Page:Debates in the Several State Conventions, v4.djvu/616

 APPENDIX.

MADISON ON THE TARIFF. LETTER 1.

, September 18, 1828.


 * Your late letter reminds me of our conversation on the constitutionality of the power in Congress to impose a tariff for the encouragement of manufactures, and of my promise to sketch the grounds of the confident opinion I had expressed that it was among the powers vested in that body.

The Constitution vests in Congress, expressly, "the power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises," and "the power to regulate trade."

That the former power, if not particularly expressed, would have been included in the latter as one of the objects of a general power to regulate trade, is not necessarily impugned by its being so expressed. Examples of this sort cannot sometimes be easily avoided, and are to be seen elsewhere in the Constitution. Thus the power "to define and punish offences against the law of nations" includes the power, afterwards particularly expressed, "to make rules concerning captures, &c., from offending neutrals." So also a power "to coin money" would doubtless include that of "regulating its value," had not the latter power been expressly inserted. The term taxes, if standing alone, would certainly have included duties, imposts, and excises. In another clause, it is said, "no tax or duties shall be laid on exports," &c. Here the two terms are used as synonymous. And in another clause, where it is said, "No state shall lay any impost, or duties," &c., the terms imposts and duties are synonymous. Pleonasms, tautologies, and the promiscuous use of terms and phrases, differing in their shades of meaning, (always to be expounded with reference to the context, and under the control of the general character and manifest scope of the instrument in which they are found,) are to be ascribed, sometimes to the purpose of greater caution, sometimes to the imperfections of language, and sometimes to the imperfection of man himself. In this view of the subject, it was quite natural, however certainly the general power to regulate trade might include a power to impose duties on it, not to omit it in a clause enumerating the several modes of revenue authorized by the Constitution. In few cases could the "ex majori cautela" occur with more claim to respect.

Nor can it be inferred that a power to regulate trade does not involve a power to tax it, from the distinction made in the original controversy with Great Britain, between a power to regulate trade with the colonies, and a power to tax them. A power to regulate trade between different parts of the empire was confessedly necessary, and was admitted to lie, as far as that was the case, in the British Parliament; the taxing part being at the same time denied to the Parliament, and asserted to be necessarily inherent in the colonial legislatures, as sufficient, and the only safe depositories of the taxing power. So difficult was it, nevertheless, to maintain the distinction in practice, that the ingredient of revenue was occasionally overlooked or disregarded in the British regulations, as in the duty on sugar and molasses imported into the colonies. And it was fortunate that the attempt at an internal and direct tax, in the case of the stamp act, produced a radical examination of the subject before a regulation of trade, with a view to revenue, had grown into an established authorit3 One thing at least is certain—that the main and admitted object of the parliamentary regulations of trade with the colonies was the encouragement of manufactures in Great Britain.

But the present question is unconnected with the former relations between