Then up came the Revenue Collection Bill, supported by thirty-two Senators, and passed with only seven besides Calhoun opposing, and the great politician from Kentucky had Calhoun safely tangled in his net. Against the protest of the latter, he amended his tariff bill with a provision that in the valuation of imported articles, “the valuation should be at the port in which the goods were imported.” Calhoun argued that this would be a great injustice to the South, as the price of goods being cheaper in the Northern than in the Southern cities, a home valuation would give the former a preference.[83] But that was exactly what Clay had proposed, and was determined to do, and although Webster and Silsbee of Massachusetts, Hill of New Hampshire, Dallas of Pennsylvania and Kane and Benton of Missouri came to Calhoun’s support, Calhoun fearing evidently to wreck his compromise with Clay, yielded this vital point. To consider all that was involved in the surrender of Calhoun, it will be necessary to revert to the past and to consider some political views emanating from the mightiest intellect South Carolina ever produced. Prior to the framing of the Constitution of the United States and subsequent to the peace between Great Britain and the States, the value of the imports from Great Britain to America had exceeded the value of the exports from America to Great Britain to such an amount as to be nearly three times as great; while the commerce between the two countries was very nearly ten times as great as that between the States and the rest of the world. This condition had produced anything but prosperity for America. The statesman who had contributed most to the framing of the Constitution, Charles Pinckney, in his effort to secure its ratification by his own State, had made among other things this remarkable statement: “‘Foreign Trade’ is one of the enemies against which we must be extremely guarded, more so than against any other, as none will ever have a more unfavorable operation. I consider it as the root of our present public distress, as the plentiful source from which our future national calamities will flow, unless great care is taken to prevent it.”[84] Thirty years later he warned Congress along similar lines, “that a country mainly agricultural and without mines of the precious metals, could not have its imports greatly in excess of its exports, without financial disaster.”[85] From the time of the Union to the first embargo and the war of 1812, the immense preponderance of the value of imports had been greatly reduced from nearly treble to an excess of but twenty-five per cent; but in the two years which followed the peace they had increased to almost double the value of the exports. Under Lowndes’s tariff of 1816 they again fell to an excess of only about twenty per cent by 1821.[86]