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mence with them, and to afford to their interests that support, and to their just rights that necessary protection, without which as a class they must continue poor and dependent, at the mercy of every cheap publisher of British trash. Once their minds have been led to consider the question of native industry with reference to their own interests, they will not be slow to apply it to the interests of the cotton spinner, the leather manufacturer, the moulder and the smith.

In an article like this, merely prefatory to the principal subjects of sessional discussion, it is impossible to notice every subject which may be worthy of the attention of Congress, or thoroughly exhaust any. In connection, however, with the sustentation of national industry, there are other questions of almost equal moment, to which we would direct attention.

1st. It would be an irresistible argument against the present system, to produce in figures from the books or evidence of the companies themselves, the amount of stock representing the ownership and profits of our railroads, canals, aqueducts, harbors, public buildings, &c., &c., now owned in England. "Absenteeism "is the worst commercial evil to which a country can be subjected; and the system of government must be vicious and inherently bad which permits any country to fall under a system so ruinous to every industry, and so perilous to the very existence of the nation. We believe that at the present day, English absenteeism is drawing from the produce of American industry, an amount not less than fifty millions of dollars per annum.

2d. Considering our ruinous extent of imported manufactures, and our equally ruinous export of raw produce; considering this yearly drain of absenteeism, and the immense yearly addition of gold to the currency of the world, and that of America in particular, it is manifest that a commercial and monetary crisis of no ordinary extent is at hand. It is well to be prepared for it.

Our system of banking, based on notes convertible into gold and silver, is one which before fifty years must abolish itself; and indeed the time may not be so distant when, to compel a man to buy gold with his industry, and then to buy his dinner with the gold, will be looked upon as an antiquated folly. The currency of the country should be based on the national industry alone, without the intervention of a more evanescent and more variable standard. Gold and all other metals should be thrown into the market, to be bought and sold at their real value for use or export, and not kept screwed up to a congressional value, in a state unproductive to all but the bill-broker and the sweater of coin. We urge upon our financiers the necessity of looking to this subject at an early period; for in the uncertain state of our creditors in Europe, with the falling manufactures and increasing poverty of the country, there is no prophesying when the national industry may be driven into still greater difficulties, and the very existence of the industrial classes imperilled.

3d. Immediate steps should be taken to make such roads of communication between the Atlantic States and the Pacific coast as may be adjudged best for the general good. Three plans have been proposed-the inter-oceanic canal, the plan of Mr. Benton, and that of Mr. Asa Whitney. The first and the last have our entire approval.

4th. The public lands have been so fearfully plundered from the people, that we fear it is hardly worth while to speak of any which may remain unsold or unbartered. Reserving such as may be needed for public improvement, let the rest, at all events, be made free to actual settlers.

We trust the members of the Whig party in Congress will urge these topics on the public ear. When thoroughly understood and appreciated by the people, the party which sustains them will rule the United States. [

CAVETO REIPUBLICÆ PARRICIDAS.

BY RUFUS HENRY BACON.

WHEN felon hands disturb the public good,

Then, if the State be strong, the wrong is crushed,
And murderous discord into peace is hushed;
But if the State be weak, and what it would
Do, it dare not do, then the savage brood

Of hungry hounds, with early triumph flushed,
Speed to new crimes, and seize their gory food,
Insatiate now, not having been withstood!

Be warned in time, my country! Pirate knaves
Are swarming in thy midst! Their banner waves
Dusky and foul; yet blazoned with a lie,

To foil suspicion. Ah, the day is nigh,

If now false slumber seals thy watchful eye,

When patriots dead will shudder in their graves!

POLITICAL MOTIVES FOR 1851-2.

In the December number we gave our readers an illustration of the frightful calamities brought upon a nation by placing her in a relation of free trade and reciprocity with England, whose enormous manufacturing monopoly, with open jaws, sucks in and devours the agricultural wealth of Ireland, and is fast reducing that country to a desert. We have shown, by the statistics of McCulloch and others, that the periods of famine in that country are exactly the periods of largest commercial intercourse with England. We have shown also, that if the population of Ireland is taken to be eight millions, that country produces food enough to keep thrice that number of persons from absolute starvation; that the surplus of Irish food, together with a small portion of that of North America, of France, and the countries of the Black Sea and the Baltic, feed the entire mass of English operatives and idlers, not one half of the fourteen millions of England being supported by their own soil.

The horrible calamities suffered by Ireland-leaving four millions of her people at the mercy of a potato crop, which failing, they were reduced to beggary and starvation

have been traced, not by a train of argument, but by the mere co-statement of admitted facts, to the operation of English monopoly legislation, under the lying designations of free trade and reciprocity between friendly nations. This "friendly" relationship resembles the friendly protection extended by a boaconstrictor to the creature it devours. The process of charming, slavering, and swallowing, by "friendly" intercourse, by a common "literature" and freedom of intercourse, bears a truly remarkable resemblance to the operations of the great snake upon the bird. Ireland has been fairly swallowed, is undergoing the macerative process prior to final digestion; her crushed figure, buried in the belly of the monster, raises a protuberance, just large enough to remind us of her existence; and the late Irish rebellions-strong convulsive kicks and twitches of the muscular parts of the entombed creature-serve to remind us that it is still suffering the silent agonies. of dissolution.

