e, they will take our cotton
goods; that their system of exclusion is entirely a consequence of, and
retaliation for, ours. Can they produce a single instance in which our
concessions in favour of their rude produce have led to a corresponding
return in favour of ours? How can it be so, when, in all old states, the
monied is the prevailing interest which sways the determinations of
government? The landholders, separated from each other, without capital,
almost all burdened with debt, are no match in the domestic struggle for
the manufacturing and commercial interests. Their superiority is founded
on a very clear footing--the same which has rendered the British House of
Commons omnipotent. _They hold the purse._ It is their loans which support
the credit of Government; it is by the customs which their imports pay
that the public revenue is to be chiefly raised. The more popular that
governments become, the more strongly will their influences appear in the
war of tariffs. If pure democracies were established in all the
neighbouring states, we would be met in then all by a duty of sixty per
cent. Witness the American tariff of 1842, and the progressive increases
of duties against us since the popular revolutions we have fostered and
encouraged in France, Belgium, and Portugal.

Is, then, a free and unrestrained system of commercial intercourse
impossible between nations, and must it ever end in a war of tariffs and
the pacific infliction of mutual injury? We consider it is impossible
between two nations, both manufacturing, or aspiring to be so, and in the
same, or nearly the same, age and social circumstances. It is mere folly
to attempt it; because interests which must clash, are continually arising
on both parts, and reciprocity, if attempted, is on one side only. With
such nations, the only wisdom is, to conclude treaties, not of reciprocity,
but of _commerce_; that is, treaties in which, in consideration of certain
branches of our manufactures being admitted on favourable terms, we agree
to admit certain articles of their produce on equally advantageous
conditions. Thus, a treaty, by which we agreed to admit, for a moderate
duty, the wines of France, which we can never rival, in return for their
admitting our iron and cotton goods on similar terns, would be a measure
of equal benefit to both countries. It would be as wise a measure as Mr
Huskisson's reduction of the duties on French silks, gloves, and clocks,
was a gra