Page:Doctrine of State Rights.djvu/11

 manufactures from foreign competition. As the manufactories were mainly at the North and the exports from the South, this measure to increase the price of imports for the benefit of domestic manufacturers at the North was usurping an undelegated power, by sectional discrimination, in disregard of the obligation to establish justice and promote the general welfare. It was a twofold injustice to the South, by increasing the cost of its imports and diminishing the value of its exports in the markets of exchange. In this connection I will quote from Mr. Benton, a statesman of long experience and close observation, and not particularly friendly to the South. He says: "Under Federal legislation the exports of the South have been the basis of the Federal revenue." He names four Southern States as contributing three-fourths of the annual expense of the Federal Government, and adds:

"Of this great sum annually furnished by them, nothing, or next to nothing, is returned to them in the shape of government expenditures. That expenditure flows in an opposite direction—it flows northwardly in one uniform, uninterrupted, and perennial stream. This is the reason why wealth disappears from the South and rises up from the North. Federal legislation does all this. . . . No tariff has ever yet included Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia, except to increase the burthens imposed upon them."

It has, in modern times, been asserted by some in high position, if not of high authority, that the will of the majority was the law of the land. Not so thought the men who formed the Constitution. They sought through every conceivable device to protect minorities from the despotism which majorities are ever prone to inflict, and I must insist that while each State retained its sovereignty it had a shield against the despotism of a majority in its power to withdraw to the precincts of its own dominion; and this, if the majority were heedless of every appeal to justice and their compact, was the only remedy which seems to have been left. De Tocqueville, in his "Democracy in America," Vol. I., page 301, writes:

"The majority in that country exercise a prodigious actual authority and a moral influence which is scarcely less preponderant; no obstacles exist which can impede or so much as retard its progress, or which induce it to heed the complaints of those whom it crushes upon its path."

Mr. Madison, in the Virginia Convention of 1788, said:

"Turbulence, violence, and abuse of power by the majority trampling on the rights of the minority have produced factions and commotions which in republics