Speech of John Randolph
Against the Tariff Bill, delivered in the House of Representatives of the United States, April 15, 1824.
I am, Mr. Speaker, practising no deception upon myself, much less upon the house, when I say, that if I had consulted my own feelings and inclinations, I should not have troubled the house, exhausted as it is, and as I am, with any further remarks upon this subject. I come to the discharge of this task, not merely with reluctance, but with disgust; jaded, worn down, abraded, I may say, as I am by long attendance upon this body, and continued stretch of the attention upon this subject. I come to it, however, at the suggestion, and in pursuance of the wishes of those, whose wishes are to me, in all matters touching my public duty, paramount law; I speak with those reservations, of course, which every moral agent must be supposed to make to himself.
It was not more to my surprise, than to my disappointment, that on my return to the house, after a necessary absence of a few days, on indispensable business, I found it engaged in discussing the general principle of the bill, when its details were under consideration. If I had expected such a turn in the debate, I would, at any private sacrifice, however great, have remained a spectator and auditor of that discussion. With the exception of the speech, already published, of my worthy colleague on my right (Mr. P. P. Barbour), I have been nearly deprived of the benefit of the discussion which has taken place. Many weeks have been occupied with this bill (I hope the house will pardon me for saying so) before I took the slightest part in the deliberations of the details; and I now sincerely regret that I had not firmness enough to adhere to the resolution which I had laid down to myself, in the early stage of the debate, not to take any part in the discussion of the details of the measure. But, as I trust, what I now have to say upon this subject, although more and better things have been said by others, may not be the same that they have said, or may not be said in the same manner. I here borrow the language of a man who has been heretofore conspicuous in the councils of the country; of one who was unrivalled for readiness and dexterity in debate; who was long without an equal on the floor of this body; who contributed as much to the revolution of 1801, as any man in this nation, and derived as little benefit from it; as, to use the words of that celebrated man, what I have to say is not that which has been said by others, and will not be said in their manner, the house will, I trust, have patience with me during the time that my strength will allow me to occupy their attention. And I beg them to understand, that the notes which I hold in my hand are not the notes on which I mean to speak, but of what others have spoken, and from which I will make the smallest selection in my power.
Sir, when are we to have enough of this tariff question? In 1816 it was supposed to be settled. Only three years thereafter, another proposition for increasing it was sent from this house to the senate, baited with a tax of four cents per pound on brown sugar. It was fortunately rejected in that body. In what manner this bill is baited, it does not become me to say; but I have too distinct a recollection of the vote in committee of the whole, on the duty upon molasses, and afterwards of the vote in the house on the same question; of the votes of more than one of the states on that question, not to mark it well. I do not say that the change of the vote on that question was affected by any man’s voting against his own motion; but I do not hesitate to say that it was effected by one man’s electioneering against his own motion. I am very glad, Mr. Speaker, that old Massachusetts Bay, and the province of Maine and Sagadahock, by whom we stood in the days of the revolution, now stand by the south, and will not aid in fixing on us this system of taxation, compared with which the taxation of Mr. Grenville and Lord North was as nothing. I speak with knowledge of what I say, when I declare, that this bill is an attempt to reduce the country, south of Mason and Dixon’s line and east of the Alleghany mountains, to a state of worse than colonial bondage; a state to which the domination of Great Britain was, in my judgment, far preferable; and I trust I shall always have the fearless integrity to utter any political sentiment which the head sanctions and the heart ratifies; for the British parliament never would have dared to lay such duties on our imports, or their exports to us, either “at home” or here, as is now proposed to be laid upon the imports from abroad. At that time we had the command of the market of the vast dominions then subject, and we should have had those which have since been subjected, to the British empire; we enjoyed a free trade eminently superior to any thing that we can enjoy, if this bill shall go into operation. It is a sacrifice of the interests of a part of this nation to the ideal benefit of the rest. It marks us out as the victims of a worse than Egyptian bondage. It is a barter of so much of our rights, of so much of the fruits of our labor, for political power to be transferred to other hands. It ought to be met, and I trust it will be met, in the southern country, as was the stamp act, and by all those measures, which I will not detain the house by recapitulating, which succeeded the stamp act, and produced the final breach with the mother country, which it took about ten years to bring about, as I trust, in my conscience, it will not take as long to bring about similar results from this measure, should it become a law.
