capital and skill, should keep down successful
competition on our part, we would be doomed to toil at our
unprofitable agriculture,--selling at the prices which a
single and very limited market might give. But, on the
contrary, if our necessity should triumph over their capital
and skill, if, instead of raw cotton we should ship to the
manufacturing States cotton yarn and cotton goods, the
thoughtful must see that it would inevitably bring about a
state of things which could not long continue. _Those who
now make war on our gains would then make it on our labor_.
They would not tolerate that those who now cultivate our
plantations, and furnish them with the material and the
market for the product of their arts, should, by becoming
their rivals, take bread from the mouths of their wives and
children. The committee will not pursue this painful
subject; but as they clearly see that the system if not
arrested, must bring the country to this hazardous
extremity, neither prudence nor patriotism would permit them
to pass it by without raising a warning voice against an
evil of so menacing a character."--_Works_, VI. 12.

The only question which arises in the mind of present readers of such
passages (which abound in the writings of Mr. Calhoun) is this: Were
they the chimeras of a morbid, or the utterances of a false mind?
Those who knew him differ in opinion on this point. For our part, we
believe such passages to have been inserted for the sole purpose of
alarming the people of South Carolina, so as to render them the more
subservient to his will. It is the stale trick of the demagogue, as
well as of the false priest, to subjugate the mind by terrifying it.

Mr. Calhoun concludes his Exposition by bringing forward his remedy
for the frightful evils which he had conjured up. That remedy, of
course, was nullification. The State of South Carolina, after giving
due warning, must declare the protective acts "null and void" in the
State of South Carolina after a certain date; and then, unless
Congress repealed them in time, refuse obedience to them. Whether this
should be done by the Legislature or by a convention called for the
purpose, Mr. Calhoun would not say; but he evidently preferred a
convention. He advised, however, that nothing be done hastily; that
time should be afforded to the dominant majority for further
reflection. Del