y cherish the parent tree at home. Chagrin and
mortification are the punishments our enemies receive.

You tell me I am quoted by those who wish to continue our dependence
on England for manufactures. There was a time when I might have been so
quoted with more candor. But within the thirty years which have since
elapsed, how are circumstances changed! We were then in peace; our
independent place among nations was acknowledged. A commerce which
offered the raw material, in exchange for the same material after
receiving the last touch of industry, was worthy of welcome to all
nations. It was expected, that those especially to whom manufacturing
industry was important, would cherish the friendship of such customers
by every favor, and particularly cultivate their peace by every act
of justice and friendship. Under this prospect, the question seemed
legitimate, whether, with such an immensity of unimproved land,
courting the hand of husbandry, the industry of agriculture, or that of
manufactures, would add most to the national wealth. And the doubt
on the utility of the American manufactures was entertained on this
consideration, chiefly, that to the labor of the husbandman a vast
addition is made by the spontaneous energies of the earth on which it
is employed. For one grain of wheat committed to the earth, she renders
twenty, thirty, and even fifty fold; whereas to the labor of the
manufacturer nothing is added. Pounds of flax, in his hands, on the
contrary, yield but penny weights of lace. This exchange, too, laborious
as it might seem, what a field did it promise for the occupation of the
ocean; what a nursery for that class of citizens who were to exercise
and maintain our equal rights on that element! This was the state of
things in 1785, when the Notes on Virginia were first published; when,
the ocean being open to all nations, and their common right in it
acknowledged and exercised under regulations sanctioned by the assent
and usage of all, it was thought that the doubt might claim some
consideration.

But who, in 1785, could foresee the rapid depravity which was to render
the close of that century a disgrace to the history of man? Who could
have imagined that the two most distinguished in the rank of nations,
for science and civilization, would have suddenly descended from
that honorable eminence, and setting at defiance all those moral laws
established by the Author of Nature between nation and nation, as
betwe