Mr. McDuffie’s great speech against the protective system is too long to be reproduced here; but in the concluding paragraphs he predicted with such clearness of vision the reign of rotten business and rotten politics which now afflicts us that his words read like inspired prophecy:
“Sir, when I consider that, by a single bill like the present, millions of dollars may be transferred annually from one part of the community to another; when I consider the disguise of disinterested patriotism under which the basest and most profligate ambition may perpetrate such an act of injustice and political prostitution, I cannot hesitate, for a moment, to pronounce this system the most stupendous instrument of corruption ever placed in the hands of public functionaries.
“It brings ambition and avarice and wealth into a combination which it is fearful to contemplate, because it is almost impossible to resist.
“Do we not perceive, at this very moment, the extraordinary and melancholy spectacle of less than one hundred thousand capitalists, by means of this unhallowed combination, exercising an absolute and despotic control over the opinions of eight millions of free citizens and the fortunes and destinies of ten millions?
“Sir, I will not anticipate or forbode evil. I will not permit myself to believe that the Presidency of the United States will ever be bought and sold. But I must say that there are certain quarters of this Union in which, if the candidate for the Presidency should come forward with this Harrisburg tariff in his hand, nothing could resist his pretensions if his adversary were opposed to this unjust system of oppression.”
“Indeed, Sir, when I contemplate the extraordinary infatuation which a combination of capitalists and politicians have had the heart to diffuse over more than one-half of this Union—when I see the very victims who are about to be offered up to satiate the voracious appetite of this devouring Moloch, paying their ardent and sincere devotions at his bloody shrine; I confess I have been tempted to doubt whether mankind was not doomed, even in its most enlightened state to be the dupe of some form of imposture, and the victim of some form of tyranny.
How American Capital Protects American Labor
“Sir, in casting my eyes over the history of human idolatry, I can find nothing, even in the darkest ages of ignorance and superstition, which surpasses the infatuation by which a confederated priesthood of politicians and manufacturers have bound the great body of the people of the farming States of this Union as if by a spell, to this mighty scheme of fraud and delusion.”