was better secured, or rested on a more solid foundation.  As applicable to the Eastern States, I put this remark to their representatives, and ask them if it is not true.  When has there been a time in which the means of living have been more accessible and more abundant?  When has labor been rewarded, I do not say with a larger, but with a more certain success?  Profits, indeed, are low; in some pursuits of life, which it is not proposed to benefit, but to burden, by this bill, very low.  But still I am unacquainted with any proofs of extraordinary distress.  What, indeed, are the general indications of the state of the country?  There is no famine nor pestilence in the land, nor war, nor desolation.  There is no writhing under the burden of taxation.  The means of subsistence are abundant; and at the very moment when the miserable condition of the country is asserted, it is admitted that the wages of labor are high in comparison with those of any other country.  A country, then, enjoying a profound peace, perfect civil liberty, with the means of subsistence cheap and abundant, with the reward of labor sure, and its wages higher than anywhere else, cannot be represented as in gloom, melancholy, and distress, but by the effort of extraordinary powers of tragedy.

Even if, in judging of this question, we were to regard only those proofs to which we have been referred, we shall probably come to a conclusion somewhat different from that which has been drawn.  Our exports, for example, although certainly less than in some years, were not, last year, so much below an average formed upon the exports of a series of years, and putting those exports at a fixed value, as might be supposed.  The value of the exports of agricultural products, of animals, of the products of the forest and of the sea, together with gunpowder, spirits, and sundry unenumerated articles, amounted in the several years to the following sums, viz.:—­

In 1790, $27,716,152
   1804, 33,842,316
   1807, 38,465,854

Coming up now to our own times, and taking the exports of the years 1821, 1822, and 1823, of the same articles and products, at the same prices, they stand thus:—­

In 1821, $45,643,175
   1822, 48,782,295
   1823, 55,863,491

Mr. Speaker has taken the very extraordinary year of 1803, and, adding to the exportation of that year what he thinks ought to have been a just augmentation, in proportion to the increase of our population, he swells the result to a magnitude, which, when compared with our actual exports, would exhibit a great deficiency.  But is there any justice in this mode of calculation?  In the first place, as before observed, the year 1803 was a year of extraordinary exportation.  By reference to the accounts, that of the article of flour, for example, there was an export that year of thirteen hundred thousand barrels; but the very next year it fell to eight hundred thousand, and the next year