aws touching their shipping
interests--America, "the land of the free," the boasting leader of
the world's progress and enlightenment, stands alone sustaining
this effete idea. She persists in maintaining an ordinance
devised originally for the protection of the home industry of her
shipbuilders, which has now become a most stalwart protection for
the industry of every foreign shipowner whom we encourage in the
transportation of our persons and property over the ocean--an
industry in which this law forbids a similar class of her own
citizens to participate!

Whatever may be the arguments in favor of, or opposed to, the
protection of industries under the control of our own Government, none
of them can apply to those pursued upon an area which is the common
property of the world. It is a proposition so evident that no words
need be wasted in its demonstration, that, other things being equal,
the cheapest and best ships, most adapted for the purpose, by
whomsoever owned, will have preference in the carrying trade over
the ocean. You may pile the duty, for instance, on iron, and grant
bounties on the production of the American article if you please,
to any extent; you may, if you choose, prohibit the importation of
ploughs, and then assess farmers ten times the cost of their ploughs
for the benefit of the home manufacturer. You would undoubtedly
succeed in compelling them to purchase American ploughs. They must
have them or starve, and we should all starve likewise if they did not
use those protected ploughs to cultivate the soil. Indeed, in a less
exaggerated way we are doing something very like this continually
under the guise of "protecting home industry."

It is a legitimate business for the advocates of that doctrine. If
they believe in it they are quite right in "trying it on," and in
making the people at large pay as much as can possibly be got out of
them for the benefit of a few.

But fortunately they cannot build a Chinese wall around the country.
We are necessitated to have intercourse with other nations. We have
a surplus of agricultural products to dispose of to them which they
cannot pay for unless to a certain extent we take the merchandise they
offer in exchange. This exchange, with all due respect to Mr. Lynch,
his committee and the House of Representatives appointing those astute
investigators, is commerce. The carrying trade is the means whereby
commerce is conducted, and this carrying trade, an indus