PROTECTION TO LABOR. 491 



currence of these unceasing and enormous revulsions. The manufacturer of 

 South Carolina is not so protected, and the danger of ruin to those who may en- 

 gage in converting the food and the cotton of that State into cloth, and thus 

 diminishing the cost of the conversion, is immense. Of all the States of the 

 South, this is the one that is best situated for manufacturing. She has more 

 wealth at command than any other. Her citizens have alw^ays been large stock- 

 holders in distant banks, because at home the State was the great banker. By 

 regulation she has thus driven abroad the wealth that should have been retained 

 at home, and her citizens are now flying from poor lands that they have exhaust- 

 ed, leaving behind them the richest lands of the State untouched. Marl and 

 limestone, the proper application of which would render her one of the richest 

 States of the Union, abound throughout the State, yet men fly to Arkansas and 

 Texas, abandoning their houses, their relatives, and their friends, because they 

 cannot find near those homes a demand for the food that they could raise in such 

 vast abundance on her rich and untouched soils. 



South Carolina is the State that of all others most needs protection. It is the 

 one that would, of all others, most profit by it. It is, nevertheless, the one, of 

 all others, whose planters are most determined not to take for themselves that 

 protection which would make her the Rhode Island of the South, and enable her 

 to maintain that position in the Union which she is now so rapidly losing be- 

 cause of her increasing tendency to depopulation. The day cannot, we think, 

 be far distant when she will open her eyes to the error of her policy. 



Much as this article has been extended, the subject growing in interest as we 

 contemplate it, we cannot close it v/ithout making the following brief extracts 

 from Mr. Carey's remarkable and convincing work, " The Past, the Present, and 

 the Future," to which we have elsewhere referred, and which every friend of 

 Agriculture and the real independence of his country ought carefully to read : 



What is the extent of indirect taxation upon the people of the United States by means of 

 the system which keeps the producer and the consumer widely separated, may perhaps be 

 estimated if we take into consideration the following facts: 



1st. The labor annually expended iii the construction of carts, and wagons, and ships, that 

 would be unnecessary if the consumer and producer could be permitted to take their place 

 by the side of each other, would produce as many mills and ftirnaces as would convert into 

 cloth half the cotton and wool produced, and smelt the ore for making all the iron used in 

 tlie Union. To the carts, and wagons, and ships, may be added the labor of horses and 

 oxen and mules employed in the same wasteful work. 



2d. The time lost by the persons employed hi the work of unnecessary transportation and 

 exchange ; by those who are idle in whole or in part for want of a regular demand for 

 labor ; and by those who are on the road seekuig for new places of residence ; is more than 

 would be required for the work of converting all the wool into cloth, and all the ore into 

 iron. 



3d. The labor that is now given to the work of cultivating poor soils yielding fen bushels 

 to the acre, instead of rich ones that are capable of affording tons of food by aid of which 

 poor soils might be enriclied, would yield double the return could tlie consumer take his 

 place by the side of the producer and thus save the manure that is now wasted. 



4th. The labor that is now wasted in making and repairing roads through new States and 

 Ten-itories, and among scattered settlements in both old and new States, if applied to the 

 improvement of old roads, would diminish annually, and largely, the cost of transportation 

 of the products of those portions of the earth requiring to be exchanged. 



It may safely be asserted that the labor of Man, as now applied, is, on an average, l)ut half 

 as productive as it would be were it possible for the consumer and the producer to be near 

 neighbors to each oilier, and if so, it follows that the indirect taxation by aid of the colonial 

 system is equal to the whole of the present product of the Union, which we have estimated 

 at two thousand millions of dollars. If we wish evidence of the extent to which taxation is 

 pushed by aid of this system, we need only to look to all the colonies of England throughout 

 the vs-orld, Ireland, India, the West Indies, Canada, Nova Scotia, and South Africa, and we 

 sliall find exhaustion and depopulation universal, as it must continue to be wherever tho 

 power of self-protection has no existence. 

 (931) 



