view, whether those articles are iron for the plough, or ostrich-feathers for the ball-room; the olive for peace, or arms for war; drugs for health, or gold for ornament; woollens and cottons for the poor, or silks and cashmeres for the rich; or sugar and salt for all classes, and the last for the whole animal creation; still liberality in the trade blesses, like mercy, twice-both him that gives and him that takes. On the one side, that is parted with which is not wanted, or can without suffering be spared; and, on the other, that is obtained which is needed either to supply real wants, minister to our comforts, or gratify taste. Both are accommodated, or both enriched; and the industry is stimulated, and the faculties sharpened, in search of more of that which either promotes pleasure, or advances knowledge, or increases power. In fine, it is the theory which tends best, in all countries, to develop the national mind, as well as the national wealth. It gives full and free play to all the faculties and instincts of man, while it is content to take from the earth the gifts of Providence, where they are natural and most profuse. It does not attempt to cultivate drugs in Greenland, or tea and coffee in New England, or pineapples in Canada. And should the Hindoos strive to freeze their own ice by a chemical process, or the inhabitants of New Orleans labor to make their own stone artificially, or the Yankees endeavor to grow, for their general consumption, pepper and palm-oil, they would only illustrate, in a different form, some of the follies and losses which attend most of the departures from the free-trade principle.

The moral and intellectual view of the subject is stronger than even the physical or the commercial one. It is a question going far beyond the ledger, beyond dollars and cents, the number of bushels, pounds, gallons, or yards produced, and the value of exports and imports, as well as amount of tonnage. It concerns natural fitness, social improvement, morals, and the higher education and civilization, as well as happiness, of millions on millions of immortal beings. That is a circle wider than all others, reaching the future, no less than the present welfare, of most of the human race.

Intolerance in religion has been one of the allies of restrictions in trade. It is bred in the same proscriptive school, and has sometimes injured even its coadjutors. It helped to expel the Lutheran mechanics from Spain, and drive across the Mediterranean her best Moorish manufacturers. By the repeal of the edict of Nantes, it long retarded the prosperity of France; and, by a like exclusive spirit, peopled originally several of our own States from the persecuting shores of England. Even at this day, by the union of church and State in the latter, thus doubling ecclesiastical taxes on seceders, and by high corn-law duties, so oppressive to labor, it violates some of the most salutary of the free-trade principles. A mass of human suffering has thus been produced there, of late years, which is ill atoned for by all her greatness and glories. Though palaces rise in the streets of Manchester, and fertility clothes the fields of contiguous counties

with golden sheaves, yet the laborer often starves in sight of them, or lingers out a miserable existence in some neighboring almshouse. What matters it to him if the treasuries of China are captured, and conquering armies are pushed over the snows of Afghanistan, and heroic columns rise in London to commemorate national glory, if he and his children suffer for bread, or freeze from half-nakedness, or are robbed of political suffrage, and have their morals and intellects debased by brutal ignorance?* Under a like view, as to the effects of such a system on mind, morals, and progress, while high protection is yielded here to manufactures, it must be remembered that it is at the expense of agriculture and commerce, and is confined in its influences to the owner of the establishment, or the capitalist,-to property alone, or dead matter, rather than extended to the artisan or laborer, the spirit, heart, and soul engaged. In the most manufacturing State of the Union, the mere operative is stripped of all political rights, and deprived of that free suffrage, in forming and regulating government, which constitutes the great distinction between liberty and slavery. On the contrary, the free-trade principle spreads a table for industry and virtue in every climate. Under its operation, man is so constituted, and is the only known being in creation thus blessed, that he can succeed in living under the frosts of the pole, as well as the heats of the equator; and can and will, if let alone, thrive and improve by all kinds of employment. Under it, no surplus of anything useful exists which is lost, as nothing abounds in any country needed elsewhere, without finding a market. Such intercourse stimulates industry, and rewards enterprise. It diffuses, also, arts, as well as letters; and the whole world thus gradually becomes improving and useful to the whole. We know how, from acorns and roots, man has advanced in food to grain and meats; from skins for clothing, to the most beautiful fabrics of silk and wool; and from ignorance and the chase, to learning and all the glories of civilization. This has always been witnessed most rapidly where commerce has most abounded and was freest. Thus, in the dawn of time, it gradually circled, and thus civilized all the shores of the Mediterranean. It then passed the pillars of Hercules, and penetrated the forests of what were savage Britain and savage Germany; crossed the Atlantic afterward, to a little less savage people, covering the whole western continent; explores still further to the remotest isles; and is now at such a height, and surrounded with such improvements in arts, laws, and literature, as to reflect back, from the once Gothic portions of Europe and from barbarian America, increased light and knowledge. Whither? you may ask. Even to the seven hills of Rome, the banks of the Tiber, as well as the Ilissus and the Nile. It is a curious fact, illustrating the mutual action and reäction through commercial intercourse, that this very year, in the city of New York, has been formed a society to diffuse useful and religious knowledge in Italy. This,

* See Lester.

among us, a people whose English ancestors, thirteen centuries ago, were painted savages, carried into slavery to Italy - and this in a country five centuries ago utterly unknown to Italy, and full of forests and Vandal Indians! How irresistibly do such facts carry our memories back to the conquest and civilization of Palestine, from more commercial Egypt, and transport our imaginations forward to a period, not far distant, when commerce may carry home most of the exiles from Africa educated, and fitted to civilize her vast waste places, and reform her debased servitude! The tenants of those arid regions, reached but seldom by foreign commerce, continue, like the Esquimaux, almost as barbarous as when first discovered; and, like most communities shut up from the liberalizing influences of free trade, have improved little more than the ox since the days of Job, or the swine since the miracle of our Saviour.

