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