o in order to maintain its own authority.

In America the liberty of association for political purposes is
unbounded. An example will show in the clearest light to what an extent
this privilege is tolerated.

The question of the tariff, or of free trade, produced a great
manifestation of party feeling in America; the tariff was not only a
subject of debate as a matter of opinion, but it exercised a favorable
or a prejudicial influence upon several very powerful interests of the
States. The North attributed a great portion of its prosperity, and the
South all its sufferings, to this system; insomuch that for a long
time the tariff was the sole source of the political animosities which
agitated the Union.

In 1831, when the dispute was raging with the utmost virulence, a
private citizen of Massachusetts proposed to all the enemies of the
tariff, by means of the public prints, to send delegates to Philadelphia
in order to consult together upon the means which were most fitted to
promote freedom of trade. This proposal circulated in a few days from
Maine to New Orleans by the power of the printing-press: the opponents
of the tariff adopted it with enthusiasm; meetings were formed on all
sides, and delegates were named. The majority of these individuals
were well known, and some of them had earned a considerable degree of
celebrity. South Carolina alone, which afterwards took up arms in
the same cause, sent sixty-three delegates. On October 1, 1831, this
assembly, which according to the American custom had taken the name of
a Convention, met at Philadelphia; it consisted of more than two hundred
members. Its debates were public, and they at once assumed a legislative
character; the extent of the powers of Congress, the theories of free
trade, and the different clauses of the tariff, were discussed in turn.
At the end of ten days' deliberation the Convention broke up, after
having published an address to the American people, in which it
declared:

I. That Congress had not the right of making a tariff, and that the
existing tariff was unconstitutional;

II. That the prohibition of free trade was prejudicial to the interests
of all nations, and to that of the American people in particular.

It must be acknowledged that the unrestrained liberty of political
association has not hitherto produced, in the United States, those fatal
consequences which might perhaps be expected from it elsewhere. The
right of association was i