\ 222 [Assembly 



factures, commerce, the mechanic arts ! What have they done for us ? 

 What rather have they not done for us ! They are children of one 

 household, and the head of the house should care for them all alike- 

 And thus one duty as a government is indicated. Excessive leg'sla- 

 tive interference with individual labor, is hurtful and not helpful to 

 the people. Unequal legislation must be invidious, where equal inte- 

 rests are involved ; and although the full grown man needs not the 

 nursing which the child requires, yet the wise parent will guard with 

 jealous care against the charge of partial patronage. At an early pe- 

 riod- of our history, the fiscal weakness of the government made it ne- 

 cessary that a line of policy should be marked out, whose immediate 

 consequence was to create a commerce, and to encourage and direct 

 the employment of capital at home. But it has been since the termi- 

 nation of the last war with Great Britain, (let it be the prayer of every 

 good man that it may be permanently our last war,) that by the con- 

 curring action of legislation and enterprise, our commercial interests 

 have been enabled to reach their present stature. But neither legis- 

 lation, nor seamen, nor shipping, nor capital, nor their united power 

 could have attained for us our commercial eminence, if the plough 

 and the loom had been idle. It is our soil that makes the sea of value 

 to us. There are, we know, some seas which our will has converted 

 into soils, and our seamen till them ; nor would it become one who 

 lives where the harpoon-plough is used, to forget the seaman farmer, 

 who labors upon the waters by day and by night throughout the year, 

 who reaps where he has not sown, and gathers where he has not 

 strawed ; whose staple crop is whales, whose works are try works 

 at the best. So intimately connected is the welfare of those great 

 departments of human pursuit, which we at this time represent, that 

 in determining the claims upon us in behalf of one, we set forth sub- 

 stantially the demands of all. And so our first duty springs from that 

 fact of fellowship. Where all are brethren, the love of brethren 

 should exist. Commerce unites these interests and makes them one. 

 Wherever more is made by the hand of man than can be appropriated 

 to the supply of his own immediate wants, that surplus becomes the 

 subject of exchange. The comforts or the wants of life unsupplied at 

 home are thus provided. From the first barter exchanges of the pro- 

 duct of the soil for the simplest articles of skill which social life de- 

 mands, to those giant enterprises which cirole the earth, calling to our 

 use all that the world knows of luxury or science, making the civili- 

 zation of all preceding time tributary to us, the circuit of the merchant 



