed the industry of the commercial world. As long as every branch of business, and all

industrial pursuits, were loaded with protective burthens, and hampered with restrictions of all sorts, supposed necessary to their existence, it was very easy to predict, and to propagate a popular belief in the prediction, that total ruin, pauperism and starvation, would overtake every soul, if those musty enactments should be disturbed. It was quite a discovery of philosophers in the 18th century, that wealth consisted in the produce of labor; but it was still supposed that labor would not produce available wealth, unless governed, guided, and restricted by laws enacted by those who never labored themselves. Adam Smith was the first who clearly demonstrated that there is wealth in all labor, and that governmental enactments do not, and cannot enhance the national wealth in the smallest degree; that their only effect is, by restraining industry, to diminish the aggregate amount, while they transfer the most of it from the hands of the producers, to whom it belongs, to those of law-makers and gentry. These latter, in a state of limited suffrage, constituted the nation; and those laws which accumulated wealth in their hands, were to them visibly beneficial, notwithstanding that the vast mass of unrepresented producers of that wealth were impoverished. As long as free trade was not tried, it was easy to denounce it as a wild and ruinous chimera. When, however, in the lapse of years and the