PROSPERITY AND POWER OF MASSACHUSETTS. 79 



community, are striking illustrations of the prosperity which 

 attends a wise combination of the producing arts. We who 

 have come up here believe in and are interested in agriculture ; 

 they who have so generously received us believe in and are 

 interested in manufactures. And it is as natural, as it is sig- 

 nificant, that these two great industries should have united on 

 this occasion, and that each should recognize how dependent it 

 is upon the other for its existence in every well-constituted 

 community. For it is indeed upon the growth of agriculture 

 and manufactures that a nation prospers. They are the strong 

 arms of a people in war and in peace. Paralyze either, and 

 the other becomes comparatively powerless. Our fathers knew 

 this, when, at the close of the revolutionary war, they found 

 themselves a slender people, stretching along the Atlantic sea- 

 board, weighed down by a heavy war debt, and dependent upon 

 primitive agriculture and a feeble commerce for their national 

 resources. Manufactures were small ; a few cotton mills in 

 Rhode Island, and the spinning and weaving of coarse cloths of 

 cotton and wool and flax in private families, constituting about 

 all there was of this branch of business until the beginning of 

 the present century. The fatal blow struck at our commerce, 

 at that time, by the belligerent powers of Europe, arrested the 

 attention of all leading statesmen, who witnessed with alarm 

 one more instance in history of the inability of commerce alone 

 to inspire national life and strength. Said Mr. Jefferson then : 

 " The situation into which we have thus been forced has im- 

 pelled us to apply a portion of our industry and capital to in- 

 ternal manufactures and improvements ,: Said Mr. Madison, 

 in 1810 : "To a thriving agriculture and the improvements 

 relating to it, is added a highly interesting extension of useful 

 manufactures, the combined product of professional occupations 

 and of household industry. Such indeed is the experience of 

 economy as well as of policy, in these substitutes for supplies 

 heretofore obtained by foreign commerce, that in a national 

 view the change is justly regarded, of itself, more than a recom- 

 pense for those privations and losses resulting from foreign 

 injustice, which furnished the general impulse required for its 

 accomplishment." Said Mr. Dallas, in 1816 : " It was emphati- 

 cally during the period of the restriction system and the war, 

 that the importance of domestic manufactures became conspic- 



