Political economy has been well defined as "the science of labor-saving applied to the action of communities, its aim being to save labor from waste, from misapplication, and from loss through constrained idleness." The objects of Protection are the ennobling of labor and the enhancing of its productiveness, and its method is interdicting an unwholesome competition which looks no farther than securing mere cheapness of production at whatever cost of human energy, comfort and enlightenment. There has never been an intelligent and sincere protectionist without a thorough faith in the vast importance and inherent nobility of Labor. On this as on all great questions Mr. Chandler's convictions were radical, and he was right fundamentally. He had been himself a laborer. The store, the farm, the factory, the work-shop, are all one in this--their duties are labor. Mr. Chandler knew the worth of free labor. He had witnessed its seed-planting and wonderful fruitage of development in Michigan, and he honored the strong, hardy, intelligent and self-reliant race who were the laborers there, and of whom he was one. He had early opportunity to make this plain in the Senate. Hammond of South Carolina, a true representative of that turbulent, rebellious State and of the embodied insolence of its master class and of the man-owner's contempt for free labor, made at this time his notorious "mud-sill" speech. "There must be laborers in every community, a low, degenerate class, who hew the wood and draw the water, ... the mud-sills of society, in effect they are slaves;" this was its idea. It was a frank avowal of the estimate put by the slaveholding oligarchy upon the Northern laborers, upon the men who have made this country what it is. Mr. Chandler was then young in the Senate, and had spoken but rarely, but to this insult to his constituency he was quick to reply. In his speech of March 12, 1858, the first in which he addressed the Senate at any length, he said: