of the quantity raised; all the rest is, of course, consumed at home; but manufacturing establishments would require a great deal of produce to be brought to them constantly, and form a new market for it, though of small extent; and the consumers in the manufactories would be, in a great proportion, new comers from Europe, whose labour in the manufactories will enable them to pay the farmer well for all they eat, and who would otherwise be forced to join the competitors of the agriculturalists, and would contribute, by their industry, as farmers, to reduce the price, and, of course, the profits of agricultural productions still lower. One hundred thousand people, either brought from Europe or retained from migration to the west, and kept at work in manufactories near the seaboard, would buy and consume the produce of many acres of land, and add not inconsiderably to the amount received by the farmers for their wheat, rye, and barley.

Of that important branch of agriculture-cotton planting, it is not necessary to speak-the advantage is plain in the establishment of a domestic market.

Thirdly, of the public morals. It is said a manufacturing popu lation is most depraved, disorderly, ignorant, seditious, and sickly: and it is urged, that to take our boys and girls from the fields and from all the wholesome virtuous regularity of rustic life, and im. mure them in crowded factories, where their principles become tainted, their minds debased, and their frames enfeebled, is a cruelty that no pecuniary advantage can possibly justify, and that it were better to be poor and honest, than rich and vicious. And here our opponents, I think, look too much to the example of England, where, to be sure, their manufacturing towns present pictures of misery and human degradation most shocking and revolting to contemplation. But let us candidly inquire whether the same scenes can occur here; and, surely, in investigating this point, it is reasonable to look at the actual state of our manufactories, which, though trifling compared with what they may and will be, are sufficiently extensive to afford a safe criterion of the effect of such establishments. In England the manufacturers are obliged to toil sixteen hours each day, and earn a scanty pittance wholly inadequate to procure proper and healthy food, still less to obtain for them the advantages of education. Their minds, consequently, are enervated with their bodies. Here, on the contrary, the wages must be so high as to obtain plenty of excellent food, and to give them leisure for exercise and education. In England the manu facturer must submit to his hard lot, and drag a miserable existence, or leave it and starve. Here he may change his occupation the moment he is dissatisfied, and the western country opens to him a never failing resource against the impositions of his employer.

In England the manufactories are crowded in close built dirty towns, where the temptations to vice, in the hours of leisure, are infinite. Here the factories are placed on the borders of running

streams, remote from towns, where country air and country food contribute to the corporeal health, as quiet retirement, good schools, and meeting-houses, and the absence of evil example, do to the soundness of the principles. The beautiful windings of the Brandywine and the Chester creek abound with manufactories-the Schuylkill will soon witness as many. Steam is in England the great moving power, because they are without our rapid streams; but nature has provided for us in a different manner, and our water-power supplies at once a more salutary and more potent principle.

New Orleans is wholly commercial, Pittsburg almost entirely a manufacturing town; yet who will say that Pittsburg is less moral or less healthy than New Orleans? Philadelphia manufactures more than New York or Baltimore, yet its inhabitants are, surely, not at all contaminated; at least they consider themselves fully equal in probity and decorum to the least manufacturing city in the world; and the greatest number of manufactures are now carried on in one of the states to which we are accustomed, and justly, to attribute superior purity and regularity of manners.

Fourthly, the tax upon many for the benefit of a few. This objection is founded on a very short-sighted view of the subject. Every alteration of the tariff is, for a time, a tax on the many and a benefit to the few. The double duties enriched all that had goods on hand to which those duties were, in future, to apply. The erection of every new public building, or new ship of war, is a tax on the many, that is the nation-for the benefit of the few, that is the contractors and workmen. But it is idle and absurd, in considering great national questions, to confine our view to one, two, or three years; and if every man that buys a new coat, and gives five dollars more for it in consequence of the nonimportation of British cloth, is rendered in one, two, or five years richer by fifty dollars than he would have been if he had not been obliged to give that additional price, then the tax is for his benefit in the end, and it is granted, that unless the permanent and future effects be advantageous in a very important degree, then the whole scheme is unsound.

It is also said, that the price of labour would be enhanced so as to throw difficulties in the way of every operation of industry, by the absorption of labourers in the manufactories.

This is, I conceive, a most satisfactory reason for adopting the plan which I advocate. There is no better sign of the prosperity of a nation than the high price of labour. If you wish to fill the army, and the poor houses, and work-houses, make labour cheap-— for then employment is scarce;-but to give every labourer a comfortable subsistence-to take away the temptations which poverty and want always bring- to scatter plenty round a smiling land' let industry of all kinds be well paid, or, in other words, enhance the price of labour,

I shall be much pleased if some more accomplished writer would adorn these simple and inartificial suggestions with the graces of elegant diction and the charms of fanciful illustration, to render them more convincing to the multitude. Rude and unpolished as they now are, I trust that the opponents of American manufactures will not peruse them entirely without profit, W.

ART. X.-To Indagator.

I HAVE read, in the Analectic Magazine for July, with a degree of interest proportioned to the importance of its subject, your essay on manufactures; and being impressed with a conviction that its principles are erroneous, that they foster the injurious prejudices of a large portion of our citizens, and that, if adopted, they would produce the most pernicious consequences on the prosperity of our common country, I have undertaken to reply to it.

One thing I regret much, which is, that in the whole of your elaborate performance, you do not once cast a glance at the consequences of the measure you deprecate, on the national interests. Your discussions are limited by the contracted view of its effects on particular classes of our citizens. You calculate the result of farmers paying half a dollar a yard extra for broadcloth, but do not deign to turn your reader's attention to the lamentable effect of destroying the industry of the country, impoverishing it of its wealth, and fostering and cherishing the industry, the manufactures, and the governments of foreign nations, at the expense of our own, and all for the sake of a paltry saving of a few dollars per head to each of the citizens. The whole amount of our imports is only eight or ten dollars each for the people of the United States. How insignificant, then, must the saving be in the difference of prices of the few articles each individual consumes!

