of the vortex of bankruptcies, distresses and miseries into which unprotective tariffs plunged the people, as will be seen, at various subsequent periods. Nor is it now less needful to ponder those solemn teachings of our history, when Peter-the-Hermit doctrinaires, emerging from their retirement amid theoretic book lore, are organizing a crusade to recover the desolate and accursed Jerusalem of unrestricted commerce. The sorrows drank by our revolutionary sires to the very dregs, under that system, should be to all following generations what the red signal-light is to a place of peril.

CHAPTER VII.

WHY "A MORE PERFECT UNION" WAS FORMED.

During the Revolutionary war, the armies suffere scarcely endurable hardships on account of the lack of power in Congress to enforce its requisitions upon the States for needed supplies. At the close of the struggle, the disbanding soldiers, with an acute recollection of the dangerous consequences of inadequate authority in the national government, had a favorite toast_" a hoop for the barrel." As the years rolled away, the wisdom of this sentiment was made manifest in an illumination of universal distress, amid which "the barrel,” for want of "a hoop," seemed about to fall to pieces, and become scattered staves. At length the people, educated by their dreadful experiences to a clear knowledge of what was essential to preserve the Confederation from a fatal catastrophe, called the Federal Convention of 1787, for the express purpose of obtaining "a hoop for the barrel."

Bancroft, in his "History of the Formation of the Constitution" (Vol. I, page 146), enumerates the agencies which exerted the most powerful tendency toward the establishment of a new organization of government fully endowed with the powers essential to a vigorous nationality. He says:

Of many causes promoting union, four above others exercised a steady and commanding influence. The new republic as one nation must have power to regulate its foreign commerce; to colonize its large domain; to provide an adequate revenue; and to establish justice in domestic trade by prohibiting the separate States from

impairing the obligation of contracts. Each of these causes was of vital importance; but the necessity for regulating commerce gave the immediate impulse to a more perfect Constitution.

On the next page, he enters into the following details of the commercial problem:

The States could not successfully defend themselves against the policy of Great Britain by separate legislation, because it was not the interest of any one of them to exclude British vessels from their harbors unless the like measure should be adopted by every other; and a union of thirteen distinct powers would encounter the very difficulty which had so often proved insuperable. But while every increase of the power of Congress in domestic affairs aroused jealousy between the States, the selfish design of a foreign government to repress their industry drew them together against a common adversary.

It was only after the several States had ascertained by experimental knowledge, full of the bitterness of invariable failure, how it was impossible to counteract the aggressions and encroachments of the British trade policy by the different and clashing measures of the individual Legislatures, that they began to tame their prejudices and jealousies into submission to the vital requirements of the general welfare. It was then seen, at least by the better class of minds, that home industry could not thrive, and the navigation interests of America could not be shielded, unless controlling authority should be lodged with Congress to frame commercial regulations obligatory upon every member of the Confederation. To reach that conclusion, the people had to make a tedious and wearisome journey from one extreme to another of belief. The bulk of mankind are too much engaged in private concerns to anticipate the operation of national causes. Before

they will clearly perceive, they must deeply feel, suffering thus becoming the schoolmaster of their convictions. It was by long and painful experience with the restrictions placed by the mother country upon the productive resources of the colonies, that the popular masses learned to regard those restrictions as serious evils to be resisted as fatal to civil liberty. When the colonies became independent States, they could not conceive that it would be politic or right to imitate, in their own behalf, the system which was repugnant to their notions of justice while practiced by Great Britain. Her persistence in the same exclusive and self-aggrandizing system of commercial regulations, so far as the altered circumstances would permit, after the close of the war, had been so greatly injurious to the maritime and exporting interests of America, that the belief was reinforced that the system was founded upon inherently wrong principles; hence, public sentiment inclined to the opposite extreme, which was free trade. On this point, Minot says, in his "History of the Insurrections in Massachusetts," page 7:

Their honest prejudices were averse from duties of impost and excise, which were, at that time, supposed to be anti-republican by many judicious and influential characters. These measures, therefore, could be adopted, at first, but partially and to small effect.

Some four years of actual contact with the evils caused by unrestricted foreign commerce were requisite to fully purge from the minds of the people their predilections in favor of the free-trade policy, and to reveal to them the necessity of warding off European encroachment by means of navigation laws and protective duties on imports, at the hands of the general government. In several of the States, however, a movement in that

direction, but under local authority, began to take practical shape as early as 1785. Bancroft says, in the first volume of his "History of the Formation of the Constitution," beginning on page 186:

The country began to be in earnest as it summoned Congress to change its barren discussions for efficient remedies. The ever increasing voice of complaint broke out from the impatient commercial towns of the northern and central States. On the 11th of January, 1785, the day on which Congress established itself in New York, the artificers, tradesmen, and mechanics of that city, as they gave it a welcome, added these brave words: "We hope our representatives will coincide with the other States in augmenting your power to every exigency of the Union." The New York Chamber of Commerce in like manner entreated it to make the commerce of the United States one of the first objects of its care, and to counteract the injurious restrictions of foreign nations. The New York Legislature, then in session, imposed a double duty on all goods imported in British bottoms.

On the 22d of March, 1785, a bill to "protect the manufactures" of Pennsylvania by specific or ad valorem duties on more than seventy articles, among them on manufactures of iron and steel, was read in its Assembly for the second time, debated by paragraphs, and then ordered to be printed for public consideration. The citizens of Philadelphia, recalling the usages of the Revolution, on the 2d of June held a town meeting; and, after the deliberations of their committee for eighteen days, they declared that relief from the oppressions under which the American trade and manufactures languished could spring only from the grant to Congress of full constitutional powers over the commerce of the United States; that foreign manufactures interfering with domestic industry ought to be discouraged by prohibitions or protective duties. They raised a committee to lay their resolutions in the form of a petition before their own Assembly, and to correspond with committees appointed elsewhere for similar purposes. On the 20th of September, after the bill of the Pennsylvania Legislature had been nearly six months under consideration by the people, and after it had been amended by an increase of duties, especially on manufactures of iron, and by