Sir, events now passing elsewhere, which plant a thorn in my pillow and a dagger in my heart, admonish me of the difficulty of governing with sobriety any people who are over head and ears in debt. That state of things begets a temper which sets at nought every thing like reason and common sense. This country is unquestionably laboring under great distress; but we cannot legislate it out of that distress. We may, by your legislation, reduce all the country south and east of Mason and Dixon’s line, the whites as well as the blacks, to the condition of Helots: you can do no more. We have had placed before us, in the course of this discussion, foreign examples and authorities; and among other things, we have been told, as an argument in favor of this measure, of the prosperity of Great Britain. Have gentlemen taken into consideration the peculiar advantages of Great Britain? Have they taken into consideration that, not excepting Mexico, and that fine country which lies between the Orinoco and Caribbean sea, England is decidedly superior, in point of physical advantages, to every country under the sun? This is unquestionably true. I will enumerate some of those advantages. First, there is her climate. In England, such is the temperature of the air, that a man can there do more days’ work in the year, and more hours’ work in the day, than in any other climate in the world; of course I include Scotland and Ireland in this description. It is in such a climate only, that the human animal can bear without extirpation the corrupted air, the noisome exhalations, the incessant labor of these accursed manufactories. Yes, sir, accursed; for I say it is an accursed thing, which I will neither taste, nor touch, nor handle. If we were to act here on the English system, we should have the yellow fever at Philadelphia and New York, not in August merely, but from June to January, and from January to June. The climate of this country alone, were there no other natural obstacle to it, says aloud, You shall not manufacture! Even our tobacco factories, admitted to be the most wholesome of any sort of factories, are known to be, where extensive, the very nidus (if I may use the expression) of yellow fever and other fevers of similar type. In another of the advantages of Great Britain, so important to her prosperity, we are almost on a par with her, if we know how properly to use it. Fortunatos nimium sua si bona norint—for, as regards defence, we are, to all intents and purposes, almost as much an island as England herself. But one of her insular advantages we can never acquire. Every part of that country is accessible from the sea. There, as you recede from the sea, you do not get further from the sea. I know that a great deal will be said of our majestic rivers, about the father of floods, and his tributary streams; but, with the Ohio, frozen up all the winter and dry all the summer, with a long tortuous, difficult, and dangerous navigation thence to the ocean, the gentlemen of the west may rest assured that they will never derive one particle of advantage from even a total prohibition of foreign manufactures. You may succeed in reducing us to your own level of misery; but if we were to agree to become your slaves, you never can derive one farthing of advantage from this bill. What parts of this country can derive any advantage from it? Those parts only, where there is a water power in immediate contact with navigation, such as the vicinities of Boston, Providence, Baltimore, and Richmond. Petersburg is the last of these as you travel south. You take a bag of cotton up the river to Pittsburg, or to Zanesville, to have it manufactured and sent down to New Orleans for a market, and before your bag of cotton has got to the place of manufacture, the manufacturer of Providence has received his returns for the goods made from his bag of cotton purchased at the same time that you purchased yours. No, sir, gentlemen may as well insist that because the Chesapeake bay, mare nostrum, our Mediterranean sea, gives us every advantage of navigation, we shall exclude from it every thing but steam-boats and those boats called κατ’ ἐξοχὴν, per emphasin, par excellence, Kentucky boats—a sort of huge square, clumsy, wooden box. And why not insist upon it? Hav’n’t you “the power to REGULATE COMMERCE”? Would not that too be a “REGULATION OF COMMERCE?” It would, indeed, and a pretty regulation it is; and so is this bill. And, sir, I marvel that the representation from the great commercial state of New York should be in favor of this bill. If operative—and if inoperative why talk of it?—if operative, it must, like the embargo of 1807–1809, transfer no small portion of the wealth of the London of America, as New York has been called, to Quebec and Montreal. She will receive the most of her imports from abroad, down the river. I do not know any bill that could be better calculated for Vermont than this bill; because, through Vermont, from Quebec, Montreal, and other positions on the St. Lawrence, we are, if it passes, unquestionably to receive our supplies of foreign goods. It will, no doubt, suit the Niagara frontier.
