and to burthen our poverty and to swell their riches;" and after characterizing Protection as "a system of fraud, robbery and usurpation," he continued "I have said that we shall ere long be compelled to calculate the value of our Union; and to enquire of what use to us is this most unequal alliance, by which the South has always been the loser and the North always the gainer. Is it worth our while to continue this union of States, where the North demands to be our masters and we are required to be their tributaries? who with the most insulting mockery call the yoke they put upon our necks the 'American system!' The question, however, is fast approaching the alternative of submission or separation." Only a few days after this inflammatory speech at Columbus, S. C., inciting South Carolinians to resist the pending Protective Tariff even to the lengths of Secession, during a grand banquet at Richmond, Va., William B. Giles--another Free Trade leader--proposed, and those present drank a toast to the "Tariff Schemer" in which was embodied a declaration that "The Southerners will not long pay tribute." Despite these turbulent and treasonable mutterings, however, the "Jacksonian Congress" passed the Act--a majority of members from the Cotton and New England States voting against, while the vote of the Middle and Western Free States was almost solidly for, it. At a meeting held soon after the enactment of the Tariff of 1828, at Walterborough Court House, S. C., an address was adopted and issued which, after reciting the steps that had been taken by South Carolina during the previous year to oppose it, by memorials and otherwise, and stating that, despite their "remonstrances and implorations," a Tariff Bill had passed, not indeed, such as they apprehended, but "ten-fold worse in all its oppressive features," proceeded thus: "From the rapid step of usurpation, whether we now act or not, the day of open opposition to the pretended powers of the Constitution cannot be far off, and it is that it may not go down in blood that we now call upon you to resist. We feel ourselves standing underneath its mighty protection, and declaring forth its free and recorded spirit, when we say we must resist. By all the great principles of liberty--by the glorious achievements of our fathers in defending them--by their noble blood poured forth like water in maintaining them--by their lives in suffering, and their death in honor and in glory;--our countrymen! we must resist. Not secretly, as timid thieves or skulking smugglers--not in companies and associations, like money chafferers or stock jobbers --not separately and individually, as if this was ours and not our country's cause--but openly, fairly, fearlessly, and unitedly, as becomes a free, sovereign and independent people. Does timidity ask WHEN? We answer NOW!"