Page:Debates in the Several State Conventions, v4.djvu/620

604, what would be the situation of states deriving their foreign supplies through the ports of other states? It is evident that they might be compelled to pay, in their consumption of particular articles imported, a tax for the common treasury, not common to all the states, without having any manufacture or product of their own, to partake of the contemplated benefit.

Of the impracticability of separate regulations of trade, and the resulting necessity of general regulations, no state was more sensible than Virginia. She was accordingly among the most earnest for granting to Congress a power adequate to the object. On more occasions than one, in the proceedings of her legislative councils, it was recited, "that the relative situation of the states had been found, on trial, to require uniformity in their commercial regulations, as the only effectual policy for obtaining, in the ports of foreign nations, a stipulation of privileges reciprocal to those enjoyed, by the subjects of such nations, in the ports of the United States; for preventing animosities which cannot fail to arise among the several states from the interference of partial and separate regulations; and for deriving from commerce such aids to the public revenue as it ought to contribute, &c.

During the delays and discouragements experienced in the attempts to invest Congress with the necessary powers, the state of Virginia made various trials of what could be done by her individual laws. She ventured on duties and imposts as a source of revenue; resolutions were passed, at one time, to encourage and protect her own navigation and ship-building; and in consequence of complaints and petitions from Norfolk, Alexandria, and other places, against the monopolizing navigation laws of Great Britain, particularly in the trade between the United States and the British West Indies, she deliberated, with a purpose controlled only by the inefficacy of separate measures, on the experiment of forcing a reciprocity by prohibitory regulations of her own.

The effect of her separate attempts to raise revenue by duties on imports soon appeared in representations from her merchants that the commerce of the state was banished by them into other channels, especially of Maryland, where imports were less burdened than in Virginia.

Such a tendency of separate regulations was, indeed, too manifest to escape anticipation. Among the projects prompted by the want of a federal authority over commerce, was that of a concert, first proposed on the part of Maryland, for a uniformity of regulations between the two states; and commissioners were appointed for that purpose. It was soon perceived, however, that the concurrence of Pennsylvania was as necessary to Maryland as of Maryland to Virginia, and the concurrence of Pennsylvania was accordingly invited. But Pennsylvania could no more concur without New York than Maryland without Pennsylvania, nor New York without the concurrence of Boston, &c.

These projects were superseded, for the moment, by that of the Convention at Annapolis in 1786, and forever by the Convention at Philadelphia in 1787, and the Constitution which was the fruit of it.

There is a passage in Mr. Necker's work on the finances of France which affords a signal illustration of the difficulty of collecting, in contiguous communities, indirect taxes, when not the same in all, by the violent means resorted to against smuggling from one to another of them. Previous to the late revolutionary war in that country, the taxes were of very different rates in the different provinces; particularly the tax on salt, which was high in the interior provinces and low in the maritime, and the tax on tobacco, which was very high in general, whilst in some of the provinces the use of the article was altogether free. The consequence was, that the standing army of patrols against smuggling had swollen to the number of twenty-three thousand; the annual arrest of men, women, and children, engaged in smuggling, to five thousand five hundred and fifty; and the number annually arrested on account of salt and tobacco alone, to seventeen or eighteen hundred, more than three hundred of whom were consigned to the terrible punishment of the galleys.

May it not be regarded as among the providential blessings to these states, that their geographical relations, multiplied as they will be by artificial channels of intercourse, give such additional force to the many obligations to cherish that union which alone secures their peace, their safety, and their prosperity! Apart