On January 28th Hamilton sent to Congress his Report on Manufactures, and how anybody survived the fray which ensued can only be explained by the cast-iron muscles forged in the ancestral arena.  Hamilton had no abstract or personal theories regarding tariff, and would have been the first to denounce the criminal selfishness which distinguishes Protection to-day.  The situation was peculiar, and required the application of strictly business methods to a threatening and immediate emergency.  Great Britain was oppressing the country commercially by every method her council could devise.  Defensive legislation was imperative.  Moreover, if the country was to compete with the nations of the world and grow in independent wealth, particularly if it would provide internal resources against another war, it must manufacture extensively, and its manufactures must be protected.  Such, in brief, was the argument of one of the ablest State papers in any country, for whose exhaustive details, the result of two years of study and comparison, of research into the commercial conditions of every State in Europe, there is no space here.  The battle was purely political, for the measure was popular with the country from the first.  It was opposed by the planters, with Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe in the lead.  They argued that the measure would burden the people at large; that the country was too remunerative not to be able to take care of itself; that progress should be natural and not artificial; that the measure was unconstitutional; above all, as the reader need hardly be told, that no proposition had yet been advanced by the monarchical Secretary of the Treasury so “paternal,” so conclusive of his ultimate designs.  “To let the thirteen States, bound together in a great indissoluble union, concur in erecting one great system, superior to the control of transatlantic force and influence, and able to dictate the connection between the old and the new world,” was but another subtle device to consolidate the States for sudden and utter subversion when Hamilton had screwed the last point into his crown.  That in the Twentieth Century the United States would be an object of uneasiness daily approaching to terror in the eyes of Great Britain and Europe, as a result of this Report, even Hamilton himself did not foresee, much less the planters; nor that it would carry through the War of 1812 without financial distress.  Above all, did no one anticipate that the three Virginians, in their successive incumbencies of the Executive Chair, would pursue the policy of protection in unhesitating obedience to the voice of the people.  The first result of this Report was the great manufacturing interests of Paterson, New Jersey, which celebrated their centennial a few years ago.  Paterson was Hamilton’s personal selection, and it still throbs with something of his own energy.