of the country was general and apparently genuine.” The economic history of the time would have enabled Mr. Blaine to say even more: that during that period the development of manufacturing industries was rather gradual than sudden and spasmodic; that foreign competition, instead of undermining and crippling them, served to stimulate the adoption of improved methods of production and a full exertion of American inventive genius; that the profits of manufacturing enterprises were not such as to pour dividends amounting to millions into the lap of shareholders; that no enormous private fortunes were thus quickly accumulated, but that the profits were abundant enough to encourage the extension of operations; that labor found comparatively steady and remunerative employment, the wages of operatives rising; that not only manufacturers flourished, but that our foreign and coastwise commerce in American bottoms covered the seas as it had never done before and has never since; and that agriculture, wherever it had means of communication, far from complaining of being prejudiced and burdened by “legislative favors” granted to other interests, was contented with having its full share of the prosperity, which was general and harmonious.
The symptoms of that general contentment are thus significantly described by Mr. Blaine:
After 1852 the Democrats had almost undisputed control of the government, and had gradually become a free-trade party. The principles involved in the tariff of 1846 seemed for the time to be so entirely vindicated and approved that resistance to it ceased, not only among the people, but among the protective economists, and even among the manufacturers to a large extent.
To what extent the manufacturers had become reconciled to the low tariff appears from an act of a very striking
