“At the end of the last session,” said Calhoun, December 8, “I recommended high duties as a substitute for the Non-importation Act. High duties have no pernicious effects, and are consistent with the genius of the people and the institutions of the country. It is thus we would combine in the highest degree the active resources of the country with the pressure on the manufactures of the enemy. Your army and navy would feel the animating effect.... The non-importation as a redress of wrongs is radically defective. You may meet commercial restrictions with commercial restrictions, but you cannot safely confront premeditated insult and injury with commercial restrictions alone.... It sinks the nation in its own estimation; it counts for nothing what is ultimately connected with our best hopes,--the Union of these States. Our Union cannot safely stand on the cold calculation of interest alone; it is too weak to withstand political convulsions; we cannot without hazard neglect that which makes man love to be a member of an extensive community,--the love of greatness, the consciousness of strength.” The three South Carolinians--Calhoun, Cheves, and Lowndes--had a financial policy of their own, in which they received some private sympathy, if not much active support, from the Treasury. Gallatin, in his own way, stood in a position almost as solitary as that of John Randolph; but condemned as he was to support the burden of a war which Congress had insisted upon, with only such financial means as Congress left him, he could feel little sympathy with any financial scheme, for all were more or less clumsy and inefficient. As far as he could see, nothing but peace could save the Treasury. In June, at the time of declaring war, he urged taxation; but the party feared taxation, and preferred to wait the chances of military success. In December these expected successes turned into disasters; the country showed an unforeseen hostility to the war. Taxation might easily be fatal, for the war found little real support except in Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Southern States, precisely where internal taxation would excite deepest resistance. The war leaders would not hear of laying taxes at such a moment, and they had no great difficulty in carrying their point. Gallatin himself could afford to wait. The accidental importations from England after the repeal of the British orders brought five million dollars into the Treasury,--a sum so much greater than had been expected, and so ample for meeting the interest on old and new loans, that Gallatin could not think himself obliged to exhaust his influence and risk that of his party in order to wring taxes from a timid Congress. The secretary’s attitude brought upon him a fair and just rebuke from John Randolph, that he had trifled with the dignity of the House.[378] Had Gallatin been inclined to retort, he would have