Nothing can retard the onward progress of our country and prevent us from assuming and maintaining the first rank among nations but a disregard of the experience of the past and a recurrence to an unwise public policy.  We have just closed a foreign war by an honorable peace—­a war rendered necessary and unavoidable in vindication of the national rights and honor.  The present condition of the country is similar in some respects to that which existed immediately after the close of the war with Great Britain in 1815, and the occasion is deemed to be a proper one to take a retrospect of the measures of public policy which followed that war.  There was at that period of our history a departure from our earlier policy.  The enlargement of the powers of the Federal Government by construction, which obtained, was not warranted by any just interpretation of the Constitution.  A few years after the close of that war a series of measures was adopted which, united and combined, constituted what was termed by their authors and advocates the “American system.”

The introduction of the new policy was for a time favored by the condition of the country, by the heavy debt which had been contracted during the war, by the depression of the public credit, by the deranged state of the finances and the currency, and by the commercial and pecuniary embarrassment which extensively prevailed.  These were not the only causes which led to its establishment.  The events of the war with Great Britain and the embarrassments which had attended its prosecution had left on the minds of many of our statesmen the impression that our Government was not strong enough, and that to wield its resources successfully in great emergencies, and especially in war, more power should be concentrated in its hands.  This increased power they did not seek to obtain by the legitimate and prescribed mode—­an amendment of the Constitution—­but by construction.  They saw Governments in the Old World based upon different orders of society, and so constituted as to throw the whole power of nations into the hands of a few, who taxed and controlled the many without responsibility or restraint.  In that arrangement they conceived the strength of nations in war consisted.  There was also something fascinating in the ease, luxury, and display of the higher orders, who drew their wealth from the toil of the laboring millions.  The authors of the system drew their ideas of political economy from what they had witnessed in Europe, and particularly in Great Britain.  They had viewed the enormous wealth concentrated in few hands and had seen the splendor of the overgrown establishments of an aristocracy which was upheld by the restrictive policy.  They forgot to look down upon the poorer classes of the English population, upon whose daily and yearly labor the great establishments they so much admired were sustained and supported.  They failed to perceive that the scantily fed and half-clad operatives were not only in abject poverty, but were bound in chains of oppressive servitude for the benefit of favored classes, who were the exclusive objects of the care of the Government.