Page:State Papers on Nullification.djvu/75

 61 It is true, that in ratifying the Federal Constitution, the States placed a large and important portion of the rights of their citizens under the joint protection of all the States with a view to their more effectual security; but it is not less true that they reserved a portion still larger, and not less important under their own immediate guardianship, and in relation to which their original obligation to protect their citizens, from whatever quarter assailed, remains unchanged and undiminished. But clear and undoubted as we regard the right, and sacred as we regard the duty of the States to interpose their sovereign power for the purpose of protecting their citizens from the un constitutional and oppressive acts of the Federal Government, yet we are as clearly of the opinion, that nothing short of that high moral and political necessity, which results from acts of usurpation, subversive of the rights and liberties of the people, should induce a member of this confederacy to resort to this in terposition. Such, however, is the melancholy and painful necessity under which we have declared the acts of Congress, imposing protecting duties, null and void within the limits of South Carolina. The spirit and the principles which animated your ancestors and ours in the councils and in the fields of their common glory, forbid us to submit any longer to a system of legislation, now become the established policy of the Federal Government, by which we are reduced to a condition of colonial vassalage, in all its aspects more oppressive and intolerable than that from which our common ancestors relieved themselves by the war of the revolution. There is no right which enters more essentially into a just conception of liberty, than that of the free and unrestricted use of the productions of our industry. This clearly involves the right of carrying the productions of that industry wherever they can be most advantageously exchanged, whether in foreign or domestic markets. South Carolina pro- duces, almost exclusively, agricultural staples, which derive their principal value from the demand for them in foreign countries. Under these circumstances, her natural markets are abroad; and restrictive duties imposed upon her intercourse with those markets, diminish the exchangeable value of her productions very nearly to the full extent of those duties. Under a system of free trade, the aggregate crop of South