It has been objected, that we ought not to charge the English Free Trade Ministry with the guilt of wholesale homicide; that the deaths of the four or five millions of miserable wretches who have perished ora

tions and convert it into ships of war and other appurtenances of monarchy, upon the folly, ignorance, and selfishness of the people of England themselves on the one side, and the grasping ambition and avarice of their rulers on the other.

ally, or are about to perish, of hunger in blame of our own miseries, and of Ireland, Ireland, does not lie at the door of English and all other countries exhausted by what rulers. That the crimes of men are meas- has been styled the "power of suction " ured by their knowledge: that we must not of the English monopolizers, by which believe an English minister would willingly they draw away the wealth of other naand deliberately destroy a million of wretches by famine. Finally, that the calamities of nations come rather by the ignorance and imbecility, than by the malice of men in power. Were the affairs of England to fall suddenly into confusion, and her manufactures cease, say our objectors, her own people Let us never forget, however, that in the would die for want of food, but their deaths affairs of this world there is a strict account could not be charged upon the malice of her kept by Nature, the prime minister and ministry for the last fifty years, but only on financier of the Most High. England, as a their want of foresight, and general bad nation, has not profited by the mischief management. That political stupidity and her commercial ministries have inflicted upon prejudice have perhaps killed more human the rest of mankind. The conservatives beings than even the sabres of Genghis of England stand ready to prove, by strict Khan or the bullets of Napoleon have put computation, that if the entire property to death. That a good-natured, wrong- of the country were equally divided among headed fool in power can do more harm, its population, each man would still be generally, and cause the deaths of a greater a very poor man, and would not realize. number of men, women, and children, than the cruellest tyrant. Arguments which demand a serious consideration and a deliberate reply, and which in good time will receive both, we trust, to the satisfaction of our readers.

It is also to be considered, that English rulers are merely representative; that they go into power with instructions, and are bound to maintain a certain system, or they go out. Reform comes from the people if it comes at all, and not in any instance from the rulers, unless in rare cases, when ministers happen to be at once heroes and statesmen.

"Where then," continues our temperate and discreet objector, "will you lay the blame of this awful calamity, and of all similar calamities greater or less, impending over nations who hold open and unguarded intercourse with England?" In reply, many answers occur to us. We may lay it if we please upon Providence, and suggest as a remedy days of fasting and prayer. But as the God of Israel favors only those who act and think while they pray, it is needful to admit that the consolation of our answer is but trifling.

enough therefrom to live with decency and comfort. A great deal has been said, too, about the self-dependence of England, when it is a demonstrated fact, as shown in our December number, that were an impassable hedge built about her, one half of her people must perish of hunger within a year.

The question of greatest importance before the world at this period, and which men of all parties must entertain alike, is doubtless, whether the present governing powers of England shall be suffered to go on in the line of ruin which they have marked out for us and for herself; whether we will permit them to enlarge and fortify a monopoly by which they keep several millions of their own people in danger of famine, and by which they exhaust the resources of every nation with which they have had the art or the fortune to establish relations of unprotected commerce. Of all people, (next to those of Ireland,) we of the United States are the most deeply interested in the reply that shall be given to this momentous question, beyond all comparison the greatest and the most important that has ever yet come up.

We, the people of the United States, are alone able to answer it effectually. If we Fate is a convenient and broad-shouldered value our own country we must answer it; recipient of all blame. We may lay the fault if France, or Germany, or Ireland, then, for upon fate if we are so inclined, were it not their sakes, we must answer it. Nothing that in our next sentence we may be fated in our own, or in the world's service, can to lay it somewhere else, and impose the hose h done while we continue the

Calhoun argued that Congress had no power of legislation over the territories, and was then extremely indignant with the people of California because they did not wait for the legislative action of Congress. Now, the people of California merely illustrated the fundamental position of the great champion of State sovereignty.

Other Senators from the South, equally warm in the defence of fundamental popular rights, insisted on the adoption of a line on either side of which it should be lawful or

odious controversy that has so long cursed and stupefied us. Men are crazed with abstractions, and seem to have lost all taste for realities. The confusion of party that is said to prevail at the present moment, (we need not say crisis, every instant of our political existence being a crisis, if some are to be trusted,) is occasioned by uncertainty as to whether the people, or any considerable portion of them, will continue to favor those agitators who advise open disobedience to the laws, or their effectual evasion by illegal methods. Now, without opening the ques-unlawful, by act of Congress, to own slaves. tion, whether the method advised by Congress for the recovery of fugitive slaves is thoroughly the best and most agreeable to the spirit of our fundamental laws; it is, nevertheless, held to be absolutely necessary for the peace of the Union, that the law as it stands should be obeyed while it stands, and if its application is to be evaded, that the evasion be thoroughly constitutional and legal. We beg to remind those who nullify it on the plea of its supposed unconstitutionality, that they are themselves much more unconstitutional in their use of an

