I will not enter upon that unsettled question of political economy.  There are two sides to it.  What is adapted to the circumstances of one country may not be adapted to another; what will do for England may not do practically for Russia; and what may be adapted to the condition of a country at one period may not be adapted at another period.  When a country has the monopoly of a certain manufacture, then that country can dispense with protection.  Before manufactures were developed in England by the aid of steam and improved machinery, the principles of free-trade would not have been adopted by the nation.  The landed interests of Great Britain required no protection forty years ago, since there was wheat enough raised in the country to supply demands.  So the landed aristocracy accepted free-trade, because their interests were not jeopardized, and the interests of the manufacturers were greatly promoted.  Now that the landed interests are in jeopardy from a diminished rental, they must either be protected, or the lands must be cut up into small patches and farms, as they are in France.  Farmers must raise fruit and vegetables instead of wheat.

When Hamilton proposed protection for our infant manufactures, they never could have grown unless they had been assisted; we should have been utterly dependent on Europe.  That is just what Europe would have liked.  But he did not legislate for Europe, but for America.  He considered its necessities, not abstract theories, nor even the interests of other nations.  How hypocritical the cant in England about free-trade!  There never was free-trade in that country, except in reference to some things it must have, and some things it could monopolize.  Why did Parliament retain the duty on tobacco and wines and other things?  Because England must have a revenue.  Hamilton did the same.  He would raise a revenue, just as Great Britain raises a revenue to-day, in spite of free-trade, by taxing certain imports.  And if the manufactures of England to-day should be in danger of being swamped by foreign successful competition, the Government would change its policy, and protect the manufactures.  Better protect them than allow them to perish, even at the expense of national pride.

But the manufactures of this country at the close of the Revolutionary War were too insignificant to expect much immediate advantage from protection.  It was Hamilton’s policy chiefly to raise a revenue, and to raise it by duties on imports, as the simplest and easiest and surest way, when people were poor and money was scarce.  Had he lived in these days, he might have modified his views, and raised revenue in other ways.  But he labored for his time and circumstances.  He took into consideration the best way to raise a revenue for his day; for this he must have, somehow or other, to secure confidence and credit.  He was most eminently practical.  He hated visionary ideas and abstract theories; he had no faith in them at all.  You can push any theory, any abstract truth even, into absurdity, as the theologians of the Middle Ages carried out their doctrines to their logical sequence.  You cannot settle the complicated relations of governments by deductions.  At best you can only approximate to the truth by induction, by a due consideration of conflicting questions and issues and interests.