Page:Nullification Controversy in South Carolina.djvu/164

 but a gull" believed that the tariff had reduced the price of cotton from 20 cents to 10 cents? Surely not as many as one-fourth of the Union party believed such nonsense, for they knew that it was a trick of the Nullifiers to say that the citizens of the state were unanimous as to the evil and differed only as to the remedy. Surely the Union party would not yield this point, for that meant the yielding of the whole question and the precipitation of civil war. If it were true that the tariff was palpably unconstitutional and that it had reduced the South to hopeless ruin, what mattered it whether the remedy was constitutional or not? The only question a sensible man would then ask. would be as to its effectiveness.

The truth as to the constitutionality of the tariff was that the best and wisest men differed; but as to the evil results of the present tariff the adherents of the Union party unanimously agreed that the results had been grossly exaggerated and that when they were compared to the evil effects of disunion they were as "the dust in the balance." The Union men therefore were opposed to nullification because it was a remedy worse than the disease, and every man who would make the disease out to be worse than the remedy justified