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not intend to represent, that the commercial connexion between us and the manufacturing states is wholly sustained by the Tariff system. A great, natural, and profitable commercial communication would exist between us without the aid of monopoly on their part, which with mutual advantage, would transfer a large amount of their products to us, and an equal amount of ours to them, as the means of carrying on their commercial operations with other countries. But even this legitimate commerce, is made unequal and burthensome by the Tariff system, which by raising the price of capital and labour in the manufacturing states, raises in a corresponding degree the price of all articles in the same quarter, as well those protected as those not protected. That such would be the effect, we know has been much urged, in argument to reconcile all classes in those states to the system, and with such success, as to leave us no room to doubt its correctness; and yet, such is the strange contradictions in which the advocates of an unjust cause must ever involve themselves, when they attempt to sustain it by reason, that, the very persons who urge the adoption of the system in one quarter by holding out the temptation of high prices for all they make, turn round and gravely inform us that its tendency is to depress and not to advance prices. The capitalist, the farmer, the wool grower, the mechanic and labourer in the manufacturing states are all to receive higher rates, while we who consume, are to pay less for the products of their labour and capital. The obvious absurdity of these arguments leaves no room to doubt that those who advance them, are conscious that the proof of the partial and oppressive operation of the system, is unanswerable, if it be conceded that we pay in consequence of it higher prices for what we consume. If it were possible to meet that conclusion on other grounds, it could not be, that men of sense would venture to encounter such palpable contradictions; for so long as the wages of labour and the rate of interest, constitute the principal elements of price as they ever must, the one or the other argument, that addressed to us or that to the manufacturing states must be false. But in order to have a clear conception of this important point, the committee propose to consider more fully the assertion, that it is the tendency of high duties, by affording protection to reduce instead of increasing prices; and if they are not greatly mistaken, it will prove, on examination, to be utterly erroneous. Before entering into the discussion, and in order to avoid misapprehension, the committee will admit that it is perhaps possible for a country to find itself in such a situation in regard to its manufacturing capacities, that the interposition of the Legislature, by encouraging their development, may effect a perma-
