lowly
in value, but in a secure and salutary degree; a ready, though not an
extravagant market for all the surplus productions of our industry;
innumerable flocks and herds browsing and gamboling on ten thousand
hills and plains, covered with rich and verdant grasses; our cities
expanded, and whole villages springing up, as it were, by enchantment;
our exports and imports increased and increasing; our tonnage, foreign
and coastwise, swelled and fully occupied; the rivers of our interior
animated by the perpetual thunder and lightning of countless steamboats;
the currency sound and abundant; the public debt of two wars nearly
redeemed; and, to crown all, the public treasury overflowing,
embarrassing Congress, not to find subjects of taxation, but to select
the objects which shall be liberated from the impost. If the term of
seven years were to be selected, of the greatest prosperity which this
people have enjoyed since the establishment of their present
Constitution, it would be exactly that period of seven years which
immediately followed the passage of the tariff of 1824.

"This transformation of the condition of the country from gloom and
distress to brightness and prosperity, has been mainly the work of
American legislation, fostering American industry, instead of allowing
it to be controlled by foreign legislation, cherishing foreign industry.
The foes of the American system, in 1824, with great boldness and
confidence, predicted, first, the ruin of the public revenue, and the
creation of a necessity to resort to direct taxation. The gentleman from
South Carolina, (General Hayne,) I believe, thought that the tariff of
1824 would operate a reduction of revenue to the large amount of eight
millions of dollars; secondly, the destruction of our navigation;
thirdly, the desolation of commercial cities; and, fourthly, the
augmentation of the price of articles of consumption, and further
decline in that of the articles of our exports. Every prediction which
they made has failed--utterly failed. . . . . It is now proposed to
abolish the system to which we owe so much of the public prosperity
. . . . . Why, sir, there is scarcely an interest--scarcely a vocation
in society--which is not embraced by the beneficence of this system. . .
. . The error of the opposite argument, is in assuming one thing, which,
being denied, the whole fails; that is, it assumes that the _whole_
labor of the United States would be profitably employ