But that the free trade system has no agency in producing it, I can plainly show. If the free trade system has had any agency in producing it, it must be, because that system has so far extended our foreign demand for the products of our country, as to have given increased demand for home labor, and. have returned a corresponding reward in money. Now is such the fact? So far from it, that although England during the last year has imported of grain of all kinds about seventy two millions of bushels, only about six and a half millions went from the United States, being not half a bushel each for every farmer in our country. Is a market for half a bushel each, to our farmers a sufficient boon for destroying our own manufactories? Let us see what is the actual gain. Suppose the grain brought 20 cents per bushel more which was exported, than that which was not; after deducting all charges-this would be a gain of ten cents to every farmer, as compensation to him for breaking down his manufactories at home. Would you call this an equivalent for throwing hundreds of thousands of men and women out of employment, and for giving up our market for manufactures to England, to which our own manufacturers ought to be entitled?

F. But you take our export of breadstuffs only-there is our cotton, tobacco, and other products, altogether reaching perhaps to one hundred and fifty millions of dollars.

P. I take bread stuffs only, because that class of exports and provision are alone affected by the free trade system-all other demands were the same heretofore as now, and are taxed in the same way, I mean essentially-Tobacco is taxed about seventy two cents per pound now, and was taxed no more heretofore. Cotton is not taxed, and has not been for a long time-not since the competition of our own manufacturers, produced by home protection, became so close, that the English government saw that every weight carried by their manufacturing interest must be thrown off to give their manufacturers an advantage over oursTo this protection, is the cotton planter indebted, for the repeal of the tax on cotton in England-and to the same protection continued to 1846 are our agriculturists indebted for the repeal of the Corn and Navigation Laws-because every year our manufacturers were trenching upon the custom of theirs.

F. Do I understand you then to say, that the heavier we tax England, the more we incline her to take the tax from us?

P. Not the more we incline her-but the more we force her. As to any inclination of England to favor us, or to do any thing except for her own interest, in her intercourse with us, he must be green indeed who can believe it. The United States furnish a better market for England than any other country on earth-almost equal to all her other markets. And she would make us believe that of late she has imbibed a great love for us—but it is the

love which the wolf has for the lamb. It is mathematically demonstrable, that the repeal of the tax on cotton, as well as of the corn and navigation laws, has been forced on England, by the protection which we gave to our own manufacturers. Let her, England, sufficiently prostrate them, and she can then reinstate her corn laws and cotton tax.

F. You tell me, we only exported last year to England six and a half millions of bushels of grain. Why, Why, are you not mistaken, when you say she imported seventy two millions.

P. I have not seen an official report on the subject, and I venture the statement upon the authority of the newspapers, but I presume it to be correct, as I know France, the countries on the Baltic, the Mediterranian and the Black Sea, can undersell us, and unless in case of short crops in Europe, we can have no reliance on supplying England with bread stuffs. And in fact of averge years, England can nearly supply herself, and wants very little from abroad.

F. According to your view then, the repeal of the corn laws of England was of no advantage to us.

P.

About the same advantage which a man's corn crib is to his hogs, where he can afford but a nubbin a day to each, barely enough to keep life in them, but enough to keep them always squealing about the pen; whereas if they had not this nubbin to hope for, they would go into the woods, rely on themselves, and get fat upon roots and the mast. In a word, the repeal of the English corn laws has held out a false hope to us, which never has, and never can be realized, because, if there is any demand to supply, the inhabitants of the Baltic, Mediterranean and Black Sea countries are nearer than we are, can sooner meet the demand, and can do it cheaper. The repeal of the corn laws is of no value to us whatever. If I could have my way, I would prefer that they should be reenacted to-morrow, as then we would not be deceived by a shadow as now-where there is no good really resulting.

F. But are you not mistaken about those people being able to undersell us in England, we having so boundless an extent of fertile country, and land so cheap-Whereas their country is represented to be very poor, and the land very high. Labor is cheap to be sure, but does that balance our greater fertility of soil, and cheapness of land?

P. There is no arguing against facts.-You may find reasons why it ought not to be so, but they fail against facts-it is so beyond all doubt. In 1849 I crossed the German Ocean, from Edinburgh to Hamburg with a Scotch merchant, going there to buy wheat. On the day after his arrival he informed me he had purchased a cargo, of first quality, to be shipped from Bremen to Glasgow at a cost of twenty nine shillings sterling per quarter of

eight bushels-being about eighty cents per bushel. At the same time wheat was worth more than this price in New York. Labor and living are very cheap in those grain furnishing countries, and over-balance our cheaper, and richer land. Of this you may form some idea from the following fact: I met in Prussia with a very intelligent American officer who had been sent to Sweden to examine the various specimens of iron there, with a view to obtain the best for making artillery. He told me that he had obtained very good board in the interior of Sweden, I think, for one dollar and a half per week. If board can be had which an American officer would call good, for one dollar and a half per week, what ought to be the cost of a common laborer's fare? And what then the wages when those laborers hardly ever use meat at all-but live on potatoes and other vegetables? It is true, the country taking the whole continent, is naturally very poor-it is two thirds of it based on a bed of gravel; but it is so highly manured, and so minutely cultivated, that poor as it is naturally, it produces more than our rich land on an average.

F. Then you would give up the foreign market for our bread stuffs, and destroy our commerce. What would become of our commerce, if we were to have this trade cut off?

