The probability is that neither opinion approaches the truth, and that both are induced by that influence of interests and prejudices to which I have referred.  The decrease of prices extends throughout the commercial world, embracing not only the raw material and the manufactured article, but provisions and lands.  The cause must therefore be deeper and more pervading than the tariff of the United States.  It may in a measure be attributable to the increased value of the precious metals, produced by a diminution of the supply and an increase in the demand, while commerce has rapidly extended itself and population has augmented.  The supply of gold and silver, the general medium of exchange, has been greatly interrupted by civil convulsions in the countries from which they are principally drawn.  A part of the effect, too, is doubtless owing to an increase of operatives and improvements in machinery.  But on the whole it is questionable whether the reduction in the price of lands, produce, and manufactures has been greater than the appreciation of the standard of value.

While the chief object of duties should be revenue, they may be so adjusted as to encourage manufactures.  In this adjustment, however, it is the duty of the Government to be guided by the general good.  Objects of national importance alone ought to be protected.  Of these the productions of our soil, our mines, and our work shops, essential to national defense, occupy the first rank.  What ever other species of domestic industry, having the importance to which I have referred, may be expected, after temporary protection, to compete with foreign labor on equal terms merit the same attention in a subordinate degree.

The present tariff taxes some of the comforts of life unnecessarily high; it undertakes to protect interests too local and minute to justify a general exaction, and it also attempts to force some kinds of manufactures for which the country is not ripe.  Much relief will be derived in some of these respects from the measures of your last session.

The best as well as fairest mode of determining whether from any just considerations a particular interest ought to receive protection would be to submit the question singly for deliberation.  If after due examination of its merits, unconnected with extraneous considerations—­such as a desire to sustain a general system or to purchase support for a different interest—­it should enlist in its favor a majority of the representatives of the people, there can be little danger of wrong or injury in adjusting the tariff with reference to its protective effect.  If this obviously just principle were honestly adhered to, the branches of industry which deserve protection would be saved from the prejudice excited against them when that protection forms part of a system by which portions of the country feel or conceive themselves to be oppressed.  What is incalculably more important, the vital principle of our system—­that principle which requires acquiescence in the will of the majority—­would be secure from the discredit and danger to which it is exposed by the acts of majorities founded not on identity of conviction, but on combinations of small minorities entered into for the purpose of mutual assistance in measures which, resting solely on their own merits, could never be carried.