But, sir, I must not suffer myself to be led too far astray from the topic of the peculiar advantages of England as a manufacturing country. Her vast beds of coal are inexhaustible; there are daily discoveries of quantities of it, greater than ages past have yet consumed; to which beds of coal her manufacturing establishments have been transferred, as any man may see who will compare the present population of her towns with what it was formerly. It is to these beds of coal that Birmingham, Manchester, Wolverhampton, Sheffield, Leeds, and other manufacturing towns, owe their growth. If you could destroy her coal in one day, you would cut at once the sinews of her power. Then, there are her metals, and particularly tin, of which she has the exclusive monopoly. Tin, I know, is to be found in Japan, and perhaps elsewhere; but, in practice, England has now the monopoly of that article. I might go further, and I might say, that England possesses an advantage, quoad hoc, in her institutions; for there men are compelled to pay their debts. But here, men are not only not compelled to pay their debts, but they are protected in the refusal to pay them, in the scandalous evasion of their legal obligations; and, after being convicted of embezzling the public money, and the money of others, of which they were appointed guardians and trustees, they have the impudence to obtrude their unblushing fronts into society, and elbow honest men out of their way. There, though all men are on a footing of equality on the high way, and in the courts of law, at will and at market, yet the castes in Hindoostan are not more distinctly separated, one from the other, than the different classes of society are in England. It is true that it is practicable for a wealthy merchant or manufacturer, or his descendants, after having, through two or three generations, washed out, what is considered the stain of their original occupation, to emerge, by slow degrees, into the higher ranks of society; but this rarely happens. Can you find men of vast fortune, in this country, content to move in the lower circles—content as the ox under the daily drudgery of the yoke? It is true that, in England, some of these wealthy people take it into their heads to buy seats in parliament. But, when they get there, unless they possess great talents, they are mere nonentities; their existence is only to be found in the red book which contains a list of the members of parliament. Now, sir, I wish to know if, in the western country, where any man may get beastly drunk for three pence sterling—in England, you cannot get a small wine-glass of spirits under twenty-five cents; one such drink of grog as I have seen swallowed in this country, would there cost a dollar—in the western country, where every man can get as much meat and bread as he can consume, and yet spend the best part of his days, and nights too, perhaps, on the tavern benches, or loitering at the cross roads asking the news, can you expect the people of such a country, with countless millions of wild land and wild animals besides, can be cooped up in manufacturing establishments, and made to work sixteen hours a day, under the superintendence of a driver, yes, a driver, compared with whom a southern overseer is a gentleman and man of refinement; for, if they do not work, these work people in the manufactories, they cannot eat; and, among all the punishments that can be devised (put death even among the number), I defy you to get as much work out of a man by any of them, as when he knows that he must work before he can eat.
In the course of this discussion, I have heard, I will not say with surprise, because nil admirari is my motto—no doctrine that can be broached on this floor, can ever, hereafter, excite surprise in my mind—I have heard the names of Say, Ganilh, Adam Smith, and Ricardo, pronounced not only in terms, but in a tone of sneering contempt, visionary theorists, destitute of practical wisdom, and the whole clan of Scotch and Quarterly Reviewers lugged in to boot. This, sir, is a sweeping clause of proscription. With the names of Say, Smith, and Ganilh, I profess to be acquainted, for I, too, am versed in title-pages; but I did not expect to hear, in this house, a name, with which I am a little further acquainted, treated with so little ceremony; and by whom? I leave Adam Smith to the simplicity, the majesty, and strength of his own native genius, which has canonized his name—a name which will be pronounced with veneration, when not one in this house will be remembered. But one word as to Ricardo, the last mentioned of these writers—a new authority, though the grave has already closed upon him, and set its seal upon his reputation. I shall speak of him in the language of a man of as great a genius as this, or perhaps any, age has ever produced; a man remarkable for the depth of his reflections and the acumen of his penetration. “I had been led,” says this man, “to look into loads of books—my understanding had for too many years been intimate with severe thinkers, with logic, and the great masters of knowledge, not to be aware of the utter feebleness of the herd of modern economists. I sometimes read chapters from more recent works, or part of parliamentary debates. I saw that these [ominous words!] were generally the very dregs and rinsings of the human intellect.” [I am very glad, sir, he did not read our debates. What would he have said of ours?] “At length a friend sent me Mr. Ricardo’s book, and, recurring to my own prophetic anticipation of the advent of some legislator on this science, I said, Thou art the man. Wonder and curiosity had long been dead in me; yet I wondered once more. Had this profound work been really written in England during the 19th century? Could it be that an Englishman, and he not in academic bowers, but oppressed by mercantile and senatorial cares, had accomplished what all the universities and a century of thought had failed to advance by one hair’s breadth? All other writers had been crushed and overlaid by the enormous weight of facts and documents: Mr. Ricardo had deduced, a priori, from the understanding itself, laws which first gave a ray of light into the unwieldy chaos of materials, and had constructed what had been but a collection of tentative discussions, into a science of regular proportions, now first standing on an eternal basis.”
