“I ask, What is the real situation of the agriculturalist?  Where has the American farmer a market for his surplus produce?  Except for cotton, he has neither a foreign nor a home market.  Does not this clearly prove, when there is no market at home or abroad, that there [is] too much labor employed in agriculture?  Common sense at once points out the remedy.  Take from agriculture six hundred thousand men, women, and children, and you will at once give a market for more breadstuffs than all Europe now furnishes.  In short, we have been too long subject to the policy of British merchants.  It is time we should become a little more Americanized, and instead of feeding the paupers and laborers of England, feed our own; or else in a short time, by continuing our present policy, we shall all be rendered paupers ourselves.”—­General Jackson’s Letter to Dr. Coleman.

“When our manufactures are grown to a certain perfection, as they soon will be, under the fostering care of government, the farmer will find a ready market for his surplus produce, and—­what is of equal consequence—­a certain and cheap supply of all he wants; his prosperity will diffuse itself to every class of the community.”  Speech of Hon. J. C. Calhoun on the Tariff.

The question of revenue we will now briefly consider.  For several years past the revenues of the government have been unequal to its expenditures, and consequently loan after loan, sometimes direct and sometimes indirect in form, has been resorted to.  By this means a new national debt has been created, and is still growing on us with a rapidity fearful to contemplate—­a rapidity only reasonably to be expected in time of war.  This state of things has been produced by a prevailing unwillingness either to increase the tariff or resort to direct taxation.  But the one or the other must come.  Coming expenditures must be met, and the present debt must be paid; and money cannot always be borrowed for these objects.  The system of loans is but temporary in its nature, and must soon explode.  It is a system not only ruinous while it lasts, but one that must soon fail and leave us destitute.  As an individual who undertakes to live by borrowing soon finds his original means devoured by interest, and, next, no one left to borrow from, so must it be with a government.

We repeat, then, that a tariff sufficient for revenue, or a direct tax, must soon be resorted to; and, indeed, we believe this alternative is now denied by no one.  But which system shall be adopted?  Some of our opponents, in theory, admit the propriety of a tariff sufficient for a revenue, but even they will not in practice vote for such a tariff; while others boldly advocate direct taxation.  Inasmuch, therefore, as some of them boldly advocate direct taxation, and all the rest—­or so nearly all as to make exceptions needless—­refuse to adopt the tariff, we think it is doing them no injustice to class them all as advocates of direct taxation.