unequal action of the protective principle. The character of
its labor incapacitated the South from dividing the benefits of the new
revenue policy with its free rival. The South of necessity was
restricted to a single industry, the tillage of the earth. Slave labor
did not possess the intelligence, the skill, the patience, the
mechanical versatility to embark successfully in manufacturing
enterprises. Free labor monopolised the protected industries, and
Northern capital caught all the golden showers of fiscal legislation.
What the South needed, from an economic point of view, was unrestricted
access to the markets of the world for her products, and the freest
competition of the world in her own markets. The limitations imposed
upon the slave States by their industrial system was in itself a
tremendous handicap in their struggle for an advantageous place in the
New World of the nineteenth century; in their struggle with their free
sisters for political leadership in the Union. But with the development
of the protective principle those States fell into sore financial
distress, were ground between the upper millstone of the protective
system and the nether millstone of their own industrial system.
Prosperity and plenty did presently disappear from that section and
settled in the North. In 1828 Benton drew this dark picture of the state
of the South:

"In place of wealth, a universal pressure for money was felt; not enough
for common expenses; the price of all property down; the country
drooping and languishing; towns and cities decaying, and the frugal
habits of the people pushed to the verge of universal self-denial for
the preservation of their family estates."

He did not hesitate to charge to Federal legislation the responsibility
for all this poverty and distress, for he proceeds to remark that:

"Under this legislation the exports of the South have been made the
basis of the Federal revenue. The twenty odd millions annually levied
upon imported goods are deducted out of the price of their cotton, rice,
and tobacco, either in the diminished prices which they receive for
those staples in foreign ports, or in the increased price which they pay
for the articles they have to consume at home."

A suffering people are not apt to reason clearly or justly on the causes
which have brought them to indigence. They feel their wretchedness and
reach out for a victim. And the law-making power usually happens to be
that victim