etings and fabrics generally; and yet
Americans will talk as though the encouragement given by protective
Duties to home Manufacturers were given at the expense of our consumers.
Vainly are they challenged from day to day to name one single article
whereof the production has been transplanted from Europe to America
through Protection, which has not thereby been materially cheapened to
the American consumer; it suits them better to assume that the duty is a
tax on the consumer than to examine the case and admit the truth. But
delusion cannot be eternal.

That our Country would at some future day work its way gradually out of
its present semi-Colonial dependence on European tastes, European
fashions, European fabrication, even though all Legislative
encouragement were withheld, I firmly believe. The genius, the activity,
the energy, the enterprise of our people conspire to assure it. So the
thief, the burglar, the forger, are certain to suffer for their misdeeds
though all the penalties of human laws were repealed, and yet I consider
state prisons and houses of correction salutary if not indispensable. It
is difficult for even an ingenious and inventive race to make
improvements in an art or process which has no existence among them.
Whitney's Cotton-Gin presupposed the growth of Cotton; Fulton's
steamboat the existence of internal commerce and navigation; without
Lowell, Bigelow might have invented a new trap for muskrats but not
looms for weaving Carpets, Ginghams, Coach-Lace, &c. I deeply feel that
our Country owes to mankind the duty of so sustaining her Manufacturing
Industry that further and more signal triumphs of her inventive genius
may yet be evolved and realised, not merely in the domain of Fabrics but
in that of Wares and Metals also, and especially in that of the chief
metal, Iron. Had Iron enjoyed for twenty years such a measure of
Protection among us as Plain Cottons obtained from 1816 through Mr.
Calhoun's minimum of six cents per square yard, we should, in all
probability, have been producing Iron by this time as cheaply as drills
and sheetings--that is, as cheaply (quality considered) as any nation on
the globe--as cheaply as we produce School-Books, Newspapers, and nearly
every article whereof the American maker is shielded by circumstances
from Foreign competition. Had the Tariff of 1842 but stood unaltered
till this time, who believes that even the greenest and silliest
American could have fancied him