The manufactures of England
are excluded, not by the revenue laws of the States, but by the corn
laws of Great Britain, which forbid the British manufacturer to take in
exchange the only article of value his American customer has to spare; a
prohibition which, unhappily for the people of this country, our
government has power to enforce. The prohibitory system is, to a great
extent, impracticable in the United States; and just so far as it should
be found practicable, it would prove injurious, by creating fictitious
and dependent interests, which, in the course of time, would become
insupportably burdensome to the commonwealth, and eventually would have
to be relinquished at the cost of a fearful amount of individual
distress and national suffering. Legitimate commerce is that department
of the national welfare, in which it is the business of statesmanship to
do nothing but remove the impediments of its own creating in past times.
In all other respects, commercial legislation is a nuisance; and if
under some circumstances trade is found to flourish concurrently with
such interference, the fact is due either to the restrictions and
regulations being practically inoperative, or more frequently, to the
high profits arising from unexhausted resources, in the absence of
competition, enabling commerce to advance in spite of impediments; in
the same way as cultivation by slave labor, notwithstanding its
expensiveness and inordinate waste, enables the first planter on a
virgin soil, and with an open market for his produce, to roll in his
carriage, though beggary is to be the fate of the second or third
generation of his descendants.
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