1821 to 1829, average tons, 37,000 90,000 1830 142,000 165,000 1832 318,000 210,000 1834 451,000 210,000 1835 to 1841, average, 250,000 1837 881,000 1842 1,108,000 1844 1,621,000 380,000 1846 2,343,000 765,000 1848 3,089,000 800,000 In the increase here exhibited lies the reason why the League made such a desperate, and unfortunately successful, effort to overthrow the whole protective system of Great Britain; and also the reason why America refuses reciprocity. The Manchester men began to see--there being no want of shrewdness among them when their own individual interests were concerned--that their game had not only become hazardous, but must ere long prove desperate. They had already many rivals on the continent of Europe, who were, equally with themselves, customers to the Americans for cotton wool, and who fenced themselves against the introduction of the Manchester fabric by hostile tariffs. That, however, was nothing in comparison to the appalling fact, that the very people who found the raw material were actually in possession of the means of spinning it themselves, and seemed bent on doing so by their progress from year to year! In vain did our manufacturers and chambers of commerce try to demonstrate to the Yankees that they were not only committing a foolish but a most unnatural action--in vain did they assert, as a fundamental doctrine of ethics, that Britain ought to have the manufacturing monopoly of the world; and as a fundamental principle of economy, that it was far more for the advantage of a nation which produced the raw material to forego its manufacture, than to rear up within itself a new and lucrative branch of industry. Their ethics and their economy were alike scouted; and no wonder, for both propositions were repugnant to common sense, to ascertained results, and to reason. If it is indeed a law of economy that a nation which produces the raw article ought to confine itself to that production, and not to undertake the finishing and manufacturing process--then, by the same reasoning which was attempted to be palmed off upon the Americans, our wool, instead of being made up at Leeds or Bradford, should be straightway shipped off to Saxony; and the product of our iron mines transported to Sweden, there to undergo the necessary process of smelting. It is perhaps the strangest feature of the age in which we live, that such absolute and self-evident nonsense as this should not only have been uttered on platforms, and received with applause by crowds of congregated merchants, but have been gravely set