seem to have forgotten that, if their
precious document should lead to anything serious, they have been
signing promises to pay for the State of South Carolina to an enormous
amount. It is probably far short of the truth to say that the taxes of
an autonomous palmetto republic would be three times what they are now.
To speak of nothing else, there must be a military force kept
constantly on foot; and the ministers of King Cotton will find that the
charge made by a standing army on the finances of the new empire is
likely to be far more serious and damaging than can be compensated by
the glory of a great many such "spirited charges" as that by which
Colonel Pettigrew and his gallant rifles took Fort Pinckney, with its
garrison of one engineer officer and its armament of no guns. Soldiers
are the most costly of all toys or tools. The outgo for the army of the
Pope, never amounting to ten thousand effective men, in the cheapest
country in the world, has been half a million of dollars a month. Under
the present system, it needs no argument to show that the
non-slaveholding States, with a free population considerably more than
double that of the slaveholding States, and with much more generally
distributed wealth and opportunities of spending, pay far more than the
proportion predicable on mere preponderance in numbers of the expenses
of a government supported mainly by a tariff on importations. And it is
not the burden of this difference merely that the new Cotton Republic
must assume. They will need as large, probably a larger, army and navy
than that of the present Union; as numerous a diplomatic establishment;
a postal system whose large yearly deficit they must bear themselves;
and they must assume the main charges of the Indian Bureau. If they
adopt free trade, they will alienate the Border Slave States, and even
Louisiana; if a system of customs, they have cut themselves off from
the chief consumers of foreign goods. One of the calculations of the
Southern conspirators is to render the Free States tributary to their
new republic by adopting free trade and smuggling their imported goods
across the border. But this is all moonshine; for, even if smuggling
could not be prevented as easily as it now is from the British
Provinces, how long would it be before the North would adapt its tariff
to the new order of things? And thus thrown back upon direct taxation,
how many years would it take to open the eyes of the poorer clas