The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster / With an Essay on Daniel Webster as a Master of English Style

by Daniel Webster; Edwin Percy Whipple

And this is a very important truth for New England. Her children, looking to their manufactures and industry for their livelihood, must rejoice to find the tariff, so necessary to these, no party question. Can they desire, can they wish, that such a great object as the protection of industry should become a party object, rising with party, and with the failure of the party that supported it going to the grave? This is a public, a national question. The tariff ought to be inwrought in the sentiments of all parties; and although I hope that the pre-eminence of Whig principles may be eternal, I wish to take bond and security, that we may make the protection of domestic industry more durable even than Whig supremacy.

Let us be true in another respect. This tariff has accomplished much, and is an honor to the men who passed it. But in regard to protection it has only restored the country to the state in which it was before the compromise act, and from which it fell under the operation of that act. It has repaired the consequences of that measure, and it has done no more. I may speak of the compromise act. My turn has come now. No measure ever passed Congress during my connection with that body that caused me so much grief and mortification. It was passed by a few friends joining the whole host of the enemy. I have heard much of the motives of that act. The personal motives of those that passed the act were, I doubt not, pure; and all public men are supposed to act from pure motives. But if by motives are meant the objects proposed by the act itself, and expressed in it, then I say, if those be the motives alluded to, they are worse than the act itself. The principle was bad, the measure was bad, the consequences were bad. Every circumstance, as well as every line of the act itself, shows that the design was to impose upon legislation a restraint that the Constitution had not imposed; to insert in the Constitution a new prohibitory clause, providing that, after the year 1842, no revenue should be collected except according to an absurd horizontal system, and none exceeding twenty per cent. It was then pressed through under the great emergency of the public necessities. But I may now recur to what I then said, namely, that its principle was false and dangerous, and that, when its time came, it would rack and convulse our system. I said we should not get rid of it without throes and spasms. Has not this been as predicted? We have felt the spasms and throes of this convulsion; but we have at last gone through them, and begin to breathe again. It is something that that act is at last got rid of; and the present tariff is deserving in this, that it is specific and discriminating, that it holds to common sense, and rejects and discards the principles of the compromise act, I hope for ever.

Another great and principal object of the revolution of 1840 was a restoration of the currency. Our troubles did not begin with want of money in the treasury, or under the sapping and mining operation of the compromise act. They are of earlier date. The trouble and distress of the country began with the currency in 1833, and broke out with new severity in 1837. Other causes of difficulty have since arisen, but the first great shock was a shock on the currency; and from the effect of this the country is not yet relieved. I hope the late act may yield competent revenue, and am sure it will do much for protection. But until you provide a better currency, so that you may have a universal one, of equal and general value throughout the land, I am hard to be persuaded that we shall see the day of our former prosperity. Currency, accredited currency, and easy and cheap internal exchanges,—until these things be obtained, depend upon it, the country will find no adequate relief.

And now, fellow-citizens, I will say a word or two on the history of the transactions on this subject. At the special session of Congress, the Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Ewing, arranged a plan for a national bank. That plan was founded upon the idea of a large capital, furnished mainly by private subscriptions, and it included branches for local discounts. I need not advert, Gentlemen, to the circumstances under which this scheme was drawn up, and received, as it did, the approbation of the President and Cabinet, as the best thing that could be done. I need not remind you, that he whom we had all agreed should hold the second place in the government had been called to the head of it. I need not say that he held opinions wholly different from mine on the subjects which now came before us. But those opinions were fixed, and therefore it was thought the part of wisdom and prudence not to see how strong a case might be made against the President, but to get along as well as we might. With such views, Mr. Ewing presented his plan to Congress. As most persons will remember, the clause allowing the bank to establish branches provided that those branches might be placed in any State which should give its consent. I have no idea that there is any necessity for such a restriction. I believe Congress has the power to establish the branches without, as well as with, the consent of the States. But that clause, at most, was theoretical. I never could find anybody who could show any practical mischief resulting from it. Its opponents went upon the theory, which I do not exactly accord with, that an omission to exercise a power, in any case, amounts to a surrender of that power. At any rate, it was the best thing that could be done; and its rejection was the commencement of the disastrous dissensions between the President and Congress.

Gentlemen, it was exceedingly doubtful at the time when that plan was prepared whether the capital would be subscribed. But we did what we could about it. We asked the opinion of the leading merchants of the principal commercial cities. They were invited to Washington to confer with us. They expressed doubts whether the bank could be put into operation, but they expressed hopes also, and they pledged themselves to do the best they could to advance it. And as the commercial interests were in its favor, as the administration was new and fresh and popular, and the people were desirous to have something done, a great earnestness was felt that that bill should be tried.

It was sent to the Senate at the Senate's request, and by the Senate it was rejected. Another bill was reported in the Senate, without the provision requiring the consent of the States to branches, was discussed for six weeks or two months, and then could not pass even a Whig Senate. Here was the origin of distrust, disunion, and resentment.

