Lectures on the History of Protection in the United States. (Internat. Free Trade Alliance). (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTUKE IV. The Establishment Of Protection' In This Country. In my last lecture I sketched the origin of the protective system in this country. I now proceed to describe its growth and establishment. This was brought about by incidents connected with the Napoleonic wars. The wars of the French revolution, and those which followed, produced great effects upon the trade of the civilized world. The United States, as the chief neutral carrier, saw its shipping multiplied and its mercantile interests enriched. The belligerents, in their struggles to injure each other, endeavored to put a stop to this neutral traffic, and inflicted great injury on the neutral who was carrying it on. Nevertheless, the profits were so great that the Americans continued it, in spite of losses. When war broke out again in 1803, the indignation here at the collisions which took place was so great, that measures of resistance and retaliation were sought. The federalists wanted to put the country in a state of defence and build a navy to protect commerce. They represented the Northeastern States and the shipping interests. The administration, however, with the great majority from the Middle and Southern States, demanded a navy, sought to reduce expenditures, and turned its attention to measures of coercion by commercial war. These measures had been tried with sad results during the revolution. Mr. Madison had urged discriminating duties in the first tariff as a means of forcing foreign nations to grant reciprocity, and he had urged coercive and retaliatory measures of that kind during Washington's administration when hostilities in Europe first broke out. It is astonishing what faith was entertained in such measures. You see it still strong in the South when the civil war broke out, when it was believed...