As regards this country, in which protection has always to some extent existed, it is the best customer that England ever had, and our demands upon her grow most steadily and regularly under protection.

It will be said, however, that protection tends to destroy commerce, the civilizer of mankind. Directly the reverse, however, is the fact.

By adopting the ‘free trade,’ or British, system, we place ourselves side by side with the men who have ruined Ireland and India, and are now poisoning and enslaving the Chinese people.

From that date the abandonment of the older State proceeded with a rapidity never before known, and with it grew the domestic slave trade and the pro-slavery feeling.

The whole action of the laws tended to increase the number of consumers of food and to diminish the number of producers, was due the invention of the Malthusian theory of population.

Then it was that were passed the laws restricting emancipation and prohibiting education.

By adopting the other trade, we place ourselves by the side of those whose measures tend not only to the improvement of their own subjects, but to the emancipation of the slave everywhere.

To enable men to exercise that power is the object of protection.

In the period from 1824 to 1833, the tendency was steadily in the former direction, but it was only in the latter part of it that it was made really efficient.

Then it was that the exports of slaves from Virginia and the Carolinas was so great that the population of those States remained almost, if not quite stationary.