I pronounce no opinion of my own on Ricardo; I recur rather to the opinion of a man inferior, in point of original and native genius, and that highly cultivated, too, to none of the moderns, and few of the ancients. Upon this subject, what shall we say to the following fact? Butler, who is known to gentlemen of the profession of the law, as the annotator, with Hargrave, on lord Coke, speaking with Fox as to political economy—that most extraordinary man, unrivalled for his powers of debate, excelled by no man that ever lived, or probably ever will live, as a public debater, and of the deepest political erudition, fairly confessed that he had never read Adam Smith. Butler said to Mr. Fox, “that he had never read Adam Smith’s work on the Wealth of Nations.” “To tell you the truth,” replied Mr. Fox, “nor I neither. There is something in all these subjects that passes my comprehension—something so wide that I could never embrace them myself, or find any one who did.” And yet we see how we, with our little dividers, undertake to lay off the scale, and with our pack-thread to take the soundings, and speak with a confidence peculiar to quacks (in which the regular-bred professor never indulges) on this abstruse and perplexing subject. Confidence is one thing, knowledge another; of the want of which, overweening confidence is notoriously the indication. What of that? Let Ganilh, Say, Ricardo, Smith, all Greek and Roman fame be against us; we appeal to Dionysius in support of our doctrines; and to him, not on the throne of Syracuse, but at Corinth—not in absolute possession of the most wonderful and enigmatical city, as difficult to comprehend as the abstrusest problem of political economy which furnished not only the means but the men for supporting the greatest wars—a kingdom within itself, under whose ascendant the genius of Athens, in her most high and palmy state, quailed, and stood rebuked. No; we follow the pedagogue to the schools—dictating in the classic shades of Longwood—(lucus a non lucendo)—to his disciples. * * *
But it is said, a measure of this sort is necessary to create employment for the people. Why, sir, where are the handles of the plough? Are they unfit for young gentlemen to touch? Or will they rather choose to enter your military academies, where the sons of the rich are educated at the expense of the poor, and where so many political janissaries are every year turned out, always ready for war, and to support the powers that be—equal to the strelitzes of Moscow or St. Petersburg. I do not speak now of individuals, of course, but of the tendency of the system—the hounds follow the huntsman because he feeds them, and bears the whip. I speak of the system. I concur most heartily, sir, in the censure which has been passed upon the greediness of office, which stands a stigma on the present generation. Men from whom we might expect, and from whom I did expect, better things, crowd the ante-chamber of the palace, for every vacant office; nay, even before men are dead, their shoes are wanted for some barefooted office-seeker. How mistaken was the old Roman, the old consul, who, whilst he held the plough by one hand, and death held the other, exclaimed, “Diis immortalibus sero!”
Our fathers, how did they acquire their property? By straightforward industry, rectitude, and frugality. How did they become dispossessed of their property? By indulging in speculative hopes and designs; seeking the shadow whilst they lost the substance; and now, instead of being, as they were, men of respectability, men of substance, men capable and willing to live independently and honestly, and hospitably too—for who so parsimonious as the prodigal who has nothing to give?—what have we become? A nation of sharks, preying on one another through the instrumentality of this paper system, which, if Lycurgus had known of it, he would unquestionably have adopted, in preference to his iron money, if his object had been to make the Spartans the most accomplished knaves as well as to keep them poor.
