of this machinery from domestic violence.

On the 28th of the ensuing February, Mr. Adams, on the part of the
minority of the Committee on Manufactures, made a report, signed by
himself and Lewis Condit, of New Jersey, which was read and ordered to
be printed by the House. In this report he took occasion to express his
dissent from the doctrine of the message, which he asserted to be that
in all countries generally, and especially in our own, the strongest
and best part of our population--the basis of society, and the friends
preeminently of freedom--are the "_wealthy landholders_." This he
controverted with a spirit at once suggestive and sarcastic, as new,
incorrect, and incompatible with the foundation of our political
institutions. He maintained that this assertion was not true even in
that part of the Union where the cultivators of the soil are slaves;
for, although there the landholders possess a large portion of the
wealth of the community, they were far from constituting an equal
proportion of its strength. Nor was it true in that portion of the
Union where the cultivators of the soil earn their bread by the sweat
of their brow, that they were _the best_ part of society. They were as
good as, but no better than, the other classes of the community. The
doctrine is in opposition to the Declaration of Independence and the
government of the Union, which are founded on a very different
principle--the principle that all men are born equal, and with equal
rights. It cannot be assumed as a foundation of national policy, and is
of a most alarming and dangerous tendency, threatening the peace and
directly tending to "the dissolution of the Union, by a complicated
civil and servile war." He traced its consequences, present and future,
in the proposition to give away the public lands, thereby withdrawing
all aid from this source to objects of internal improvement; and in the
destiny to which it consigns our manufacturing interests, and those of
the handicraftsmen and the mechanics of our populous cities and
flourishing towns, for the benefit of these wealthy landholders.

The insincerity of the message and the danger of its doctrines he
elucidates with scrutinizing severity, exposing its fallacies, and
showing that, by its recommendations, "a nation, consisting of ten
millions of freemen, must be crippled in the exercise of their
associated power, unmanned of all the energies applicable to the
improvement of their own cond