176 



happy when all alike act upon those principles which embrace the com- 

 mon good. 



The arbitraiy enactments of governments have so embarrassed com- 

 merce, that a nation like ours, well disposed to free trade, is compelled 

 to protect itself by counter enactments, and to appropriate labor and 

 skill, it may be, to unnatural products. Wherever an easy and natural 

 barter cannot be effected, a nation must supply itself the best way it can 

 by its own independent endeavors. But who does not see that the time 

 is approaching when the Custom Houses of modem times shall take 

 their place among the ruined strongholds of the feudal Barons ? The 

 mutual dependence of nations, like the mutual dependence of stars and 

 planets, demands the recognition of each part in the perfect balancing 

 of the whole. Some wild schemer might be ready to strike away some 

 satellites as superfluous, or deem that where woiids are sown in space 

 with such amazing profusion, a constellation or two might easily be 

 spared; while a deep and true thinker, seeks in a more distant and 

 hitherto impenetrated region of space, for a new world to assure him of 

 the stability of even the planet on which he treads. 



Our country dwells under more gracious auspices in this respect than 

 the nations of the old world. Were each of our thirty-one sovereign 

 States a separate nation, then like the states of Europe, we might be 

 held apart by Custom Houses and police regulations placed on the 

 boundaries of each ; and a journey from Boston to Detroit, might be 

 attended by as many inconveniences and annoyances as a journey from 

 Paris to Rome. But it is our glorious privilege to be a country consist- 

 ing of many States indeed, and of States sovereign and free, and lying 

 under every variety of climate, and possessing every variety of soil and 

 product, but bound together by a federal compact which enables the 

 people of all the States to mingle together and carry on trade without 

 any impediment. Our perfect fraternity is not a condition of things 

 which merely neutralizes the evUs of a free intercourse and a free trade, 

 but a condition of things which secures all the manifold blessings of a 

 free intereourse and a free trade. It is the want of this fraternity which 

 curses the states of Europe with the suspicion, malevolence and robbery 

 of a police and tarifl' S5'stem. 



I made a passage on the Mediterranean from Marseilles to Naples. 

 I had in my trunk a few very good books of a philosophical character, 



