Page:Debates in the Several State Conventions, v4.djvu/618

602 being derived, in a great measure, not from their exports, but from their fisheries, from their freights, and from commerce at large, in some of its branches altogether external to the United States; the profits from all which, being invisible and intangible, would escape a tax on exports. A tax on imports, on the other hand, being a tax on consumption, which is in proportion to the ability of the consumers, whencesoever derived, was free from that inequality.

7. If revenue be the sole object of a legitimate impost, and the encouragement of domestic articles be not within the power of regulating trade, it would follow that no monopolizing or unequal regulations of foreign nations could be counteracted; that neither the staple articles of subsistence, nor the essential implements for the public safety, could, under any circumstances, be insured or fostered at home, by regulations of commerce, the usual and most convenient mode of providing for both; and that the American navigation, though the source of naval defence, of a cheapening competition in carrying our valuable and bulky articles to market, and of an independent carriage of them during foreign wars, when a foreign navigation might be withdrawn, must be at once abandoned, or speedily destroyed; it being evident that a tonnage duty, in foreign ports, against our vessels, and an exemption from such a duty in our ports, in favor of foreign vessels, must have the inevitable effect of banishing ours from the ocean.

To assume a power to protect our navigation, and the cultivation and fabrication of all articles requisite for the public safety, as incident to the war power, would be a more latitudinary construction of the text of the Constitution, than to consider it as embraced by the specified power to regulate trade—a power which has been exercised by all nations for those purposes, and which effects those purposes with less of interference with the authority and conveniency of the states than might result from internal and direct modes of encouraging the articles, any of which modes would be authorized, as far as deemed "necessary and proper," by considering the power as an incidental power.

8. That the encouragement of manufactures was an object of the power to regulate trade, is proved by the use made of the power for that object, in the first session of the first Congress under the Constitution; when among the members present were so many who had been members of the Federal Convention which framed the Constitution, and of the state Conventions which ratified it; each of these classes consisting also of members who had opposed, and who had espoused, the Constitution in its actual form. It does not appear, from the printed proceedings of Congress on that occasion, that the power was denied by any of them; and it may be remarked that members from Virginia, in particular, as well of the anti-federal as the federal party,—the names then distinguishing those who had opposed and those who had approved the Constitution,—did not hesitate to propose duties, and to suggest even prohibitions in favor of several articles of her productions. By one a duty was proposed on mineral coal, in favor of the Virginia coal-pits; by another, a duty on hemp was proposed, to encourage the growth of that article; and by a third, a prohibition even of foreign beef was suggested, as a measure of sound policy.

A further evidence in support of the constitutional power to protect and foster manufactures by regulations of trade,—an evidence that ought of itself to settle the question,—is the uniform and practical sanction given to the power, by the general government, for nearly forty years, with a concurrence or acquiescence of every state government throughout the same period, and, it may be added, through all the vicissitudes of party which marked the period. No novel construction, however ingeniously devised, or however respectable and patriotic its patrons, can withstand the weight of such authorities, or the unbroken current of so prolonged and universal a practice. And well it is that this cannot be done without the intervention of the same authority which made the Constitution. If it could be so dope, there would be an end to that stability in government, and in laws, which is essential to good government and good laws—a stability, the want of which is the imputation which has at all tunes been levelled against republicanism, with most effect, by its most dexterous adversaries.

The imputation ought never, therefore, to be countenanced, by innovating