The Life and Work of James A. Garfield, Twentieth President of the United States / Embracing an Account of the Scenes and Incidents of His Boyhood; the Struggles of His Youth; the Might of His Early Manhood; His Valor As a Soldier; His Career As a Statesman; His Election to the Presidency; and the Tragic Story of His Death.

by John Clark Ridpath

THE TARIFF.

“A few days ago, the distinguished gentleman from Virginia, who now occupies the chair [Mr. Tucker], made a speech of rare ability and power, in which he placed at the front of his line of discussion a question that was never raised in American legislation until our present form of Government was forty years old; the question of the constitutionality of a tariff for the encouragement and protection of manufacturers. The first page of the printed speech of the gentleman, as it appears in the Congressional Record, is devoted to an elaborate and very able discussion of that question.

“He insists that the two powers conferred upon Congress, to levy duties and to regulate commerce, are entirely distinct from each other; that the one can not by any fair construction be applied to the other; that the methods of the one are not the methods of the other, and that the capital mistake which he conceives has been made in the legislation of the country for many years is that the power to tax has been applied to the regulation of commerce, and through that to the protection of manufactures. He holds that if we were to adopt a proper construction of the Constitution we should find that the regulation of commerce does not permit the protection of manufactures, nor can the power to tax be applied, directly or indirectly, to that object.

“I will not enter into any elaborate discussion of that question, but I can not refrain from expressing my admiration of the courage of the gentleman from Virginia, who in that part of his speech brought himself into point-blank range of the terrible artillery of James Madison, one of the fathers of the Constitution, and Virginia’s great expounder of its provisions.

“In a letter addressed to Joseph C. Cabell, on the 18th of March, 1827, will be found one of those discussions in which Mr. Madison gives categorically thirteen reasons against the very constitutional theory advanced now by the gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Tucker]. It would almost seem that the distinguished author of the book which I hold in my hand had prophetically in his mind the very speech delivered in this House by the later Virginian, for he refutes its arguments, point by point, thoroughly and completely.

“I say that more than a hundred pages of Madison’s works are devoted to discussing and exploding what was, in 1828, this new notion of constitutional construction. In one of these papers he calls to mind the fact that sixteen of the men who framed the Constitution sat in the first Congress and helped to frame a tariff expressly for the protection of domestic industries; and it is fair to presume that these men understood the meaning of the Constitution.

“I will close this phase of the discussion by calling the attention of the committee to the language of the Constitution itself:

“‘The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.’

“Language could hardly be plainer to declare the great general objects to which the taxing power is to be applied.

“It should be borne in mind that revenue is the life-blood of a government, circulating through every part of its organization and giving force and vitality to every function. The power to tax is therefore the great motive power, and its regulation impels, retards, restrains, or limits all the functions of the Government.