Government and the protected States by the tariff of 1816; and the mutual considerations passed were first named "incidental benefit" for one party to the contract and "liberal construction" of implied powers for the other. Angry protests and sectional incriminations and recriminations followed, and awakened Jefferson, like "an alarm-bell at night," out of the sleep of old age. The "peculiar institution" of one section gave the other a terrible advantage, which it was quick to see and to seize; and it was used remorselessly. Greed, suddenly joining philanthropy, religion, and fanaticism, organized and led a crusade against African slavery. The agitation about the negro, as a counter-irritant to distract attention from the injustice of Federal revenue laws, was more than a success: for the shallow politicians of both sections forgot the real issue; but the beneficiaries never lost sight of it. I will use a homely illustration: A and B are doing business on opposite sides of a street; B begins to undersell A; A becomes angry, but cannot afford to tell his customers the cause; he hears that B once cheated a negro out of a mule; he makes that charge; they fight; the court record of the trial shows that the fight was about the negro and the mule; but there is not a business man on the street who does not know that the record speaks a lie.

The first speech in this book opens with old Nat. Macon lecturing (in 1820) a Representative from Pennsylvania, the most protected State, for expressing a desire to see the Union dissolved rather than that slavery should be extended beyond the Mississippi.

Slavery, itself, while for several generations usually beneficial to the negro, was, doubtless, in many respects injurious to his masters. It made us provincial, of necessity, sensitive and intolerant of criticism, easily susceptible of misrepresentation, and cut us off from the sympathy of some who else had been our friends. It cramped thought, invention, progress, poetry, and literature. It enabled monopoly to divide and conquer the tillers of the soil. It tended to create caste and it degraded manual labor—as necessary as death after sin and decreed in the same Divine judgment. Skilled manual labor gutted the Confederacy by driving war-ships up its rivers: and the felt want of it, in late years, has established a great industrial institution at our State capital, the mother of many others, and destined to revolutionize education among us.

"Protection" and discrimination in the operation of the Federal revenue laws, though still potent for evil, will probably never again be the principal, causing cause of another revolution unto blood; because from three to ten per cent. of our Southern population will henceforward be directly benefited by such laws, and their interests will soften the sectional aspect of the tax. But the unequal and sectional operation of the currency laws, alienating the West as well as the South; the heaping up of nearly all the wealth of the country into one section, and most of it in a few great cities of that section; the plunder of agriculture by legislation and by the unchecked conspiracy of capital; the monopoly of the carrying trade by the wealth of the cities; the growing distrust between the urban and rural populations; the sullen and fickle temper of our foreign elements—the nucleus, perhaps, of a future Prætorian Guard; the mutterings against the now "vested right" of protected labor to be fed or assisted by the government—and capital hides behind such labor; machine politics and party spirit; the prostitution of the electoral system by the national nominating mob system, which treats sovereign States as the provinces of a party; the fine Italian hand of a certain religio-political corporation in getting offices and holding the balance of power between the factions contending for public plunder; the growing intimacy of sectional wealth with foreign governments and aristocracies—these are the dangers which together threaten a perpetual Union of the States and the liberties of the people.

Before 1860, Macaulay prophesied that our government would go to pieces over a presidential election. In the face of these dangers, it is well for us to consider and carefully teach our children the causes which have worked our injury in the past, in order that we and they may be the better able to recognize and grapple them when they reappear, under changed names or in the shape of new laws.

But a tariff tax as a causing cause of the late war shall not rest upon the foregoing testimony alone. "Let the South go," exclaimed Abraham Lincoln, in 1861, "where then shall we get our revenues?" This man was noted for hitting the bull's-eye, and Divine Inspiration had forestalled him with the prophecy that the love of revenue was the root of all evil.

Thomas H. Benton is a witness who will be heard. In a speech in the Senate, in 1828, he shows how the tariff (which, except for about twelve years, had been mainly levied for revenue) had plundered the South. He said: "I feel for the sad changes which have taken place in the South during the last fifty years. Before the Revolution it was the seat of wealth as well as hospitality. Money, and all it commanded, abounded there. But how is it now? All this is reversed. Wealth has fled from the South, and settled in the regions north of the Potomac; and this in the face of the fact that the South, in four staples alone, has exported produce since the Revolution to the value of eight hundred millions of dollars; and the North has exported comparatively nothing. Such an export would indicate unparalleled wealth, but what is the fact? In the place of wealth a universal pressure for money is felt—not enough for current expenses—the price of property all down—the country drooping and languishing—towns and cities decaying—and the frugal habits of the people pushed to the verge of universal self-denial for the preservation of their family estates. Such a result is a strange and wonderful phenomenon. It calls upon statesmen to inquire into the cause.

"Under Federal legislation the exports of the South have been the basis of the Federal revenue. * * * * Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia may be said to defray three-fourths of the annual expense of supporting the Federal Government; and of this great sum, annually furnished by them, nothing, or next to nothing, is returned to them in the shape of government expenditure. That expenditure flows in an opposite direction—it flows northwardly, in one uniform, uninterrupted, and perennial stream. This is the reason why wealth disappears from the South and rises up in the North. Federal legislation does all this. It does it by the simple process of eternally taking from the South and returning nothing to it. If it returned to the South the whole or even a good part of what it exacted the four States south of the Potomac might stand the action of the system, but the South must be exhausted of its money and its property by a course of legislation which is forever taking away and never returning anything. Every new tariff increases the force of this action. No tariff has ever yet included Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia, except to increase the burdens imposed by them."—Benton's Thirty Years View, Vol. I, p. 98, quoted by Raphael Semmes in his Memoirs of Service Afloat.

In 1860 we find the South still furnished many millions more than two-thirds of the export crops, besides fifty millions to the North. In Colonial and Revolutionary times the South was the richest section, and so acknowledged to be in the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

No wonder that the South always insisted that the Federation was a limited partnership; and no wonder that her rapacious partners insisted on a government of unlimited