[10] The Hon. James M. Edmunds, for many years Commissioner of the Land Office, and afterward postmaster of the Senate and of Washington City.
[11] The Springfield Journal of October 18 said: "Senator Chandler, of Michigan, made yesterday one of the best speeches to which our citizens have had the pleasure of listening during the campaign.... The meeting was a magnificent one and the greatest enthusiasm prevailed."
CHAPTER IX.
SERVICES TO THE CAUSE OF THE PROTECTION OF HOME INDUSTRY.
Zachariah Chandler as a Republican Senator was a thorough Whig in both his advocacy of an enlightened national system of Internal Improvements and his constant and efficient championship of the cause of the Protection of American Industries. It has been justly said that "the Great West of to-day owes its unequaled growth and progress, its population, productiveness and wealth, primarily, to the framers of the federal constitution, by which its development was rendered possible, but more immediately and palpably to the sagacity and statesmanship of Jefferson, the purchaser of Louisiana; to the genius of Fitch and Fulton, the projector and achiever, respectively, of steam navigation; to De Witt Clinton, the early, unswerving and successful champion of artificial inland navigation; and to Henry Clay, the eminent, eloquent, and effective champion of the diversification of our national industry through the Protection of Home Manufactures." No man knew better or acknowledged more fully the truth of this analysis than Mr. Chandler. His own State abounded with evidences of its justice, and his firm faith in the protective principle was also strengthened by the teachings of his practical mercantile experience and by his general commercial sagacity. No State presents to-day more abundant proofs of the beneficence of "the American system" than Michigan, and no personal contributions to the protection of its interests and the diversification of its industries equaled those given on every possible occasion by Mr. Chandler throughout his prolonged Senatorial service.
Political economy has been well defined as "the science of labor-saving applied to the action of communities, its aim being to save labor from waste, from misapplication, and from loss through constrained idleness." The objects of Protection are the ennobling of labor and the enhancing of its productiveness, and its method is interdicting an unwholesome competition which looks no farther than securing mere cheapness of production at whatever cost of human energy, comfort and enlightenment. There has never been an intelligent and sincere protectionist without a thorough faith in the vast importance and inherent nobility of Labor. On this as on all great questions Mr. Chandler's convictions were radical, and he was right fundamentally. He had been himself a laborer. The store, the farm, the factory, the work-shop, are all one in this—their duties are labor. Mr. Chandler knew the worth of free labor. He had witnessed its seed-planting and wonderful fruitage of development in Michigan, and he honored the strong, hardy, intelligent and self-reliant race who were the laborers there, and of whom he was one. He had early opportunity to make this plain in the Senate. Hammond of South Carolina, a true representative of that turbulent, rebellious State and of the embodied insolence of its master class and of the man-owner's contempt for free labor, made at this time his notorious "mud-sill" speech. "There must be laborers in every community, a low, degenerate class, who hew the wood and draw the water, ... the mud-sills of society, in effect they are slaves;" this was its idea. It was a frank avowal of the estimate put by the slaveholding oligarchy upon the Northern laborers, upon the men who have made this country what it is. Mr. Chandler was then young in the Senate, and had spoken but rarely, but to this insult to his constituency he was quick to reply. In his speech of March 12, 1858, the first in which he addressed the Senate at any length, he said:
It is an attack upon my constituents. Under the Senator's version, under his exposition of slavery, nine-tenths of the people of the North are or have been at some time slaves; for nine-tenths of the people of the North have at some time been hirelings and laborers. We do not feel degraded by being laborers. We believe it to be respectable.... Travel on any road in the State of Michigan, and you will find flourishing farms on almost every 160 acres, with comfortable dwellings, and a high state of improvement and cultivation.... You will find the owners of these farms with four or five sons of their neighboring farmers hired out by the day or the month or the year.... These young men go to service or labor until they get money enough to buy a farm; then they, too, become the employers of labor.... These men are never degraded by labor.... They are the foundations of society there. Some of these men who are at work by the month during the summer on farms are in the Legislature making laws for us in the winter.