There was more of it to the same effect—honest, indignant words in defense of free Northern labor, and in eulogy of the men who toiled. And the tone of these portions of the speech was wholesomely defiant, without a shade of truckling to Southern insolence. Nine years later, in discussing proposed tariff amendments in 1867, Mr. Chandler said in the Senate, "I thank God we are able to pay good prices to our laborers." These utterances indicate the vein in which he always made his voice heard and influence felt whenever the interests and rights of labor were challenged either by speech or attempted legislation.

The tariff controversy in the United States dates back half a century. This republic in its colonial days was agricultural. There were no mines nor manufactures. Each house did its own spinning and weaving. There were small shops for the making and repairing of a few articles, and luxuries and fine goods for the rich were imported from the factories of Europe. The great labor-saving appliances of the nineteenth century did not exist even in imagination. The water power of the country was unused and its boundless wealth of minerals unknown. The people were farmers or traders. For them the government was founded, and apparently there was no contemplation of anything beyond. It was years before a change came, but, once begun, it hurried with rapid stride, until to-day more than one-twentieth of the entire population of the United States are engaged in manufacturing, as many more are employed in occupations connected with and dependent upon such enterprises, and the capital invested in productive industries exceeds by millions of dollars the entire national debt.

These changes as they progressed made new demands upon the government. After the development of the steam engine, and after later inventions and contrivances had cheapened the production of cotton, woolen and other goods, household spinning-wheels and looms were silent, and the United States imported nearly every manufactured article needed by its people, sending out in return the products of its farms and plantations, its tobacco, cotton and grain. Year after year this draining process went on, the manufacturing towns of Europe growing great and prosperous, the United States widening and increasing in population, but adding little to its wealth. The mill-owners of Europe bought their cotton in South Carolina or Georgia, transported it across the Atlantic, made it into cloths, and returned them to New York or Charleston. The American purchaser paid the cost of both transportations, the cost and profit of manufacture abroad, all the profits of middle-men who handled the goods, and all the cost of exchanges. By this process America toiled, while England and the other manufacturing States of Europe reaped the harvest. Thoughtful people, knowing that capital employed in production feeds, clothes and lodges the industrious workman, adds to the wealth of the nation, adds to its strength, adds to its power of resistance, and lessens the individual burden of taxation, and comprehending the inevitable result of the drain in progress, asked, Is there no way of preventing this? They saw the raw material produced in bountiful profusion, saw the water power of the country running away to the sea unvexed by use, and naturally asked, Is it not possible to bring the miners and smelters, the founders, machinists and laborers, the mechanic and manufacturer of every description, here, to place them beside the raw material, to utilize this wasted power, and to save the losses and attrition that are impoverishing the country? When these thoughts took shape in the active brains of Americans, the change began. Mills and factories sprang up by the water-courses. Tall chimneys, clouds of smoke and glowing furnaces came after. Thus American manufacturing was born.

But as the first mills and factories were established, these discoveries were made: In building a mill in England the laborers and mechanics could be hired at wages from twenty to forty per cent. lower than prevailed on this continent. The cost of machinery, most of it being brought from Europe, was also greater. Foreign manufacturers could hire their capital from the immense reservoir of Europe, where it had been accumulating for centuries, at from four to six per cent. interest. Here the borrower must pay eight or ten per cent. or even higher. There was another and even graver matter presented to the consideration of the pioneer manufacturer. Labor in Europe was cheap—so cheap that, combined with abundant capital and low interest, it enabled the foreign manufacturer to pay two ocean transportations and yet undersell an American competitor at the very door of his own mill. Should the American mechanic be asked to toil for the pauper wages of Europe? Should it be the policy of this government to gather about its factories the hungry-eyed, ill-clad, impoverished, ignorant and hopeless crowds which are found in the manufacturing towns of the old world? Could American institutions endure this? Where the people are all agriculturists, except under very extraordinary circumstances they need never want for food, and such circumstances are rarely chargeable to misgovernment or to bad laws. The farming classes are widely scattered; they are conservative and self-reliant, not given to mobs and outbreaks, nor to obeying the will of self-constituted leaders as do men gathered in great masses. But the men of mills and shops and factories, unless they are well paid, must suffer; and when they suffer their discontent threatens society itself. Despotic governments may apply the gag of a bayonet or the silence of a musket ball, but this is not possible in a republic resting upon the uncompelled support of all the people. Plainly, if a government, constituted as is this, is to be preserved, the mechanics, the laborers in mills and mines, in shops and factories, must be paid enough to support themselves and their families in comfort, to educate their children and to permit the thrifty to make savings. If the time ever comes when the millions of American workers upon whose assent this government exists are reduced to the condition of the pauper labor of Europe, this republic and its golden promises of freedom will most certainly ignobly perish from the face of the earth. From such circumstances and ideas as these sprang the doctrine, accepted by almost all of the earlier statesmen of the republic, that the revenue system of the United States must be so modeled as to stimulate domestic manufactures, protect them from ruinous foreign competition, and promote that diversification of industry which is so essential to the prosperity and independence of free labor.

