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CHAPTER X.

THE DEBATE ON THE TARIFF.-RANDOLPH, HAYNE, CLAY. -ON THE LAND QUESTION.-CLAY, CALHOUN.

To further explain and exemplify the rules and principles herein laid down, we append hereto portions of public debates between orators of wide reputation. Some of the subjects discussed were at one time of a very exciting nature, but we trust the selections can be read with interest and profit, especially as the disputants have long been removed from the scenes of the contests.

One of the best subjects for debate in former times, as well as in our own, was that of the tariff -the principle or power claimed by nations of levying a tax or duty upon goods and materials manufactured or produced in one country and brought for sale to another.

The discussion of this doctrine gave rise in former times, and gives rise to-day, to an almost infinite. variety of perplexing and aggravating questions and opposing theories. It affects all classes of citizens, and that is sufficient to make it a subject of universal contention and discussion. It affects the wages of the poor and the profits of the rich, and both parties claim that their doctrine, if tried and

adhered to, will bring prosperity, and the adoption of the other view will cause irretrievable ruin and disaster. It has made and unmade cabinets and administrations, and been the battle-cry of contending parties for many years. At one time it threatened very seriously the existence of the American Union itself. We need give no apology for its introduction, as it not only is a subject upon which every intelligent person should be informed, but exhibits in our country some excellent specimens of argumentative reasoning. It is a subject, too, that is quite different from those heretofore presented, in that there is little scope for the elegant, metaphorical language, specimens of which we have so freely given. Its discussion deals with cold facts and figures; the imagination is kept in the background.

Mr. Randolph, in his speech delivered in 1824, said:

"Sir, when are we to have enough of this tariff question? In 1816 it was supposed to be settled. Only three years thereafter another proposition for increasing it was sent from this house to the Senate, baited with a tax of four cents per pound on brown sugar. It was, fortunately, rejected in that body. In what manner this bill is baited it does not become me to say; but I have too distinct a recollection of the vote in committee of the whole, on the duty upon molasses, and afterwards of the vote in the House on the same question; of the votes of more than one of the States on that question, not to mark it well. I do not say that the change of the vote

on that question was affected by any man's voting against his own motion; but I do not hesitate to say that it was effected by one man's electioneering against his own motion. I am very glad, Mr. Speaker, that old Massachusetts Bay, and the Province of Maine and Sadagahock, by whom we stood in the days of the Revolution, now stand by the South, and will not aid in fixing on us this system of taxation, compared with which the taxation of Mr. Grenville and Lord North was as nothing. I speak with knowledge of what I say when I declare that this bill is an attempt to reduce the country south of Mason and Dixon's line, and cast off the Alleghany Mountains, to a state of worse than colonial bondage; a state to which the domination of Great Britain was, in my judgment, far preferable; and I trust I shall always have the fearless integrity to utter any political sentiment which the head sanctions and the heart ratifies; for the British Parliament never would have dared to lay such duties on our imports or their exports to us, either 'at home' or here, as is now proposed to be laid upon the imports from abroad. At that time we had the command of the market of the vast dominions then subject, and we should have had those which have since been subjected to the British Empire; we enjoyed a free trade eminently superior to anything that we can enjoy, if this bill shall go into operation. It is a sacrifice of the interests of a part of this nation to the ideal benefit of the rest. It marks us out as the victims of a worse than Egyptian bondage. It is a barter of so much of our rights, of so much of the fruits of our labor, for political power to be transferred to other hands. It ought to be met, and I trust it will be met,

in the Southern country as was the stamp act, and by all those measures, which I will not detain the house by recapitulating, which succeeded the stamp act, and produced the final breach with the mother country, which it took about ten years to bring about, as I trust in my conscience it will not take as long a time to bring about similar results from this measure, should it become a law.

This country is, unquesdistress; but we cannot We may by your legisla

"Sir, events now passing everywhere, which plant a thorn in my pillow and a dagger in my heart, admonish me of the difficulty of governing with sobriety any people who are over head and ears in debt. That state of things begets a temper which sets at naught everything like reason and common sense. tionably, laboring under great legislate it out of that distress. tion, reduce all the country south of Mason and Dixon's line, the whites as well as the blacks, to the condition of Helots; you can do no more. We have had placed before us, in the course of this discussion, foreign examples and authorities; and among other things we have been told, as an argument in favor of this measure, of the prosperity of Great Britain. Have gentlemen taken into consideration that, not excepting Mexico and that fine country which lie between the Orinoco and the Caribbean Sea, England is decidedly, superior, in point of physical advantages, to every country under the sun? This is unquestionably true. I will enumerate some of these advantages: First, there is her climate. In England, such is the temperature of the air that a man can there do more days' work in the year, and more hours' work in the day, than in any other cli

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mate in the world; of course I include Scotland and Ireland in the description. It is in such a climate only that the human animal can, bear, without extirpation, the corrupted air, the noisome exhalations, the incessant labor, of those accursed manufactories. Yes, sir, accursed; for I say it is an accursed thing, which I will neither taste nor touch nor handle. If we were to act here on the English system, we should have yellow fever at Philadelphia and New York, not in August merely, but from June to January, and from January to June. climate of this country alone, were there no other natural obstacle to it, says aloud, You shall not manufacture! Even our tobacco factories, admitted to be the most wholesome of any sort of factories, are known to be, where extensive, the very nidus (if I may use the expression) of yellow fever and other fevers of similar type. In another of the advantages of Great Britain, so important to her prosperity, we are almost on a par with her, if we know how properly to use it. Fortunatos nimium sua si bona norint for as regards defense, we are, to all intents and purposes, almost as much an island as England herself. But one of her insular advantages we can never acquire. Every part of that country is accessible from the sea. There, as you recede from the sea, you do not get further from the sea. I know that a good deal will be said of our majestic rivers, about the father of floods, and his tributary streams; but with the Ohio, frozen up all the winter, and dry all the summer, with a long, tortuous, difficult, and dangerous navigation thence to the ocean, the gentlemen of the West may rest assured that they will never derive one particle of advantage from even a total prohibition

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