The manufacturer of the east may carry his woolens or his cottons, or his coffins, to what market he pleases—I do not buy of him. Self-defence is the first law of nature. You drive us into it. You create heats and animosities among this great family, who ought to live like brothers; and, after you have got this temper of mind roused among the southern people, do you expect to come among us to trade, and expect us to buy your wares? Sir, not only shall we not buy them, but we shall take such measures (I will not enter into the detail of them now) as shall render it impossible for you to sell them. Whatever may be said here of the “misguided counsels,” as they have been termed, “of the theorists of Virginia,” they have, so far as regards this question, the confidence of united Virginia. We are asked—Does the south lose any thing by this bill—why do you cry out? I put it, sir, to any man from any part of the country, from the gulf of Mexico, from the Balize, to the eastern shore of Maryland—which, I thank Heaven, is not yet under the government of Baltimore, and will not be, unless certain theories should come into play in that state, which we have lately heard of, and a majority of men, told by the head, should govern—whether the whole country between the points I have named, is not unanimous in opposition to this bill. Would it not be unexampled, that we should thus complain, protest, resist, and that all the while nothing should be the matter? Are our understandings (however low mine may be rated, much sounder than mine are engaged in this resistance), to be rated so low, as that we are to be made to believe that we are children affrighted by a bugbear? We are asked, however, why do you cry out? it is all for your good. Sir, this reminds me of the mistresses of George II., who, when they were insulted by the populace on arriving in London (as all such creatures deserve to be, by every mob), put their heads out of the window, and said to them in their broken English, “Goot people, we be come for your goots;” to which one of the mob rejoined—“Yes, and for our chattels too, I fancy.” Just so it is with the oppressive exactions proposed and advocated by the supporters of this bill, on the plea of the good of those who are its victims. * * *
I had more to say, Mr. Speaker, could I have said it, on this subject. But I cannot sit down without asking those, who were once my brethren of the church, the elders of the young family of this good old republic of the thirteen states, if they can consent to rivet upon us this system, from which no benefit can possibly result to themselves. I put it to them as descendants of the renowned colony of Virginia; as children sprung from her loins; if for the sake of all the benefits, with which this bill is pretended to be freighted to them, granting such to be the fact for argument’s sake, they could consent to do such an act of violence to the unanimous opinion, feelings, prejudices, if you will, of the whole Southern States, as to pass it? I go farther. I ask of them what is there in the condition of the nation at this time, that calls for the immediate adoption of this measure? Are the Gauls at the gate of the capitol? If they are, the cacklings of the Capitoline geese will hardly save it. What is there to induce us to plunge into the vortex of those evils so severely felt in Europe from this very manufacturing and paper policy? For it is evident that, if we go into this system of policy, we must adopt the European institutions also. We have very good materials to work with; we have only to make our elective king president for life, in the first place, and then to make the succession hereditary in the family of the first that shall happen to have a promising son. For a king we can be at no loss—ex quovis ligno—any block will do for him. The senate may, perhaps, be transmuted into a house of peers, although we should meet with more difficulty than in the other case; for Bonaparte himself was not more hardly put to it, to recruit the ranks of his mushroom nobility, than we should be to furnish a house of peers. As for us, we are the faithful commons, ready made to hand; but with all our loyalty, I congratulate the house—I congratulate the nation—that, although this body is daily degraded by the sight of members of Congress manufactured into placemen, we have not yet reached such a point of degradation as to suffer executive minions to be manufactured into members of congress. We have shut that door; I wish we could shut the other also. I wish we could have a perpetual call of the house in this view, and suffer no one to get out from its closed doors. The time is peculiarly inauspicious for the change in our policy which is proposed by this bill. We are on the eve of an election that promises to be the most distracted that this nation has ever yet undergone. It may turn out to be a Polish election. At such a time, ought any measure to be brought forward which is supposed to be capable of being demonstrated to be extremely injurious to one great portion of this country, and beneficial in proportion to another? Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof. There are firebrands enough in the land, without this apple of discord being cast into this assembly. Suppose this measure is not what it is represented to be; that the fears of the south are altogether illusory and visionary; that it will produce all the good predicted of it—an honorable gentleman from Kentucky said yesterday—and I was sorry to hear it, for I have great respect for that gentleman, and for other gentlemen from that state—that the question was not whether a bare majority should pass the bill, but whether the majority or the minority should rule. The gentleman is wrong, and, if he will consider the matter rightly, he will see it. Is there no difference between the patient and the actor? We are passive: we do not call them to act or to suffer, but we call upon them not so to act as that we must necessarily suffer; and I venture to say, that in any government, properly constituted, this very consideration would operate conclusively, that if the burden is to be laid on 102, it ought not to be laid by 105. We are the eel that is being flayed, while the cook-maid pats us on the head, and cries, with the clown in King Lear, “Down, wantons, down.” There is but one portion of the country which can profit by this bill, and from that portion of the country comes this bare majority in favor of it. I bless God that Massachusetts and old Virginia are once again rallying under the same banner, against oppressive and unconstitutional taxation; for, if all the blood be drawn from out the body, I care not whether it be by the British parliament or the American congress; by an emperor or a king abroad, or by a president at home.
Under these views, and with feelings of mortification and shame at the very weak opposition I have been able to make to this bill, I entreat gentlemen to consent that it may lie over, at least, until the next session of congress. We have other business to attend to, and our families and affairs need our attention at home; and indeed I, sir, would not give one farthing for any man who prefers being here to being at home; who is a good public man and a bad private one. With these views and feelings, I move you, sir, that the bill be indefinitely postponed.