the same manner. I here borrow the language of a man who has been heretofore conspicuous in the councils of the country; of one who was unrivalled for readiness and dexterity in debate; who was long without an equal on the floor of this body; who contributed as much to the revolution of 1801, as any man in this nation, and derived as little benefit from it; as, to use the words of that celebrated man, what I have to say is not that which has been said by others, and will not be said in their manner, the house will, I trust, have patience with me during the time that my strength will allow me to occupy their attention. And I beg them to understand, that the notes which I hold in my hand are not the notes on which I mean to speak, but of what others have spoken, and from which I will make the smallest selection in my power.

Here permit me to say, that I am obliged, and with great reluctance, to differ from my worthy colleague, who has taken so conspicuous a part in this debate, about one fact, which I will call to his recollection, for I am sure it was in his memory, though sleeping. He has undertaken to state the causes by which the difference in the relative condition of various parts of the Union has been produced; but my worthy colleague has omitted to state the primum mobile of the commerce and manufactures to which a portion of the country, that I need not name, owes its present prosperity and wealth. That primum mobile was southern capital. I speak not now of transactions quorum pars minima fui, but of things of which, nevertheless, I have a contemporaneous recollection. I say, without the fear of contradiction, then, that in consequence of the enormous depreciation of the evidences of the public debt of this country-the debt proper of the United States (to which must be added an item of not less than twenty millions of dollars, for the state debts assumed by the United States) being bought up and almost engrossed by the people of what were then called the Northern States-a measure which nobody dreamt any thing about, of which nobody had the slightest suspicion-I mean the assumption of the state debts by the federal governmentthese debts being bought up for a mere song, a capital of eighty millions of dollars, or, in other words, a credit to that amount, bearing an interest of six per cent. per annum (with the exception of nineteen millions, the interest of that debt, which bore an interest of three per cent.)—a capital of eighty millions of dollars was poured, in a single day, into the coffers of the north; and to that cause we may mainly ascribe the difference, so disastrous to the south, between that country and the other portion of this Union, to which I have alluded. When we, roused by the sufferings of our brethren of Boston, entered into the contest with the mother country, and when we came out of it-when this constitution was adopted, we were comparatively rich; they were positively poor.

What is now our relative situation? They are flourishing and rich; we are tributary to them, not only through the medium of the public debt of which I have spoken, but also through the me dium of the pension list, nearly the whole amount of which is disbursed in the Eastern States-and to this creation of a day is to be ascribed the difference of our relative situation (I hope my worthy colleague will not consider any thing that I say as conflicting with his general principles, to which I heartily subscribe). Yes, sir, and the price paid for the creation of all that portion of this capital, which consisted of the assumed debts of the states, was the immense boon of fixing the seat of government where it now is. And I advert to this bargain, because I wish to show to every member of this house, and, if it were possible, to every individual of this nation, the most tremendous and calamitous results of political bargaining.

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 Sagadahock, 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 east of 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

any thing 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 to bring about similar results from this measure, should it become a law.

All policy is very suspicious, says an eminent statesman, that sacrifices the interest of any part of a community to the ideal good of the whole; and those governments only are tolerable, where, by the necessary construction of the political machine, the interests of all the parts are obliged to be protected by it. Here is a district of country extending from the Patapsco to the gulf of Mexico, from the Alleghany to the Atlantic; a district, which, taking in all that part of Maryland lying south of the Patapsco and east of Elk river, raises five sixths of all the exports of this country, that are of home growth. I have in my hand the official statements which prove it, but which I will not weary the house by reading-in all this country-yes, sir, and I bless God for it; for with all the fantastical and preposterous theories about the rights of man (the theories, not the rights themselves, I speak of), there is nothing but power that can restrain power. I bless God, that, in this insulted, oppressed, and outraged region, we are, as to our counsels in regard to this measure, but as one man; that there exists on the subject but one feeling and one interest. We are proscribed and put to the bar; and if we do not feel, and, feeling, do not act, we are bastards to those fathers who achieved the revolution: then shall we deserve to make our bricks without straw. There is no case on record, in which a proposition like this, suddenly changing the whole frame of a country's polity, tearing asunder every ligature of the body politic, was ever carried by a lean majority of two or three votes, unless it be the usurpation of the septennial act, which passed the British parliament, by, I think, a majority of one vote, the same that laid the tax on cotton bagging. I do not stop here, sir, to argue about the constitutionality of this bill; I consider the constitution a dead letter: I consider it to consist, at this time, of the power of the general government and the power of the states: that is the constitution. You may entrench yourself in parchment to the teeth, says lord Chatham, the sword will find its way to the vitals of the constitu

tion. I have no faith in parchment, sir; I have no faith in the abracadabra of the constitution; I have no faith in it. I have faith in the power of that commonwealth, of which I am an unworthy son; in the power of those Carolinas, and of that Georgia, in her ancient and utmost extent, to the Mississippi, which went with us through the valley of the shadow of death, in the war of our independence. I have said, that I shall not stop to discuss the constitutionality of this question, for that reason and for a better; that there never was a constitution under the sun, in which, by an unwise exercise of the powers of the government, the people may not be driven to the extremity of resistance by force. "For it is not, perhaps, so much by the assumption of unlawful powers, as by the unwise or unwarrantable use of those which are most legal, that governments oppose their true end and object; for there is such a thing as tyranny as well as usurpation." If, under a power to regulate trade, you prevent exportation; if, with the most approved spring lancets, you draw the last drop of blood from our veins; if, secundum artem, you draw the last shilling from our pockets, what are the checks of the constitution to us? A fig for the constitution! When the scorpion's sting is probing us to the quick, shall we stop to chop logic? Shall we get some learned and cunning clerk to say whether the power to do this is to be found in the constitution, and then, if he, from whatever motive, shall maintain the affirmative, like the animal whose fleece forms so material a portion of this bill, quietly lie down and be shorn?

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Sir, events now passing elsewhere, 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 nought every thing like reason and common sense. This country unquestionably laboring under great distress; but we cannot legis late it out of that distress. We may, by your legislation, reduce all the country south and east 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 the peculiar advantages of Great Britain? Have they taken into consideration that, not excepting Mexico, and that fine country which lies between the Orinoco and 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 those 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 climate in the world; of course I include Scotland and Ireland in this 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 these 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 the yellow fever at Philadelphia and New York, not in August merely, but from June to January, and from January to June. The 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 defence, 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 great 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 of foreign manufactures. You may succeed in reducing us to your own level of misery; but if we were to agree to become your slaves, you never can derive one farthing of advantage from this bill. What parts of this country can derive any advantage from it? Those parts only, where there is a water power in immediate contact with navigation, such as the vicinities of Boston, Providence, Baltimore, and Richmond. Petersburg is the last of these as you travel south. You take a bag of cotton up the river to Pittsburg, or to Zanesville, to have it manufactured and sent down to New Orleans for a market, and before your bag of cotton has got to the place of manufacture, the manufacturer of Providence has received his returns for the goods made from his bag of cotton purchased at the same time that you purchased yours. No, sir, gentlemen may as well insist that because the Chesapeake bay, mare nostrum, our Mediterranean sea, gives us every advantage of navigation, we shall exclude from it every thing but steam-boats and those boats called xar' igoxiv, per emphasin, par excellence, Kentucky boats-a sort