the Report on
Manufactures, and we may be sure that when it went forth it was with
his full and cordial approval, and after that minute consideration
which he gave to all public questions. But we are not left to
inference. We have Washington's views and feelings on this matter set
forth again and again, and they show that the principle of the Report
on Manufactures was as near and dear to him, and as full of meaning,
as it was to Hamilton.

Washington was brought up and had lived all his life under a system
which came as near as possible to the ideal of the modern free-trader.
The people of Virginia were devoted almost entirely to a single
interest, tobacco-growing, that being the occupation in which they
could most profitably engage. No legislative artifices had been
employed to enable them to diversify their industries or to establish
manufactures. They bought in the cheapest market every luxury and
most of the necessities of life. British merchants supplied all their
wants, carried their tobacco, and advanced them money. Cheap labor, a
single staple with wide fluctuations of value, a credit system, entire
dependence on foreigners, and absolute free trade according to the
Manchester theories, should have produced an earthly paradise. As a
matter of fact, the Virginia planters had little ready money and were
deeply in debt. Bankruptcy, as has been already said, seems to have
come to them about once in a generation. The land, rapidly exhausted
by tobacco, was prodigally wasted, and the general prosperity
declined. Washington, with his strong sense and perfect business
methods, personally escaped most of these evils, but he saw the
mischief of the system all the more clearly. It was bad enough in
his time, but he did not live to see Virginia with her wasted and
exhausted lands stand still, while her sister States to the north
passed her with giant strides in the race for wealth and population.
He did not live to see her become, as a result of her colonial system,
a mere breeder of slaves for the plantations of the Gulf States. But
he saw enough, and the lesson taught him by the results of industrial
dependence was well learned.

When the war came and he was carrying the terrible burden of the
Revolution, he learned the same lesson in a new and more bitter way.
Nothing went so near to wreck the American cause as lack of all the
supplies by which war was carried on, for the United States produced
little or nothing of w