P. Whatever commerce we have now, we had before the repeal of the corn laws, and the same we would have, very nearly, if they were reenacted-But what does it amount to? All the ships nescessary to transport six and a half millions of bushels of grain, if our ships did it all, and made six trips a year, it would not give employment to one hundred ships. But it is not to be presumed, if the corn laws were reinstated, that it would destroy all this commerce. England requires a certain amount of food, whether her corn laws exist or not. It is true, that the cheaper food is the more of it will be consumed; but the facts as at present existing show that any such increase inures very little to our benefit, and if half were left, it would only throw fifty ships out of employment, and these would find more than an equivalent business in transporting bread stuffs and provisions from New Orleans to the manufacturing states, provided our manufactures were to receive the protection necessary to put them all in full operation again. Give such protection, and I would not exchange then the market, which would be created for the agriculturist by the little state of Rhode Island, for all the demand of Great Britain which we can supply.

F. I confess, I cannot see how you can make that out.

P. Thus there are probably fifty thousand manufacturers in Rhode Island, when their factories are all in operation. These will consume in bread ten bushels of grain each per annum; they will consume half a pound of meat per day (1 Ib is the estimate in the West) say 200 lb in Rhode Island per annum. The esti

mate is that it takes 10 bushels of grain to make 100 lb of meatso that in meat each hand would consume 20 bushels grain, and in bread 10 bushels, making 30, or, one million five hundred thousand bushels which they would require. Now, stop one half of the factories, as I presume is now very nearly the case. You turn 25, 000 manufacturers in Rhode Island into agriculturists-these will on an average each produce 200 bushels of grain (in the West 800 is common) here would be five millions of bushels produced, which if the manufacturers had other employment would not be, and is a market to that extent lost to the agriculturist elsewhere, besides what the producers consume, which added to said 5,000,000 make 6,500,000 equal to the wholeEnglish demand. But Rhode Island has not one tenth of all the manufacturers of the United States. And then bear in mind, if you stop the factories, you stop the miners who supply them with fuel, and in the iron region the ore diggers, and various dependents of all kinds, ramified beyond the conception of almost any man. It would be very safe to say that by a proper protection we should create a market ten times as great as that estimated for Rhode Island-and ten times that we have now with England, for bread stuffs. And we would not lose the market which we have with England, for it is dire necessity which has made her repeal her corn laws-it was necessary to sustain her manufacturers. And while by protecting our own manufacturers we should make a home market equal to ten times that which we find in England, we should be no worse off in regard to that market.

F. I think you largely over-estimate the market to be created by our manufacturers, even if protected to the utmost extent of their wishes. But does not this word protection carry injustice on its very face. What does it mean but the balance of the community shall submit to be taxed by the manufacturers, in order to enable those manufacturers to sustain a competition with foreigners, which they cannot do without this tax. Now is there not something unreasonable in the very nature of the demand? I think when we have already submitted to this tax beyond the necessity of the revenue for twenty or thirty years, to help those manufacturers along, if they cannot now stand alone, they ought to fall. I think Mr. McDuffie of South Carolina in his speech, known as the forty bale speech most triumphantly exposed the operation of the tariff, and I do not think any man has ever to my satisfaction answered that speech.

P. I forgot the grounds he took in that speech.

F. Why they were that if we levied a tax on the consumer to sustain the manufacturer, it is no better than to put your hands into the pocket of the consumer, and rob him of this tax to pay it to the manufacturer. And he illustrated it thus: Suppose A ships 40 bales of cotton to England, and lays out the proceeds in

goods, which he brings back, and the government charges onefourth of those goods or 25 per. cent. tariff-is the government not taking one-fourth of his cotton from him-or ten bales, to put in the pockets of the manufacturer in order to enable him to compete with the English manufacturers?

P. The advantage your party have of ours in the argument on this question, is that all your positions are superficially plausible, and admit of being so imposingly presented, that the delusion is very strong, and taken in without an effort of the mind-whereas the refutation requires a power of thought, which every man is not capable of.

F. A generous admission. Be assured the stronger the truth, the more easily it is seen, and where an effort of the mind is necessary to controvert apparent facts, it is strong evidence that the apparent facts are true facts.

P. Yes, I recollect an old gentleman, whose son after returning from college, undertook to refute the old man's previously fixed notions, that the sun revolved around the earth, and to prove to him that the earth revolved around the sun once a year, and turned around upon its own axis every twenty four hours. The old man jumped up out of his chair, seized his cane, and would have laid it well upon his son's back, if he had not escaped-the old man crying out to him-"And this is the college nonsense you have been learning, is it? Dont I see the sun rise every morning, pass over my head, and set at night, and dont I see every thing standing as straight up on the earth at night, as in the day, and would not every thing tumble off if the earth were to turn round? This is the nonsense I have been paying my money for you to learn, is it?" Now, the old man's notions were certainly more palpably comprehensible than his son's-and took much less thought-but you will not contend therefore that they were the most correct, and yet I think I can show that the old man was as near right as Mr. McDuffie.

There is a certain revenue required by our government for its support. This must be raised by a tariff on goods imported, or by a direct tax. As every man voluntarily pays his part of the tax who buys the goods, as the tariff has to be added to the price paid in England for the goods, this is found more agreeable and simple, than to send the tax gatherer into every man's house. Now, when Mr. McDuffie sold his forty bales, and bought goods with the proceeds, say $2000 worth, on his arrival in the United States, he had to pay $500 duty. This he added to the price of the goods, making the amount $2500, for which with charges and profits he sold them, and he did not lose a dollar-all that he could complain of was the tariff which he had to pay on so much of the goods as he used himself—and he had no right to complain of this, unless in this way he paid more than he would have had