The first tariff measure (passed by the First Congress and approved by George Washington) imposed but low duties, but in some of its details practically recognized the protective principle, and in its preamble declared one of its purposes to be "the protection and encouragement of Domestic Manufacture." From 1807 to 1815 the United States was in a great degree driven from the ocean. A part of that time it was involved in a war with Great Britain, with an embargo laid upon its ports. During these years the home manufacturer had no foreign competition to fear, and factories sprang up to meet the local demands, drawing about them laborers and their families, making a quick market for the productions of the soil, and placing consumer and producer side by side. But this was the result of accident and not of deliberate policy. The scene changed when the raising of the embargo brought into the country a flood of manufactured articles representing cheap labor, cheap interest and cheap capital. Then came the demand for the levying of such duties on the products of foreign labor as would protect the American manufacturer and enable him to pay a suitable compensation to the American workman. The first response to this was the tariff of 1816, justly styled "The Planters' and Farmers' Tariff," because it gave protection to coarser commodities which least required it, and withheld it from those articles in whose production others were to be used. Eight years afterward came a third tariff varying little in its general features, but with rates of duties slightly increased. Four years later (in 1828) was enacted the first thoroughly American protective tariff, but it was soon destroyed by the act of July 12, 1832 (the outcome of the Nullification controversy), which completely abolished its protective features. Within a few months, through the exertions of Mr. Clay, this measure was modified by what was known as the compromise tariff act, which continued in force until the passage of the protective tariff of 1842. This was in time displaced by the free-trade tariff, which went into force four years later, in June, 1847. It was followed in 1861 (March 23) by the Morrill tariff, a thoroughly protective measure, which with some modifications yet remains on the statute books.

In 1816, notwithstanding it had just emerged from war, the country's industrial condition was at least hopeful, but the consequences of the tariff of that year promptly manifested themselves. The American manufacturer was undersold at the door of his mill by the foreigner; factories closed, wages shrunk and the demand for labor diminished. Prices of all kinds of planter's and farmer's produce declined in turn, and to industrial prostration was speedily added agricultural depression. Henry Clay pronounced the seven years preceding 1824 the most disastrous this nation had ever known. But almost from the moment of its passage the country felt the impetus of the protective tariff of 1828. Furnace doors were thrown open; foundries were built; the cobwebs that had gathered about factory machinery disappeared in the whir of busy wheels; labor came again into demand; immigration increased; the products of farms and plantations brought good prices; and the public revenue grew until the national debt was extinguished. Prosperity thus became universal throughout the land. When this protective tariff of 1828 gave way to the gradual reductions in duties of the compromise measure of 1832, there followed a repetition of the scenes that succeeded the tariff of 1816. From 1837 to 1842 mills and furnaces were closed, wages were reduced, laborers sought in vain for employment, the poor-houses were filled and manufacturers, farmers and planters became bankrupts together. Even the public treasury was unable to borrow at home as small a sum as $1,000,000 at any rate of interest, and the great banking houses of Europe refused it credit, so that it was forced to the humiliation of selling its securities at ruinous discounts. The passage of the protective tariff of 1842 marks the date of another business revival. Old mines were re-worked and new ones were opened. Mill-fires were re-lighted and new mills sprang up in all directions. Money became abundant, and public and private incomes exceeded all precedent. Farmers and planters secured easy markets and ample prices for their produce, and laborers' homes grew bright with plenty. Then came the Free-Trade tariff of 1846 and the commercial decadence which culminated in the disasters of 1857. California and its gold delayed the catastrophe but could not avert it. From the moment of the repeal of the protective tariff, the inflow of British iron and cloth began and the receding tide carried back American gold, impoverishing the country. Industry was stricken to the earth, and day by day saw the dependence of the United States on foreign markets growing until when the crash came it was complete. The vast flood of gold from California had gone into European vaults and in its stead could only be shown receipts for foreign goods consumed and the wrecks of American industries. The Morrill tariff was followed by an unparalleled mercantile and manufacturing development, which not even the disastrous effects of an inflated currency (in 1873-76) could more than briefly check.

