COMMON SENSE AND THE TARIFF QUESTION. 597 



to Congress, whose capacity or whose want of capacity we all 

 know ; many of whom we would never choose to manage a sin- 

 gle large corporation, bank, or other commercial enterprise — to 

 be able to choose and direct the occupations of this people ? Are 

 such men as our members of Congress to be empowered to say to 

 us, This branch of work you shall do, and that branch of work 

 you shall not do ? What an absurdity ! As if the people were 

 not more competent than any Congress that ever existed, and more 

 capable of managing their own affairs than the average member. 



Again, what could be more absurd than the bugbear which is 

 held up to us, of a community which would be exclusively devoted 

 to agriculture, as the penalty for doing away with protection to 

 domestic industry ? Such a community never existed upon this 

 continent except in the slave States. There, owing to slavery, we 

 had a community almost wholly devoted to agriculture, and this 

 was due to the coercion of law and the attempt to direct and con- 

 trol the labor of a great community by statute. 



The first pamphlet ever printed by the writer, on Cheap Cotton 

 by Free Labor, was devoted to an economic review of the slave sys- 

 tem of labor. In that and in other articles I treated the system 

 purely from the economic standpoint ; I ventured to predict the 

 changes which would come whenever the attempt to direct the 

 labor of the community by the force of slavery should be removed. 

 When the economic history of the present generation shall be 

 written, it will give a picture of the most wonderful industrial 

 revolution that has ever been witnessed, and it will do away for- 

 ever with the conception that infant industries require even tem- 

 porary support from the Government. 



Witness the conditions. In 1865 the people of the Southern 

 States were subjected not only to a revolution of institutions but 

 of ideas. A considerable part of the most effective brain-power of 

 the South was disfranchised as a penalty for having taken part in 

 the rebellion, while the franchise was given to the most ignorant 

 portion of the community. I fully justify the enfranchisement 

 — the protection of the ballot was necessary to the black citizens 

 of the United States — but I have never justified the disfranchise- 

 ment. The result was as bad as it could be. We all know the 

 history of what had been miscalled " carpet-bag " governments. 

 They were not " carpet-bag " governments in any single State, 

 so far as I can find out. The Northern men who took part in the 

 readmission of the Southern States brought to their aid the best 

 constitutional lawyers, and the organic laws of these States were 

 most admirably framed and carried through by them. It was in 

 specific legislation under these organic laws that the abuses hap- 

 pened; and, so far as I can learn, there was not one single in- 

 stance or not one single law called into existence under these 



