Page:Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1st ed, 1833, vol II).djvu/534

 526, an unequivocal preponderance throughout the Union. It is manifest from contemporaneous documents, that one object of the constitution was, to encourage manufactures and agriculture by this very use of the power.

§ 1079. The terms, then, of the constitution are sufficiently large to embrace the power; the practice of other nations, and especially of Great-Britain and of the American states, has been to use it in this manner; and this exercise of it was one of the very grounds, upon which the establishment of the constitution was urged and vindicated. The argument, then, in its favour would seem to be absolutely irresistible under this aspect. But there are other very weighty considerations, which enforce it.

§ 1080. In the first place, if congress does not possess the power to encourage domestic manufactures by regulations of commerce, the power is annihilated for the whole nation. The states are deprived of it. They have made a voluntary surrender of it; and yet it exists not in the national government. It is then a mere nonentity. Such a policy, voluntarily adopted by a free people, in subversion of some of their dearest rights and interests, would be most extraordinary in itself, without any assignable motive or reason for so great a sacrifice, and utterly without example in the history of the world. No man can doubt, that domestic agriculture and manufactures may be most essentially promoted and protected by regulations of commerce. No