In fine, without the vivifying impulses of that trade on man, the world is stationary or retrograde; while, with them, all is progress, as well as an apparent development of some useful end in the contrivance of the human race; and if any one nation or tongue is destined to pervade the globe otherwise than by arms, and to ameliorate its condition, through the arts of peace, letters, and religion, it must be that one most influenced in all things by the spirit of free commerce. That, alone, can surmount every obstacle, penetrate remotest regions, win confidence by political favors, and, through its comforts and necessaries, if not luxuries, interest, excite, benefit, and elevate, every people. Withdraw, too, or shackle its power, after once enjoyed as here, and though it may seem, at first, to affect only the humble shipwright, the sailor, or the merchant, and the axe and the saw may only appear to stand still, the wharf and the warehouse only at first to decay, rather than the splendid abodes of wealth and the gorgeous temple, yet, rely upon it, there is a canker preying, a worm gnawing at the root of the prosperity of the whole, a mildew begun, which will, in time, blast every ramification of society.

Miserable, indeed, beyond any description, must be the condition of any country, where, by a violation of these principles of free trade, the masses must deteriorate rather than improve, and wages become lower, and the clothing or food of the millions are highly taxed to supply the extravagances and follies of the few; and, what is even worse than this, the intellects of the former are left neglected, and their morals depraved.

But it is time to close this hasty address. The free-trade system, as thus explained, is, in my view, the only one suited to a free people or a free government. If it cannot be restored and perpetuated here, my deliberate conviction, without any want of candor or charity as to the designs of our opponents, is, that our boasted form of government, and all its golden promises to mankind, must in the end prove a mockery. If it does not soon triumph again in all its essentials, we shall lose consistency of character over the globe, and it is vain to look for

restoration of permanent prosperity, or to cherish brilliant hopes for the future; and the experiment of a just and equal self-government in this part of the western hemisphere, as a model for the world now and forever, must be considered to have failed. If this be not the truth, let others exhibit it; for truth should be the object of all. In the mean time, I trust that, knowing these principles, to use the words adopted as your beautiful motto, "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."

Though my remarks have been addressed to all classes, all being deeply interested in the success of such principles,—yet, before closing, allow me to repeat the exhortation of the philanthropic Channing, on this topic, to the merchants in particular. It was given not long previous to his death, and some may respect it the more from an impression that it may have been influenced less by any party prejudice than my own views. This was his language : "Allow me to say a word to the merchants of our country on another subject. The time is come when they are particularly called to take yet more generous views of their vocation, and to give commerce a universality as yet unknown. I refer to the juster principles which are gaining ground on the subject of free trade, and to the growing disposition of nations to promote it. Free trade! this is the plain duty and plain interest of the human race. To level all barriers to free exchange; to cut up the system of restriction, root and branch; to open every port on earth to every product; this is the office of enlightened humanity. To this a free nation should especially pledge itself. Freedom of the seas; freedom of harbors; an intercourse of nations, free as the winds;-this is not a dream of philanthropists. We are tending towards it, and let us hasten it. Under a wiser and more Christian civilization, we shall look back on our present restrictions as we do on the swaddling-bands by which, in darker times, the human body was compressed."

45*

THE UNION AND THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW.*

Concord, N. H., Nov. 15, 1850. GENTLEMEN: Your polite invitation for me to attend a Union meeting, at Manchester, on the 20th instant, has been received.

The great object of that meeting "to advise upon the course best calculated to allay all unnecessary further agitation" of certain sectional questions-meets with my hearty concurrence.

Without more forbearance as to such agitation among the sister States, it is my solemn conviction that the present hallowed Union of those States will be placed in fearful jeopardy.

It is another alarming sign of the times, that any portion of our lawabiding community should either recommend forcible resistance to the laws, or actually participate in measures designed to overawe the constituted authorities, and defeat the execution of legal precepts issued by those authorities.

This is in direct hostility to the injunctions of Washington, in his farewell address to his grateful countrymen. And it seems no less hostile and derogatory to every sound principle for sustaining public order, and obedience to what the legislative agents of the people and the States have enacted.

The only objection to such obedience which has come to my knowledge, and which seems supported by any semblance of argument, is one very dangerous for individuals to rely on at any time so as to use force. But it is much more hazardous when the measure resisted is one sanctioned, after much deliberation, by Congress and the President; one provided for explicitly in the constitution itself; one carried into effect, except as to some details since added, under the father of his country, as early as 1793; and one which has received the approval of the Supreme Court, sitting as the highest judicial tribunal of the Union, and of the elevated law-officer of the government, the present Attorney General of the United States.

It would afford me much pleasure to attend your meeting, and express my views at length on this subject, were it not that this last question is likely to come before me officially, one warrant having thus been issued already by the Circuit Court, of which I am a member. Consequently, I do not deem it appropriate to offer my own opinion on it now, or at any public meeting, until the parties who may raise it before me judicially have been fully heard.

But, at all times and in all places, I shall never hesitate to raise my voice against forcible resistance to established laws, made by our

*A letter in reply to an invitation from B. F. Ayer, Esq., and others, to attend a Union meeting in Manchester, N. H., Nov. 1850.