It is an attack upon my constituents. Under the Senator's version, under his exposition of slavery, nine-tenths of the people of the North are or have been at some time slaves; for nine-tenths of the people of the North have at some time been hirelings and laborers. We do not feel degraded by being laborers. We believe it to be respectable.... Travel on any road in the State of Michigan, and you will find flourishing farms on almost every 160 acres, with comfortable dwellings, and a high state of improvement and cultivation.... You will find the owners of these farms with four or five sons of their neighboring farmers hired out by the day or the month or the year.... These young men go to service or labor until they get money enough to buy a farm; then they, too, become the employers of labor.... These men are never degraded by labor.... They are the foundations of society there. Some of these men who are at work by the month during the summer on farms are in the Legislature making laws for us in the winter. There was more of it to the same effect--honest, indignant words in defense of free Northern labor, and in eulogy of the men who toiled. And the tone of these portions of the speech was wholesomely defiant, without a shade of truckling to Southern insolence. Nine years later, in discussing proposed tariff amendments in 1867, Mr. Chandler said in the Senate, "I thank God we are able to pay good prices to our laborers." These utterances indicate the vein in which he always made his voice heard and influence felt whenever the interests and rights of labor were challenged either by speech or attempted legislation. The tariff controversy in the United States dates back half a century. This republic in its colonial days was agricultural. There were no mines nor manufactures. Each house did its own spinning and weaving. There were small shops for the making and repairing of a few articles, and luxuries and fine goods for the rich were imported from the factories of Europe. The great labor-saving appliances of the nineteenth century did not exist even in imagination. The water power of the country was unused and its boundless wealth of minerals unknown. The people were farmers or traders. For them the government was founded, and apparently there was no contemplation of anything beyond. It was years before a change came, but, once begun, it hurried with rapid stride, until to-day more than one-twentieth of the entire population of the United States are engaged in manufacturing, as many more are employed in occupations connected with and dependent upon such enterprises, and the capital invested in productive industries exceeds by millions of dollars the entire national debt.