Your objections to the encouragement of the manufactures of your country by prohibitions and prohibitory duties, after the example of all the wiser nations of Europe, though very numerous, have no novelty to recommend them. They have in this and other countries been a hundred times repeated, and as often fully refuted. There is, in fact, hardly one of them that has not been recently obviated in the addresses of the Philadelphia Society for the promotion of national industry. And had you read these addresses attentively, as you ought to have done, when you undertook to refute them, you might have reduced your list within very narrow limits.

Your objections, I repeat, being hacknied, and the refutation of them equally so, I shall be obliged to avail myself of weapons of defence that have been often brandished in the polemics of political economy. When novel arguments are advanced, there will be scope for novel replies. But trite accusations must be met by trite defences.

To give you an instance. You lay very great emphasis on the demoralizing effects of manufacturing establishments. This is a

point to be decided not by declamation, or assertion, or begging the question, but by appeals to facts, under circumstances calculated to warrant their use as a basis for reason and argument. The society, within a few weeks, by the overwhelming authority of Colquhoun, the first statistical writer in Europe, overthrew this hypothesis, and settled the question, for ever, in the minds of all men open to conviction. When you, nevertheless, adduce the same objection anew, regardless of its recent refutation, I must necessarily have recourse to the same disproof. And thus of nearly all the other items of your essay.

I offer this preface to prevent readers from expecting much novel matter, and to prevent likewise their fastidiousness from being excited by facts and arguments which they may have already seen in newspapers and pamphlets.

Res negat ornari-contenta doceri.

The objections you have marshalled are no less than fourteen:1. That there is danger of retaliatory measures on the part of Great Britain, if we prohibit or lay heavy duties on her manufac

tures.

2. That the merchants do not apply for protection, and that, therefore, the manufacturers have no claim to it.

3. That our manufactories are, and for ten years to come, will be, unable to supply the demands of the country, even for cotton and woollen goods.

4. That the manufacturing system is as yet premature.

5. That congress have no right to lay unequal burdens on our citizens.

6. That the plan proposed would encourage smuggling.

7. That the system of protecting national industry, if adopted at all, ought not to be adopted on the example of foreign nations.

8. That it would produce pernicious effects on agriculture by enticing to manufactures persons employed in the more useful labours of the field.

9. That the price of agricultural productions is already too high for want of labourers.

10. That the failure of the manufacturing establishments, during and since the war, arose from imprudence and mismanagement. 11. That the system would give rise to extortion.

12. That the high price of labour forbids us to hope for success in manufacturing establishments.

13. That the manufacturing system is a productive source of foreign wars.

14. That manufacturers are held in a state of abject slavery, and are greatly inferior to agriculturists.

Of these in the order in which they are arranged.

I. Danger of retaliatory measures.

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All commerce,' you observe, 'is essentially founded on reciprocity, or supposed reciprocity of advantages. To encourage ma

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nufactures, it is proposed to tax high the manufactures of Europe. In return, or in revenge, if you please, they throw discouragements on our raw materials of cotton, rice, tobacco.' [Why omit flour?] "What right has congress, then, to tax indirectly the staples of the southern states, for the sake of a handful of manufacturing speculators? For it is exactly the same thing whether we tax the export, or Great Britain taxes the import.'

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This argument falls to the ground, when it is considered that Great Britain has recently set us the example of prohibition, by closing her ports against the importation of flour, one of our principal staples, and a most important item in our means of paying her for the immoderate quantities of her manufactures we consume. I omit the discouragement' of our cotton, by the extensive importation of that article from her own dependencies. I would not be understood to condemn either of those measures. Her policy was perfectly right in both. But if such regulations of trade, as the duty of fostering and protecting domestic industry may require, be a justifiable reason for retaliatory measures, then, sir, give me leave to observe, that the exclusion of our flour would, according to your own theory, perfectly warrant us in throwing discouragements on her manufactures,' 'in return, or revenge, if you please,' for the 'discouragements' she has thrown on our raw materials. If there be any hostility in prohibitions, or prohibitory duties, she hurled the gauntlet, and commenced the warfare, and therefore cannot, without manifest injustice, complain, if we follow her example.

Let me observe further, sir, that Great Britain precludes us from sending our cotton goods to her market by a duty of eighty-five per cent. and our leather fabrics by a duty of one hundred and fortytwo per cent. Suppose, for argument sake, we were to impose similar duties on her manufactures, could she, without a disregard of consistency, be offended at our taking a leaf out of her tariff, for our advantage? Surely not.

It may appear ludicrous to mention the prohibition of our manufactures by Great Britain. But, however wonderful an aspect it may wear to your mind, you may be assured, that if the tariff between the two countries were equalized, our manufacturers would be as well able, at no very distant day, to destroy her manufactures, by sending off their surplus quantities of goods, as hers are at present, to destroy ours, by inundating our markets with their surpluses. Our citizens are as ingenious and as industrious-our machinery is equal, and performs its operations at as little expense-our advantages of water-power are far more abundant,* and our country is just as near to theirs as theirs to ours--of course the voyage is not more expensive.

Water-power is so scarce, comparatively, in Great Britain, that a very large proportion of the machinery of that country is worked, at an enormous expense, by steam, and, therefore, much of the success of her manufactures depends on their vicinity to the coal mines.