A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents. Volume 2, part 2: John Quincy Adams
History
A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents. Volume 2, part 2: John Quincy Adams
Adams, John Quincy, 1767-1848; Presidents -- United States; United States -- History -- Sources; United States -- Politics and government
States; it proscribes with equal rigor the bulkier lumber and live stock
of the same portion and also of the Northern and Eastern part of our
Union. It refuses even the rice of the South unless aggravated with a
charge of duty upon the Northern carrier who brings it to them. But the
cotton, indispensable for their looms, they will receive almost duty
free to weave it into a fabric for our own wear, to the destruction of
our own manufactures, which they are enabled thus to undersell.
Is the self-protecting energy of this nation so helpless that there
exists in the political institutions of our country no power to
counteract the bias of this foreign legislation; that the growers of
grain must submit to this exclusion from the foreign markets of their
produce; that the shippers must dismantle their ships, the trade of the
North stagnate at the wharves, and the manufacturers starve at their
looms, while the whole people shall pay tribute to foreign industry to
be clad in a foreign garb; that the Congress of the Union are impotent
to restore the balance in favor of native industry destroyed by the
statutes of another realm? More just and more generous sentiments will,
I trust, prevail. If the tariff adopted at the last session of Congress
shall be found by experience to bear oppressively upon the interests of
any one section of the Union, it ought to be, and I can not doubt will
be, so modified as to alleviate its burden. To the voice of just
complaint from any portion of their constituents the representatives of
the States and of the people will never turn away their ears. But so
long as the duty of the foreign shall operate only as a bounty upon the
domestic article; while the planter and the merchant and the shepherd
and the husbandman shall be found thriving in their occupations under
the duties imposed for the protection of domestic manufactures, they
will not repine at the prosperity shared with themselves by their
fellow-citizens of other professions, nor denounce as violations of the
Constitution the deliberate acts of Congress to shield from the wrongs
of foreign laws the native industry of the Union. While the tariff of
the last session of Congress was a subject of legislative deliberation
it was foretold by some of its opposers that one of its necessary
consequences would be to impair the revenue. It is yet too soon to
pronounce with confidence that this prediction was erroneous. The
obstruction of one avenue of trade not unfrequently opens an issue to
another. The consequence of the tariff will be to increase the
exportation and to diminish the importation of some specific articles;
but by the general law of trade the increase of exportation of one
article will be followed by an increased importation of others, the
duties upon which will supply the deficiencies which the diminished
importation would otherwise occasion. The effect of taxation upon
revenue can seldom be foreseen with certainty. It must abide the test of
experience.
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