Mr. Chandler, who knew well these facts, and had learned "the American doctrine" in the days of Clay, had taken his seat in the Senate when the crash of 1857 came, and was active in demanding and shaping that revolution in the revenue system which has made the United States one of the great manufacturing nations of the world. He was an ardent champion of the Morrill tariff (of 1861), and aided materially in perfecting its details, watching with special vigilance those of its provisions which affected the vast interests of the Northwest. He believed in the largest possible application of the protective principle, and favored aiding every American producer and every American manufacturer who could complain on valid grounds of foreign competition. Every demand for protection, which gave reasonable promise of increasing the yield of any staple or of developing a new industry, received his energetic support. To any revenue measure or proposition, which seemed to him calculated to advance foreign at the expense of American interests, he was uncompromisingly hostile. The abrogation of the Reciprocity treaty with Canada he labored most assiduously to bring about, and he resisted with all his characteristic pertinacity each successive effort to restore a compact which imposed such heavy burdens upon the lumbermen, salt manufacturers, and farmers of the Northwest. Throughout his Senatorial term all measures affecting duties in any form or proposing any modification in their schedules found him alert, well-informed, and determined to maintain the protective policy against any assault.[12] Very much the greater, and undoubtedly the most effective, part of his labors for an American tariff was put forth in committee-rooms and in the earnest use of argument and influence with fellow-Congressmen; he relied much more upon this work than upon speech-making for results—and results he always ranked far above display or mere publicity. Still he spoke not unfrequently on tariff questions, and a few quotations will illustrate satisfactorily his positions and methods. This passage shows how radical was his protectionism:

This nation to-day should be an exporter of iron instead of an importer. There is no valid reason why we should buy one single pound of iron from any other nation on the globe. Our mountains are filled with the purest ores on the face of the earth.... If I had my way I would absolutely prohibit the introduction of foreign iron.

The context does not sustain an absolutely literal construction of the last sentence. Mr. Chandler had seen Michigan when its copper mines were unworked, its limitless riches of iron undiscovered, its salt deposits unknown, and its pine forests unfelled. He had seen these industries passing through various stages of prosperity and disaster as they were affected by prevailing tariffs, now shielded by a wise policy of protection and now at the mercy of foreign producers, who at times (to use their own admission) "voluntarily incur immense losses in order to destroy American competition and to gain and keep control of American markets." He saw these industries grow from nothing, until the annual yield of Michigan's copper mines became 20,266 tons, of its iron mines 1,125,231 tons, and of its salt wells 1,885,884 barrels, and until its lumber product expanded to the enormous total of 2,700,000,000 feet in one season. They thus became powerful interests, employing a great host of laborers and offering support to thousands of families. These facts and the tone of what Mr. Chandler said on kindred topics make it plain that by the absolute prohibition of the introduction of foreign iron he meant not an embargo, but the affording of such ample protection to the iron industries of the entire country as would make it impossible for the products of foreign cheap labor to compete in its markets with those of American labor, and as would make the United States a seller and not a buyer of iron and its wares.