While the chief object of duties should be revenue, they may be so
adjusted as to encourage manufactures. In this adjustment, however, it
is the duty of the Government to be guided by the general good. Objects
of national importance alone ought to be protected. Of these the
productions of our soil, our mines, and our workshops, essential to
national defense, occupy the first rank. Whatever other species of
domestic industry, having the importance to which I have referred, may
be expected, after temporary protection, to compete with foreign labor
on equal terms merit the same attention in a subordinate degree.

The present tariff taxes some of the comforts of life unnecessarily
high; it undertakes to protect interests too local and minute to justify
a general exaction, and it also attempts to force some kinds of
manufactures for which the country is not ripe. Much relief will be
derived in some of these respects from the measures of your last
session.

The best as well as fairest mode of determining whether from any just
considerations a particular interest ought to receive protection would
be to submit the question singly for deliberation. If after due
examination of its merits, unconnected with extraneous considerations--
such as a desire to sustain a general system or to purchase support for
a different interest--it should enlist in its favor a majority of the
representatives of the people, there can be little danger of wrong or
injury in adjusting the tariff with reference to its protective effect.
If this obviously just principle were honestly adhered to, the branches
of industry which deserve protection would be saved from the prejudice
excited against them when that protection forms part of a system by
which portions of the country feel or conceive themselves to be
oppressed. What is incalculably more important, the vital principle of
our system--that principle which requires acquiescence in the will of
the majority--would be secure from the discredit and danger to which it
is exposed by the acts of majorities founded not on identity of
conviction, but on combinations of small minorities entered into for the
purpose of mutual assistance in measures which, resting solely on their
own merits, could never be carried.

I am well aware that this is a subject of so much delicacy, on account
of the extended interests it involves, as to require that it should be
touched with the utmost caution, and that while an aband