and distressed politicians. The people added to their distress by his reëlection by an almost unanimous vote.

In 1833 the bugles again sounded notes of distress at the removal of the deposits. The doctors were called in, but no remedy was found. The matter ended in very hard words against General Jackson for his cool stubbornness, and want of sympathy for incurable distress.

In 1840 there was again great distress, brought on by living in log-cabins, eating cold pork and beans, sitting on wagontongues, logs, and fences, and drinking hard cider out of gourdshells. But this was cured by the election of "Tippecanoe and Tyler too," though, it is said, they had distressing dreams for four years, and until "Young Hickory" took the Executive chair.

Elsewhere we shall give further instances of great distress, and especially that occasioned by the inability of the Republicans to get Mr. Johnson out of the Executive chair. No rational man can doubt that when a politician wants office and power, and can't get it, he is distressed. There have been large numbers badly distressed, because the presidency was withheld from them. These are distresses of the mind, and who can minister to a discased mind, where a million of votes is the only healing prescription? Those who sound the loudest notes, exhibiting the greatest political distress, never manifest it, when merely food and clothing are wanted by men, women, and children, like that daily seen down South among the white people. Their music-teachers have given them no instruction, enabling them to sound the proper notes for such occasions.

71.--THE PROTECTIVE SYSTEM.

Protection necessarily implies two parties, one to protect and another to be protected, as well as the necessary means by which the protection is accomplished. When a government engages in a system of protection, the whole people must be divided into two classes, one whose duty it is to protect, and another who have the right to demand and receive protection. It must also prescribe the instrumentality and the mode and manner of its use, by which the desired result is to be secured. In a government where the

rights of all are, under the Constitution, equal, before it can decree that one class shall protect the other, it must find, in the organic law, a provision authorizing it to do so. It must also find authority for selecting and forming these classes, and for defining the agents that are to be used in carrying out the work. It would also seem to be necessary to provide against changes from one class to another, or the abandonment of the specified agencies to be used in securing the intended results. If the protection intended should be for the producers of wheat and corn, if no provision is made against it, the producers of rye, oats, potatoes, and hay may leave their unprotected business and engage in raising wheat and corn, and, by increasing the supply beyond the demand, effectually defeat the intended protection. If the object should be to protect the owners of cotton and woollen mills, if not prevented by law, other manufacturers might come in and defeat the protection by overstocking the market with cotton and woollen goods. There can be no lasting protection where the favored class is free to select and pursue employments. If protection raises prices, competition is as certain, as the laws of business, to step in and reduce prices to the cost of production. If there were but a hundred hatters and boot-makers in the Union, and foreign competition legislated out, they could fix the price of hats and boots at pleasure. But when the business is thrown open, competitors will rush in and increase the supply, until hatting and boot-making would cease to be specially profitable. This will be found true of every kind of business. High duties on like productions from foreign countries will, for a time, keep up prices on our productions to the cost of the foreign article, its duty, and costs, and charges. For a time high prices naturally prevail, but time is sure to lower those of our own productions to cost, including a fair business profit.

Those who say, "Put on duties, and give protection to all our productions," seem not to understand that this would be merely raising the price of those productions without benefiting anybody. A law giving fifty per cent. protection to every article would be no more useful than to mark up prices without it. If, before the law, a hatter got two bushels of wheat of a farmer for

