It is the remark of a beautiful writer that "to have known nothing but misery is the most portentous condition under which human nature can start on its course." Has your agricultural laborer ever known anything but misery? He is born in a miserable hovel, which in mockery is termed a house or a home; he is reared in penury: he passes a life of hopeless and unrequited toil, and the jail or the union house is before him as the only asylum on this side of the pauper's grave. Is this the result of your protection to native industry? Have you cared for the laborer till, from a home of comfort, he has but a hovel for shelter? and have you cherished him into starvation and rags? I tell you what your boasted protection is--it is a protection of native idleness at the expense of the impoverishment of native industry. FROM THE SPEECH ON NON-RECOGNITION OF THE SOUTHERN CONFEDERACY (1861) I advise you, and I advise the people of England, to abstain from applying to the United States doctrines and principles which we never apply to our own case. At any rate, they [the Americans] have never fought "for the balance of power" in Europe. They have never fought to keep up a decaying empire. They have never squandered the money of their people in such a phantom expedition as we have been engaged in. And now, at this moment, when you are told that they are going to be ruined by their vast expenditure,--why, the sum that they are going to raise in the great emergency of this grievous war is not greater than what we raise every year during a time of peace.