of protection, but in defiance
of it. With such an extended coast, and such facilities of internal
communication, prohibition is impossible. The manufactures of England
are excluded, not by the revenue laws of the States, but by the corn
laws of Great Britain, which forbid the British manufacturer to take in
exchange the only article of value his American customer has to spare; a
prohibition which, unhappily for the people of this country, our
government has power to enforce. The prohibitory system is, to a great
extent, impracticable in the United States; and just so far as it should
be found practicable, it would prove injurious, by creating fictitious
and dependent interests, which, in the course of time, would become
insupportably burdensome to the commonwealth, and eventually would have
to be relinquished at the cost of a fearful amount of individual
distress and national suffering. Legitimate commerce is that department
of the national welfare, in which it is the business of statesmanship to
do nothing but remove the impediments of its own creating in past times.
In all other respects, commercial legislation is a nuisance; and if
under some circumstances trade is found to flourish concurrently with
such interference, the fact is due either to the restrictions and
regulations being practically inoperative, or more frequently, to the
high profits arising from unexhausted resources, in the absence of
competition, enabling commerce to advance in spite of impediments; in
the same way as cultivation by slave labor, notwithstanding its
expensiveness and inordinate waste, enables the first planter on a
virgin soil, and with an open market for his produce, to roll in his
carriage, though beggary is to be the fate of the second or third
generation of his descendants.

In giving the preceding representation of the religious, the moral, and
the intellectual elevation of the population of the Northern States of
the Union, I have indicated the source we must look to for the abolition
of slavery, to which it is now time to turn our attention, for no
American question can be discussed, into which this important subject
does not largely enter.

Light and darkness, truth and falsehood, are not more in opposition than
Christianity and slavery. If the religion that is professed in the free
States be not wholly a dead letter,--if the moral and intellectual light
which they appear to enjoy be indeed light, and not darkness,--then the