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be extinguished] pursue a strict course of public and private economy. Let us encourage and support our own manufactures, and thereby contribute to the subsistence and wealth of our own laborers instead of contributing millions annually to the pauper labor of European nations; especially of those nations that have failed to give us countenance in the present struggle and that have, on the contrary, given both direct and indirect aid to the rebels of the South. The United States have within themselves, in great abundance, contributed by a bountiful Providence, the leading products of the earth. In metals and in agricultural products, we exceed any and all other countries of the earth. If we encourage the labor of our own people in the development of the great resources of the country, we shall not only preserve our own commercial independence, but we shall soon be, as we ought to be in view of such advantages, the creditor nation of the world, and compel other countries to resort to us for the raw materials for their own manufacturing districts. With the aid of the vast iron and coal mines of our own country, we can construct and keep in force an adequate navy for peace or for war. Our skilled industry can produce firearms equal to any in the world. The vast agricultural resources of the West yield abundance for ourselves and a large surplus for other countries. The breadstuffs of the West and Northwest; the tobacco of the Middle States, and the cotton of the South are in demand, throughout nearly all Europe. Let us then be independent ourselves of foreign manufacturers, and endeavor to place the rest of the world under obligations to our own country for the necessaries of life. This will do more to preserve peace than all the arguments of cabinets or the combined navies and armies of the world. Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell said,[7] in parliament, in 1842, five years before the famine in Ireland: 'We are not, we cannot be, independent of foreign nations, any more than they can of us: * * * two millions of our people have been dependent on foreign countries for their daily food. At least five millions of our people are dependent on the supplies of cotton from America, of foreign wool or foreign silk. * * * The true independence of a great commercial nation is to be found, not in raising all the produce it requires within its own bound, _but in attaining such a preeminence in commerce that the time can never
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