have none, and she invited
the ships of the rest of the world to come for her products and bring in
return all she needed for her own consumption. The picture of the
possible ruin of New England was as nothing to that of the Southern
planter scanning the horizon with weary eyes in vain for the sight of a
sail, while behind him was a dangerous crowd of hungry blacks with
nothing to do. That desolation seemed complete to the southernmost
States when it was also proposed to levy a tax of ten dollars upon every
slave imported. In short, the whole subject bristled with difficulties.
The problem was nothing more nor less than how to tax everything, and at
the same time convince everybody that the scheme was for the general
good, while nobody's special interests were sacrificed. The "infant
industries," to which Mr. Madison alluded, really received no special
consideration in the final adjustment, and they were too feeble then
even to cry for nursing. They have grown stronger since, though they are
"infants" still; and they should never cease to be grateful to him who,
however unwittingly, gave them a name to live by for a hundred years.

But the most remarkable part of the debate was that upon the proposition
of Mr. Parker of Virginia to impose a duty upon the importation of
slaves. Could the progress of events have been foreseen, that proposal
might have been regarded as meant to protect an "infant industry" of the
northernmost slave States. But the wildest imagination then could not
conceive of the domestic slave trade of a few years later, when a chief
source of the prosperity of Virginia would be her perennial crop of
young men and women to be shipped for New Orleans and a market. But Mr.
Parker had no ulterior motive when he avowed his regret that the
Constitution had failed to prohibit the importation of slaves from
Africa, and hoped that the duty he proposed would prevent, in some
degree, a traffic which he pronounced "irrational and inhuman." It would
have been difficult to have found a Virginian of that day who would not
have taken down his shotgun on hearing that there were miscreants
prowling about his kitchen doors in the hope of buying up the strongest
young people of his household for export to the Southwest.

Judging from the imperfect report of the debate upon the subject, it
would seem that the bargain relative to the slave trade, made in the
Constitutional Convention of two years before between New England a