but regard the situation of the West as highly
favorable to human happiness. It offers, in the abundance of its new and
fertile lands, such assurances of permanent property and respectability
to the industrious, it enables them to lay such sure foundations for a
competent provision for their families, it makes such a nation of
freeholders, that it need not envy the happiest and most prosperous of
the manufacturing communities. We may talk as we will of well-fed and
well-clothed day-laborers or journeymen; they are not, after all, to be
compared, either for happiness or respectability, with him who sleeps
under his own roof and cultivates his own fee-simple inheritance.

With respect to the proposed duty on glass, I would observe, that, upon
the best means of judging which I possess, I am of opinion that the
chairman of the committee is right in stating that there is in effect a
bounty upon the exportation of the British article. I think it entirely
proper, therefore, to raise our own duty by such an amount as shall be
equivalent to that bounty.

And here, Mr. Chairman, before proceeding to those parts of the bill to
which I most strenuously object, I will be so presumptuous as to take up
a challenge which Mr. Speaker has thrown down. He has asked us, in a
tone of interrogatory indicative of the feeling of anticipated triumph,
to mention any country in which manufactures have flourished without the
aid of prohibitory laws. He has demanded if it be not policy,
protection, ay, and prohibition, that have carried other states to the
height of their prosperity, and whether any one has succeeded with such
tame and inert legislation as ours. Sir, I am ready to answer this
inquiry.

There is a country, not undistinguished among the nations, in which the
progress of manufactures has been far more rapid than in any other, and
yet unaided by prohibitions or unnatural restrictions. That country, the
happiest which the sun shines on, is our own.

The woollen manufactures of England have existed from the early ages of
the monarchy. Provisions designed to aid and foster them are in the
black-letter statutes of the Edwards and the Henrys. Ours, on the
contrary, are but of yesterday; and yet, with no more than the
protection of existing laws, they are already at the point of close and
promising competition. Sir, nothing is more unphilosophical than to
refer us, on these subjects, to the policy adopted by other nations in a
very diff