Abridgment of the Debates of Congress, from 1789 to 1856, Vol. 4 (of 16)United States. Congress
History
Abridgment of the Debates of Congress, from 1789 to 1856, Vol. 4 (of 16)
United States. Congress
Law -- United States; United States -- Politics and government
The embargo should be removed, because, says the gentleman, it has
operated as a bounty to the British trade. I should be disposed to
doubt this, if for no other reason than a knowledge of who advocates
its removal. Before the embargo was laid, agricultural labor in the
British West India islands, particularly on sugar estates, could
scarcely support itself. I refer the gentleman to the documents printed
by order of Parliament, and the memorials of the agent of Jamaica. He
will find that the planters are in a distressed situation, not from
their failure in the cultivation of the soil, but from the enormous
duties on their produce in the mother country. Are the extravagant
prices of articles of the first necessity, superadded to their former
embarrassments, to operate as a bounty on their trade? I should be
extremely gratified if the gentleman will inform us what would have
been the amount of bounty on the trade, if evasions of the embargo
had not taken place. If the price of flour has been sixty dollars per
barrel, and other articles in proportion, what would have been the
price had there been no evasions of the law? They could not have been
procured at all: and yet we are told the embargo is a bounty on British
trade! When the gentleman was, I had like to have said, justifying
the Orders in Council, he should have favored us with a vindication
of the _smuggling_ proclamation also. Such a degree of corruption and
of immorality never before, in any one paper, disgraced a civilized
nation. The citizens of a country, at peace and in amity, enticed to
evade their own laws! Is such an act calculated to induce the belief
that the embargo operates as a bounty on British trade?
I shall not enter upon another question stirred by the gentleman,
the constitutionality of the embargo law; the subject has become so
stale, that even he could scarcely make it interesting. It has been
laid asleep--a solemn adjudication has taken place and put it at
rest. But the gentleman will excuse me for observing he made a most
unfortunate allusion in the course of his argument. He said it was
strange that, not having the power delegated to us to tax exports, we
should undertake to prohibit them. The Orders in Council, which if the
gentleman did not justify, he was certainly very tender of, do exercise
that very power of taxing our exports, which by the constitution we are
prohibited, and that too when they are destined to a government equally
sovereign and independent with that of Great Britain.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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