illegal remedy. While the present Secretary of State was still by comparison a young orator in the Senate, the people of South Carolina attempted to nullify the revenue laws, because they seemed to them to be very unconstitutional. The people of Massachusetts will do well to recollect with what a fine legal and moral enthusiasm they hailed the successful enforcement of those laws, so offensive to their Southern fellowcitizens. South Carolinians insisted at that time that the sovereignty of the State was infringed by the execution of the tariff-that it was a direct attack upon the rights of States, which are by all men held sacredUnion or no Union. But South Carolinians have had a fine revenge upon their Northern friends, and can throw back the charge of nullification upon certain citizens of Massachusetts, who are engaged in agitating disobedience.

No nation had ever a body of laws that were satisfactory to all alike. Unconstitutionality, inhumanity, violation of rights, can be charged by remote construction, in some of their effects, upon almost every law, and indeed have been so charged. The Constitution, like Holy Writ, has its sects; its High Church, its Low Church, its heretics and its martyrs. To recall but one example,

These profound legislators argued, nevertheless, violently against the legislative power of Congress over the territories.

All things considered, the people of the South, in the final establishment of territorial governments without pro-slavery or antislavery proviso, have gained a great victory for their darling and essential principle of State sovereignties, and the North will, in good time, have cause to be thankful for that too. It would be childish to quarrel with the North about territories after such an admission.

Equally injudicious would it be for Southerners to engage in scandalous experiments upon the temper of the Northern people, by sending persons to reclaim fugitive slaves, not for their value, but for that avowed purpose. It is a very popular and plausible excuse for the people of Massachusetts that they understood a hostile intention in those persons who came into their State in search of fugitive slaves. If the reclamation was undertaken merely to try the temper of the people, to be made afterward a topic of jest among Southerners, the result was natural, and should have been expected. In South Carolina itself, were Northern men to enter that State armed for the recovery of free negroes confined there as aliens, the same conduct might be expected on the part of the people in South Carolina.

On a certain occasion the State of Massachusetts sent an envoy to South Carolina to test the laws of that State in regard to free blacks, confined for entering Charleston, and who were also citizens of Massachusetts. The envoy was ordered to depart in peril of his life, though he came there only for the trial of a legal remedy.

Massachusetts and South Carolina, or rather a certain irritable portion of the people of those States, the free blacks, and

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ent policy of England results of necessity in our own disgrace and impoverishment. Our free spirit, the nationality and the just and natural jealousy of the people-all those masculine traits that distinguish them from the servile masses of Europe, demand an open and manly opposition.

the innocent admirers of English free-trade | cal motive of the present time. The most lecturers, and female orators of one, and the careful and extended. inquiry serves only gallant disunionists of the other, have over- to show, that, in every particular, the presstepped a little the line of courtesy, and of the Constitution. The body of sensible and discreet citizens of the South and North are not involved in this reproach. Because a few are refractory, the country is not thereby wholly shattered, but still retains some little faith in the "great experiment," as it is naïvely called, of constitutional re- The most powerful means of deception publican government-that is to say, a used to stifle this antagonism is doubtless government by the discretion, common the abuse of significant names. Every forsense, and brotherly feeling of the people. eigner who lands upon the shores of the In view of the disastrous effects upon our- North American Continent, unless he be an selves of the policy pursued by the Govern- agent of despotism, inquires for the party of ment of England, in their attempts to appro- the people, and is immediately enlisted in priate the profits of all employments, raising the ranks of "democracy and free trade." up among ourselves two destructive factions, The name of Democrat and free-trader in between whom there is no choice of evils, America, like the name of Whig in Engbut whose hostility to each other is embit- land, carries a body of well-meaning people tered and intensified by a rivalship in the within the pale of a party hostile and hatefavor and protection of a Power whose ful to republicanism, and whose entire policy, purposes they serve, we arrive involuntarily at the conclusion that opposition to the commercial and diplomatic policy of the ministry of England, and to the influence by which they endanger our Union, impede our industrial progress, and stifle every sentiment Out of the dull ignorance of the people, of nationality, has become the leading politi-flow a thousand mischiefs:

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at this day, is to make a few men in England, and their wealthy agents in America, India, Ireland, and China, the sole managers of the world's business, and in very truth the masters of men.

Unprotected industry,-the people gradually depressed.
Disunion and civil war.

Monopoly-foreign and domestic.

National poltroonery.
Abolitionism.

Dread of foreign opinion,-respect for foreign advice.

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Would to Heaven we dared say, that in | to have effectually and hopelessly corrupted the year 1852, the motives of enlightened us. democracy will actuate a majority of the people; but we dare not hope for so much. The flood of foreign opinion that for the last few years has deluged the land, seems

It has even become a question of much speculative interest with some far-looking persons, whether the tide of popular sentiments created by foreign and uncongenial influence

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