tain sense a second
Declaration of Independence; and by a coincidence which could not
have been more striking or more significant, it was approved by
President Washington on the fourth day of July, 1789. Slow as were
the modes of communicating intelligence in those days, this Act of
Congress did, in a suggestive way, arouse the attention of both
continents. The words of the preamble were ominous. The duties
levied were exceedingly moderate, scarcely any of them above fifteen
per cent, the majority not higher than ten. But the beginning was
made; and the English manufacturers and carriers saw that the power
to levy ten per cent. could at any time levy a hundred per cent.
if the interest of the new government should demand it. The separate
States had indeed possessed the power to levy imposts, but they
had never exercised it in any comprehensive manner, and had usually
adapted the rate of duty to English trade rather than to the
protection of manufacturing interests at home. The action of the
Federal Government was a new departure, of portentous magnitude,
and was so recognized at home and abroad.

It was not the percentage which aroused and disturbed England. It
was the power to levy the duty at all. In his famous speech on
American taxation in the House of Commons fifteen years before,
Mr. Burke asserted that it was "not the weight of the duty, but
the weight of the preamble, which the Americans were unable and
unwilling to bear." The tax actually imposed was not oppressive,
but the preamble implied the power to levy upon the Colonies whatever
tax the British Government might deem expedient, and this led to
resistance and to revolution. The force of the preamble was now
turned against Great Britain. She saw that the extent to which
the principle of protective duties might be carried was entirely
a matter of discretion with the young Republic whose people had
lately been her subjects and might now become her rivals. The
principle of protecting the manufactures and encouraging the
navigation of America had been distinctly proclaimed in the first
law enacted by the new government, and was thus made in a suggestive
and emphatic sense the very corner-stone of the republican edifice
which the patriots of the Revolution were aiming to construct.

The opinions of Mr. Madison as thus shown in the first legislation
by Congress are the more significant from the fact that he belonged
in the Jeffersonian school, belie