“It will not be our fault if the inopportune legislation of the North combined with the reciprocity of wants between ourselves and the South should bring about considerable modification in our relations with America. No one after the recent debate on the slave trade can doubt that England is still in earnest on this point, and will never buy commercial advantage at the cost of her honor. We should infinitely prefer dealing with a single responsible government to maintaining two embassies and running the risk of misunderstandings with two highly sensitive democracies. But the tendencies of trade are inexorable, and our manufactures will infallibly find their way to the best market with the regularity of a mechanical law.... It may be the Southern population will become our best customers.... Granted that a permanent secession can be effected by a ‘peaceful appeal to the ballot-box,’ and that the moral and economical evils of slavery do not prove fatal to a society based on it, material prosperity will not fail to follow unrestricted intercourse, and the free States will long repent an act which brings needless discredit on the intrinsic merits of their cause.” This “discredit” to the cause grew in Europe as the days went on. Not only did the bill hurt Northern trade and alienate European sympathy, it was the chief reason the Confederates had for thinking their new government would succeed. It was driving trade to their ports, thus giving them money. It was making Europe their friend, thus giving them position. And nothing could be done. On all sides the Morrill tariff was denounced as a stupidity, a blunder, an outrage. There were even many demands for an extra session to repeal it. Too late the Republicans saw that their first measure as a party had been a mistake. And then suddenly the whole situation of the unhappy bill was changed by the breaking out of war between the North and South. The first and most imperative necessity in war is money, for money means everything else—men, guns, ammunition. Mr. Lincoln and his cabinet when they found in the spring of 1861 that they were in for a war of more than 90 days, at once called an extra session of Congress to provide the means for carrying it on. It fell to Mr. Chase, the new Secretary of the Treasury, to suggest what could be done. Practically our whole income came at that time from duties on imported goods. How could they be made to yield more? What other sources of revenue could be tapped? Mr. Chase had various suggestions to make, but it is with only one of them that we have to do here—the raising of the tariff on imported goods.