Page:HOUSE CR Exposition and Protest 1828-12-19.pdf/11

 abandon our ancient and favorite pursuit, to which our soil, climate, habits and peculiar labor are adapted, we should be compelled without experience or skill, and with a population untried in such pursuits, to attempt to become the rivals instead of the customers of the manufacturing states. The result is not doubtful. If they, by superior capital and skill, should keep down successful competition on our part, we should be doomed to toil at our unprofitable agriculture, selling at the prices, which a single and limited market might give. But on the other hand, if our necessity should triumph over their capital and skill, if, instead of raw cotton, we should ship to the manufacturing states, cotton yarn, and cotton goods, the thoughtful must see, that it would immediately bring about a state of things, which could not long continue. Those who now make war on our gains would then make it on our labour. They would not tolerate, that those, who now cultivate our plantations and furnish them with the material and the market for the products of their arts, should, by becoming their rivals, take bread out of the mouths of their wives and children. The committee will not pursue this painful subject, but as they clearly see, that the system if not arrested, must bring the country to this hazardous extremity, neither prudence nor patriotism would permit them to pass it by, without giving warning of an event so full of danger.

It has been admitted in the argument that the consumption of the manufacturing states, in proportion to population, was as great as ours. How they with their limited means of payment, if estimated by the exports of their own products, could consume as much as we, with our ample exports, has been partially explained, but it demands a fuller consideration: Their population in round numbers may be estimated at 8,000,000 and ours at 4,000,000, while the value of their products exported compared to ours is as sixteen oto [sic] thirty seven millions of dollars. If to the aggregate of these sums, be added the profits of our foreign trade and navigation, it will give the amount of the fund out of which is annually paid the price of foreign articles consumed in this country. This profit at least so far as it constitutes a portion of the fund out of which the price of foreign articles is paid, is represented by the difference between the value of the exports and imports, both estimated at our own ports, and, taking the average of the last five years, amount to about $4,000,000. The foreign trade of the country being principally in the hands of the manufacturing states, we will add this sum to their means of consumption, which will raise theirs to $20,000,000, and will place the relative means of consumption of the two sections, as twenty, to 37,000,000 of dollars;