I will not pursue the unhappy narrative of the latter part of the session of 1841. Men had begun to grow excited and angry and resentful. I expressed the opinion, at an early period, to all those to whom I was entitled to speak, that it would be a great deal better to forbear further action at present. That opinion, as expressed to the two Whig Senators from Massachusetts, is before the public. I wished Congress to give time for consultation to take place, for harmony to be restored; because I looked for no good, except from the united and harmonious action of all the branches of the Whig government. I suppose that counsel was not good, certainly it was not followed. I need not add the comment.

This brings us, as far as concerns the questions of currency, to the last session of Congress. Early in that session the Secretary of the Treasury sent in a plan of an exchequer. It met with little favor in either House, and therefore it is necessary for me, Gentlemen, lest the whole burden fall on others, to say that it had my hearty, sincere, and entire approbation. Gentlemen, I hope that I have not manifested through my public life a very overweening confidence in my own judgment, or a very unreasonable unwillingness to accept the views of others. But there are some subjects on which I feel entitled to pay some respect to my own opinion. The subject of currency, Gentlemen, has been the study of my life. Thirty years ago, a little before my entrance into the House of Representatives, the questions connected with a mixed currency, involving the proper relation of paper to specie, and the proper means of restricting an excessive issue of paper, came to be discussed by the most acute and well-disciplined understandings in England in Parliament. At that time, during the suspension of specie payments by the bank, when paper was fifteen per cent below par, Mr. Vansittart had presented his celebrated resolution, declaring that a bank-note was still worth the value expressed on its face; that the bank note had not depreciated, but that the price of bullion had risen. Lord Liverpool and Lord Castlereagh espoused this view, as we know, and it was opposed by the close reasoning of Huskisson, the powerful logic of Horner, and the practical sagacity and common sense of Alexander Baring, now Lord Ashburton. The study of those debates made me a bullionist. They convinced me that paper could not circulate safely in any country, any longer than it was immediately redeemable at the place of its issue. Coming into Congress the very next year, or the next but one after, and finding the finances of the country in a most deplorable condition, I then and ever after devoted myself, in preference to all other public topics, to the consideration of the questions relating to them. I believe I have read every thing of value that has been published since on those questions, on either side of the Atlantic. I have studied by close observation the laws of paper currency, as they have exhibited themselves in this and in other countries, from 1811 down to the present time. I have expressed my opinions at various times in Congress, and some of the predictions which I have made have not been altogether falsified by subsequent events. I must therefore be permitted, Gentlemen, without yielding to any flippant newspaper paragraph, or to the hasty ebullitions of debate in a public assembly, to say, that I believe the plan for an exchequer, as presented to Congress at its last session, is the best measure, the only measure for the adoption of Congress and the trial of the people. I am ready to stake my reputation upon it, and that is all that I have to stake. I am ready to stake my reputation, that, if this Whig Congress will take that measure and give it a fair trial, within three years it will be admitted by the whole American people to be the most beneficial measure of any sort ever adopted in this country, the Constitution only excepted.

I mean that they should take it as it was when it came from the Cabinet, not as it looked when the committees of Congress had laid their hands upon it. For when the committees of Congress had struck out the proviso respecting exchange, it was not worth a rush; it was not worth the parchment it would be engrossed upon. The great desire of this country is a general currency, a facility of exchange; a currency which shall be the same for you and for the people of Alabama and Louisiana, and a system of exchange which shall equalize credit between them and you, with the rapidity and facility with which steam conveys men and merchandise. That is what the country wants, what you want; and you have not got it. You have not got it, you cannot get it, but by some adequate provision of government. Exchange, ready exchange, that will enable a man to turn his Orleans means into money to-day, (as we have had in better times millions a year exchanged, at only three quarters of one per cent,) is what is wanted How are we to obtain this? A Bank of the United States founded on a private subscription is out of the question. That is an obsolete idea. The country and the condition of things have changed. Suppose that a bank were chartered with a capital of fifty millions, to be raised by private subscription. Would it not be out of all possibility to find the money? Who would subscribe? What would you get for shares? And as for the local discount, do you wish it? Do you, in State Street, wish that the nation should send millions of untaxed banking capital hither to increase your discounts? What, then, shall we do? People who are waiting for power to make a Bank of the United States may as well postpone all attempts to benefit the country to the incoming of the Jews.

What, then, shall we do? Let us turn to this plan of the exchequer, brought forward last year. It was assailed from all quarters. One gentleman did say, I believe, that by some possibility some good might come out of it, but in general it met with a different opposition from every different class. Some said it would be a perfectly lifeless machine,—that it was no system at all,—that it would do nothing, for good or evil; others thought that it had a great deal too much vitality, admitting that it would answer the purpose perfectly well for which it was designed, but fearing that it would increase the executive power: thus making it at once King Log and King Serpent. One party called it a ridiculous imbecility; the other, a dangerous giant, that might subvert the Constitution. These varied arguments, contradicting, if not refuting, one another, convinced me of one thing at least,—that the bill would not be adopted, nor even temperately and candidly considered. And it was not. In a manner quite unusual, it was discussed, assailed, denounced, before it was allowed to take the course of reference and examination.