Again, at this session, the object of the tariff occupied the attention of Congress. The compromise act, as it was called, of 1833, which was composed of two parts—one to last nine years, for the benefit of manufactures; the other to last for ever, for the benefit of the planting and consuming interest—was passed, as hereinbefore stated, in pursuance of an agreement between Mr. Clay and Mr. Calhoun and their respective friends, at the time the former was urging the necessity for a continuance of high tariff for protection and revenue, and the latter was presenting and justifying before Congress the nullification ordinance adopted by the Legislature of South Carolina. To Mr. Clay and Mr. Calhoun it was a political necessity, one to get rid of a stumbling-block (which protective tariff had become); the other to escape a personal peril which his nullifying ordinance had brought upon him, and with both, it was a piece of policy, to enable them to combine against Mr. Van Buren, by postponing their own contention; and a device on the part of its author (Mr. Clayton, of Delaware) and Mr. Clay to preserve the protective system. It provided for a reduction of a certain per centage each year, on the duties for the ensuing nine years, until the revenue was reduced to 20 per cent. ad valorem on all articles imported into the country. In consequence the revenue was so reduced that in the last year, there was little more than half what the exigencies of the government required, and different modes, by loans and otherwise, were suggested to meet the deficiency. The Secretary of the Treasury had declared the necessity of loans and taxes to carry on the government; a loan bill for twelve millions had been passed; a tariff bill to raise fourteen millions was depending; and the chairman of the Committee of Ways and Means, Mr. Millard Fillmore, defended its necessity in an able speech. His bill proposed twenty per cent. additional to the existing duty on certain specified articles, sufficient to make up the amount wanted. This encroachment on a measure so much vaunted when passed, and which had been kept inviolate while operating in favor of one of the parties to it, naturally excited complaint and opposition from the other, and Mr. Gilmer, of Virginia, in a speech against the new bill, said: “In referring to the compromise act, the true characteristics of that act which recommended it strongly to him, were that it contemplated that duties were to be levied for revenue only, and in the next place to the amount only necessary to the supply of the economical wants of the government. He begged leave to call the attention of the committee to the principle recognized as the language of the compromise, a principle which ought to be recognized in all time to come by every department of the government. It is, that duties to be raised for revenue are to be raised to such an amount only as is necessary for an economical administration of the government. Some