a hat, he would get no more, and the farmer would pay exactly the old price for a hat. Among producers and consumers neither would be benefited. If a class is to be selected to profit by protective legislation, it would be necessary to define who should compose it. Should it be those personally most meritorious? If so, who shall adjudicate and determine who they are? If it is to be composed of those without whose toil we cannot exist-the farmers will the mechanics and seamen be satisfied? The farmers have never yet been selected. Shall it be the seamen ? Then the farmers and mechanics will complain and overthrow the law, as their combined numbers will enable them to do. Shall it be the farmers? Then the scamen and mechanics will be dissatisfied and seek a change. If it shall be mechanics, then the farmers and seamen will complain, and seek to alter the law. Among the farmers are there degrees of merit? Are not the wheat, corn, wool, and potato growers, and the graziers, all on a par? Do they not all toil, work the soil, and receive about equally low profits? We rely upon them in war; shall we overlook them in peace? Among mechanics, what class shall be preferred? Is he who uses machinery to be preferred to him who uses his hands? Is the maker of farthingales more worthy of favor than the pinmaker? Who shall select, and where does he obtain his authority to discriminate among citizens upon whom God and the Constitution have conferred equal rights? We are not speaking concerning raising revenue, but of class advantages conferred by legislation, inaptly called protection, which has a less repulsive aspect. But words cannot disguise the intention. It is to select among mankind a class who shall receive worldly favors to be derived from the earnings of another class. To those who earn and yield these advantages, and to the class who receive them, it is precisely the same thing in principle, whether the receiver collects, as now, for himself, or the Government should do it and pay over to the favored class. The loss on one side and the gain on the other would be the same. But if the Government should become the organ of an aggression upon the rights of equality, those enacting and executing the law would be instantly hurled from power. When the disguise is stripped off from such a system, the voice

of the world is against it. When the injustice is indirectly perpetrated, so as not to be shown up glaringly in all its proportions, it is not clearly seen, its extent known or appreciated. When the law, by its operation, adds fifty per cent. to the price of cottons and woollens, not being collected by itself, but as added to a fair price, it is little thought of, because covered up and concealed. If the bills were made out in two items, one showing the real cost, and the other the legislative protection, few would pay the latter, and fewer still approve of the law authorizing the exaction. It is by disguising the ingredients with a sugar-coating that a disagreeable pill is easily swallowed. It would be just as fair and honest for Government to appoint officers to go to the paying class and require them to pay to the favored class specific amounts as to allow it to be indirectly done. There is no more power in the Constitution to do the one than there is to do the other. There is not a particle in it authorizing either. During the twenty-eight years of the four first Presidents, the idea of such favoritism in legislation was not proposed or thought of. There was no class controlling a sufficiently large number of the press. and politicians to dare attempt any such object. Then the country was new, and men struggled to secure a livelihood, and were willing to earn it. It was not until years of prosperity had accumulated capital, and the United States Bank, and small imitations had been chartered, that men began to think of living by their wits and without labor. This occasioned the necessity of profiting by the warnings of others, and prompted men to seek the aid of legislation to accomplish their purposes. Men seek the fruits of industry, but wish to be protected from the labor necessary to obtain them. Class legislation secures this. The smaller the class, the more certain is a thriving result. The favored class is made just large enough to secure the passage of the law, and no larger. The larger the number left in the contributing class, the more profitable the discrimination. If restricted to inconsiderable numbers, the system would fail to be productive. The constitutional power authorizing this kind of legislation has never been pointed out. It is never visible, except to those whose eyes are so peculiar that they can see around a hill. The system

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finds talkers and writers, but never furnished a logical constitutional argument, because impossibilities are never accomplished.

The protective system rests upon extreme anti-democratic principles-the principle that the Government is a machine created to make one class rich, and to control the industry of the other, so as to secure that object. A share, often a large one, of the earnings of one class is taken from them by law and diverted to the use of the favored one. Instead of each person working out his own happiness, according to democratic principles, the unprotected class are required, by Government, to work out the prosperity and happiness of the protected class, by contributing toward the means necessary to enable them to live. There is, in reality, slavery in this principle, because the class contributing to the support of the protected class do so, not of their own free will, but by compulsion and without compensation. The difference is in the form and dress, and not in the principle.

We have shown that, in the progress of time, this class legislation defeats itself. But not until large mischief is done. It weakens the bonds of Government, and alienates one section from another, according to the locality of the contributing and receiving classes, while it occasions a perpetual scramble for these legislative advantages. All such things tend to diminish, if not destroy, the happiness of the people, and impair the respectability of our Government.

72. THE REVIVAL OF A GOLD CURRENCY.

The power to coin money has, all over the civilized world, and at all times, been a function of government, or prerogative of the crown. Gold and silver have ever been the currency of the world, with very limited exceptions, when speculative associations have bought the privilege of creating an inferior substitute. When our national Constitution was formed, its framers were alive to the evils of a currency not consisting of gold and silver. They acted upon the theory, reiterated in express words in the tenth amendment, that "the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." The Consti