Such is the state of the commercial
legislation of Great Britain as it bears upon our interests. It excludes
with interdicting duties all importation (except in time of approaching
famine) of the great staple of productions of our Middle and Western
States; it proscribes with equal rigor the bulkier lumber and live stock
of the same portion and also of the Northern and Eastern part of our
Union. It refuses even the rice of the South unless aggravated with a
charge of duty upon the Northern carrier who brings it to them. But the
cotton, indispensable for their looms, they will receive almost duty
free to weave it into a fabric for our own wear, to the destruction of
our own manufactures, which they are enabled thus to undersell.
Is the self-protecting energy of this nation so helpless that there
exists in the political institutions of our country no power to
counteract the bias of this foreign legislation; that the growers of
grain must submit to this exclusion from the foreign markets of their
produce; that the shippers must dismantle their ships, the trade of the
North stagnate at the wharves, and the manufacturers starve at their
looms, while the whole people shall pay tribute to foreign industry to
be clad in a foreign garb; that the Congress of the Union are impotent
to restore the balance in favor of native industry destroyed by the
statutes of another realm? More just and more generous sentiments will,
I trust, prevail.
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