Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 36.djvu/341

 senate chamber scene where this tall, vivid form, meet tabernacle of prophetic fire, towered in power and, in purity. The smoke is rolling away. But the grandeur which gave battle there, unconquered then, unconquerable now—cannot be rolled away. The crisis came with the victory. The mere demonstration of the true general welfare the greater the storm which would overturn proof by force. As the fated bark glided on the smooth wave of success, louder and louder grew the roar of a cateract toward whose rage the irresistible torrent of the time was sweeping. All that had been won would be clashed to pieces in this, fury. On May 9, 1828, Benton had said in the senate: "Before the revolution, it (the Souths was the seat of wealth as well as of hospitality. * * * All this is reversed. * * * Virginia, the two Carolinas and Georgia may be said to defray three-fourths of the annual expense of supporting the Federal government; and 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, in one uniform, uninterrupted, and perennial stream." The prosperity of unequal taxes is welcome, as a rule, to them who live on the open site of the sign of inequality. Who are they to-day whose breasts so quake with terror at the thought of competition with the foreigners? Those into whose lap the fruit will fall by excluding competition; the same who underbid Europe for the delivery of steel products in South Africa; for viaducts joining Burma to South China; rails for the holy railway from Beirut to Medina; for industrial triumphs in the antipodes. These lusty exporters, with tears in their eyes, demand that their fellow citizens be restrained from dealing with the "man of sin" abroad, with whom they themselves so lucratively deal. The foreigner receives preferential treatment under a tariff for the protection of the native. After enactment of laws called "patriotic" to protect native toil against the "pauper labor" of Europe, there is then brought in ship load after ship load of the aforesaid "pauper labor" to do the work which, with such timely forethought, had been protected from such labor. It is a benevolence which, on the plea of raising wages, raises the price of all things bought with wages. Ah! those happy isles of the "protected" in the midst of a sea of troubles (growing year by year more