Excerpt from Speeches, Addresses and Letters

Were we early revenue reformers worshippers at false shrines, or did the sequel approve our faith? History answers these questions with emphasis. It needed but a de cade to demonstrate the folly of attempting to create a mar ket for our increasing agricultural productions, and to develop our mining and manufacturing resources by the application of the beautiful abstractions disseminated by Free Trade Leagues. It was just ten years after the substitution of the revenue tariff of 1846 for the protective tariff of 1842, that the general bankruptcy of the American people was announced by the almost simultaneous failure of the Ohio Life and Trust Company, and the Bank of Pennsyl vania, and the suspension of specie payments by almost every bank in the country. In that brief period, our steamers had been supplanted by foreign lines, and our clipper ships driven from the sea, or restricted to carrying between our Atlantic. And Pacific ports. At the close of that brief term, the ship-yards of Maine were almost as idle as they are now when railroads traverse the country in all directions and compete with ships in carrying even such bulky commodities as sugar, cotton, and leaf tobacco and while the families of thousands of unemployed workmen in our great cities were in want of food, Illinois farmers found in corn, for which there was no market, the cheapest fuel they could obtain, though their fields were under-laid by an inexhaustible deposit of coal that is almost co-extensive with the State. Capital invested in factories, furnaces, forges, rolling mills and machinery was idle and unproduc tive, and there was but a limited' home market for cotton or wool. Taking advantage of this condition of affairs, foreign dealers put their prices down sufficiently to bankrupt the cotton States, to induce many of our farmers to give up sheep raising, and to constrain many thousand immigrants who could not find employment to return to their native countries. 1847 had been a good year for farmers, mechanics, miners and merchants; but 1857 was a good year for sheriffs.

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