This brief sketch of economic history

This brief sketch of our economic history in the United
States seeks to show that Protective Tariffs have always impoverished
a majority of our people, the Agriculturists ;
that agriculture has thus been made a most unprofitable vocation
throughout the States, and that this unsoundness at the very
foundation of the business of the American people has often
forced our finances into such makeshift conditions, that under
any unusual financial strain a panic, with all its wretched
accompaniments, has resulted.
To consider this properly, we must note the well known
fact that in this land, those who live by agriculture directly,
are more than one half of our population. Their votes can
cause to be made such laws as they see fit, hence, one would
expect the enactment of laws to raise the price of farm products,
and to lower the price of all that the farmer has to buy.
But the farmers vote as the manufacturers and other active
classes of the minority of our voters may influence ; and only
twice in our history, from 1789 to 1808, and from 1846 to
1860, have enough of the minority found their interests sufficiently
identical with that of the unorganized farmer-majority
to join votes, and thus secure at once their common end. In
consequence of this coalition during these two periods, two
remarkable things happened: 1, agriculture flourished,
and comfortable living was more widely spread : 2, panics
were very infrequent, and the hardships and far-reaching discomforts
that must ever attend adjustments to new financial
conditions after disturbances were, of course, minimized.
It is not fair to deduce very much from the first period of
prosperity among the farmers, 1789 to 1808, for, during this
time, there were no important business interests unconnected
with agriculture ; but we may summarize the facts that from 1 789
to 1808, there was, 1, no protection, the average duty during
this time being 5 per cent., and that laid for revenue only ; 2,
that agriculture flourished ; 3, that there was not a single panic. " The Embargo" of 1808, followed by the Non-Intercourse
Act in 1809 and the War of 1812-15, and the war tariff, by
which double duties were charged in order to raise money for
war purposes, caused us to suffer all the economic disasters
flowing from tariffs ranging between absolute protection, and
those practically prohibiting, and intensified by the sufferings
inseparable from war.
During this period agriculture, for the first time in our history,
was in a miserable condition. It is significant that for
the first time too, we had a protective tariff. Though our
people made heroic efforts to make for themselves those articles
formerly imported, thus starting our manufacturing interests,
they had, of course, lost their export trade and its profits.
When the peace of 1814 came, we again began exporting our
produce, and aided by the short harvests abroad, and our own
accumulated crops, resumed the profitable business which for
six years our farmers and our people generally had entirely lost.
Our first panic, that of 1814, came as a result of our long
exclusion from foreign markets, being followed by the stimulation
given business through resumption of our foreign trade
in 1 8 14, which was immensely heightened by the banks issuing
enormous quantities of irredeemable paper, instead of bending
all their energies to paying off the paper they had issued
during the war.

The Embargo and the Non-Intercourse Act,
(which was a high prohibitory protective tariff) that all infant
manufactures must be protected, that is, guaranteed a home
market, and by infant it means new industries which had popped up to serve the war.

Plutocracy or self-government

Where you get a country split, between men who live without working, on the labor
of others, and great masses who labor when they get a chance
and get only part of the product of their work, when you get
that kind of a fundamental economic division you have
to build classes and that country will never again be at peace
until that economic division is ironed out. There are two
things before us: one to be a plutocracy where wealth rules
absolutely, and where men and women are stepped on like the
dirt of the street; and the other is to set up self-government
economic life where men and women handle their own economic
affairs just as now they try to handle their own political
affairs.