pportunity of a timely remark or two on
that subject. I was glad he approached it, for it is a question I enter
upon without fear from anybody. The strenuous toil of the gentleman has
been to raise an inconsistency between my dissent to the tariff in 1824,
and my vote in 1828. It is labor lost. He pays undeserved compliment to
my speech in 1824; but this is to raise me high, that my fall, as he
would have it, in 1828, may be more signal. Sir, there was no fall.
Between the ground I stood on in 1824 and that I took in 1828, there was
not only no precipice, but no declivity. It was a change of position to
meet new circumstances, but on the same level. A plain tale explains the
whole matter. In 1816 I had not acquiesced in the tariff, then supported
by South Carolina. To some parts of it, especially, I felt and expressed
great repugnance. I held the same opinions in 1820, at the meeting in
Faneuil Hall, to which the gentleman has alluded. I said then, and say
now, that, as an original question, the authority of Congress to
exercise the revenue power, with direct reference to the protection of
manufactures, is a questionable authority, far more questionable, in my
judgment, than the power of internal improvements. I must confess, Sir,
that in one respect some impression has been made on my opinions lately.
Mr. Madison's publication has put the power in a very strong light. He
has placed it, I must acknowledge, upon grounds of construction and
argument which seem impregnable. But even if the power were doubtful, on
the face of the Constitution itself, it had been assumed and asserted in
the first revenue law ever passed under that same Constitution and on
this ground, as a matter settled by contemporaneous practice, I had
refrained from expressing the opinion that the tariff laws transcended
constitutional limits, as the gentleman supposes. What I did say at
Faneuil Hall, as far as I now remember, was, that this was originally
matter of doubtful construction. The gentleman himself, I suppose,
thinks there is no doubt about it, and that the laws are plainly against
the Constitution. Mr. Madison's letters, already referred to, contain,
in my judgment, by far the most able exposition extant of this part of
the Constitution. He has satisfied me, so far as the practice of the
government had left it an open question.

With a great majority of the Representatives of Massachusetts, I voted
against the tariff of 1824. My reasons were