A third object was protection, protection incidental to revenue, or consequent upon revenue.  Now as to that, Gentlemen, much has been done, and I hope it will be found that enough has been done.  And for this, too, all the Whigs who supported that measure in Congress are entitled to high praise:  they receive mine, and I hope they do yours; it is right that they should.  But let us be just.  The French rhetoricians have a maxim, that there is nothing beautiful that is not true; I am afraid that some of our jubilant oratory would hardly stand the test of this canon of criticism.  It is not true that a majority, composed of Whigs, could be found, in either house, in favor of the tariff bill.  More than thirty Whigs, many of them gentlemen of lead and influence, voted against the law, from beginning to end, on all questions, direct and indirect; and it is not pleasant to consider what would have been the state of the country, the treasury, and the government itself, at this moment, if the law actually passed, for revenue and for protection, had depended on Whig votes alone.  After all, it passed the House of Representatives by a single vote; and there is a good deal of eclat about that single vote.  But did not every gentleman who voted for it take the responsibility and deserve the honor of that single vote?  Several gentlemen in the opposition thus befriended the bill; thus did our neighbor from the Middlesex District of this State,[5] voting for the tariff out and out, as steadily as did my honored friend, the member from this city.[6] We hear nothing of his “coming to the rescue,” and yet he had that one vote, and held the tariff in his hand as absolutely as if he had had a presidential veto!  And how was it in the Senate?  It passed by one vote again there, and could not have passed at all without the assistance of the two Senators from Pennsylvania, of Mr. Williams of Maine, and of Mr. Wright of New York.  Let us then admit the truth (and a lawyer may do that when it helps his case), that it was necessary that a large portion of the other party should come to the assistance of the Whigs to enable them to carry the tariff, and that, if this assistance had not been rendered, the tariff must have failed.

And this is a very important truth for New England.  Her children, looking to their manufactures and industry for their livelihood, must rejoice to find the tariff, so necessary to these, no party question.  Can they desire, can they wish, that such a great object as the protection of industry should become a party object, rising with party, and with the failure of the party that supported it going to the grave?  This is a public, a national question.  The tariff ought to be inwrought in the sentiments of all parties; and although I hope that the pre-eminence of Whig principles may be eternal, I wish to take bond and security, that we may make the protection of domestic industry more durable even than Whig supremacy.