e fray which ensued can only be explained by
the cast-iron muscles forged in the ancestral arena. Hamilton had no
abstract or personal theories regarding tariff, and would have been the
first to denounce the criminal selfishness which distinguishes
Protection to-day. The situation was peculiar, and required the
application of strictly business methods to a threatening and immediate
emergency. Great Britain was oppressing the country commercially by
every method her council could devise. Defensive legislation was
imperative. Moreover, if the country was to compete with the nations of
the world and grow in independent wealth, particularly if it would
provide internal resources against another war, it must manufacture
extensively, and its manufactures must be protected. Such, in brief, was
the argument of one of the ablest State papers in any country, for whose
exhaustive details, the result of two years of study and comparison, of
research into the commercial conditions of every State in Europe, there
is no space here. The battle was purely political, for the measure was
popular with the country from the first. It was opposed by the planters,
with Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe in the lead. They argued that the
measure would burden the people at large; that the country was too
remunerative not to be able to take care of itself; that progress should
be natural and not artificial; that the measure was unconstitutional;
above all, as the reader need hardly be told, that no proposition had
yet been advanced by the monarchical Secretary of the Treasury so
"paternal," so conclusive of his ultimate designs. "To let the thirteen
States, bound together in a great indissoluble union, concur in erecting
one great system, superior to the control of transatlantic force and
influence, and able to dictate the connection between the old and the
new world," was but another subtle device to consolidate the States for
sudden and utter subversion when Hamilton had screwed the last point
into his crown. That in the Twentieth Century the United States would be
an object of uneasiness daily approaching to terror in the eyes of Great
Britain and Europe, as a result of this Report, even Hamilton himself
did not foresee, much less the planters; nor that it would carry through
the War of 1812 without financial distress. Above all, did no one
anticipate that the three Virginians, in their successive incumbencies
of the Executive Chair, would pursue th