The triumphant Republicans of 1816 obeyed this law of their position;—­one wing of the party, under Mr. Monroe, being reluctant to depart from the old Jeffersonian policy; the other wing, under Henry Clay, being inclined to go very far in internal improvements and a protective tariff.  Mr. Clay now appears as the great champion of what he proudly styled the American System.  He departed farther and farther from the simple doctrines of the earlier Democrats.  Before the war, he had opposed a national bank; now he advocated the establishment of one, and handsomely acknowledged the change of opinion.  Before the war, he proposed only such a tariff as would render America independent of foreign nations in articles of the first necessity; now he contemplated the establishment of a great manufacturing system, which should attract from Europe skilful workmen, and supply the people with everything they consumed, even to jewelry and silver-ware.  Such success had he with his American System, that, before many years rolled away, we see the rival wings of the Republican party striving which could concede most to the manufacturers in the way of an increased tariff.  Every four years, when a President was to be elected, there was an inevitable revision of the tariff, each faction outbidding the other in conciliating the manufacturing interest; until at length the near discharge of the national debt suddenly threw into politics a prospective surplus,—–­one of twelve millions a year,—­which came near crushing the American System, and gave Mr. Calhoun his pretext for nullification.

At present, with such a debt as we have, the tariff is no longer a question with us.  The government must have its million a day; and as no tax is less offensive to the people than a duty on imported commodities, we seem compelled to a practically protective system for many years to come.  But, of all men, a citizen of the United States should be the very last to accept the protective system as final; for when he looks abroad over the great assemblage of sovereignties which he calls the United States, and asks himself the reason of their rapid and uniform prosperity for the last eighty years, what answer can he give but this?—­There is free trade among them.  And if he extends his survey over the whole earth, he can scarcely avoid the conclusion that free trade among all nations would be as advantageous to all nations as it is to the thirty-seven States of the American Union.  But nations are not governed by theories and theorists, but by circumstances and politicians.  The most perfect theory must sometimes give way to exceptional fact.  We find, accordingly, Mr. Mill, the great English champion of free trade, fully sustaining Henry Clay’s moderate tariff of 1816, but sustaining it only as a temporary measure.  The paragraph of Mr. Mill’s Political Economy which touches this subject seems to us to express so exactly the true policy of the United States with regard to the tariff, that we will take the liberty of quoting it.