498 [Assembly 



reduced scale of duties aur revenue from customs is increasing as 

 rapidly as reported, it must be from excess of importations of foreign 

 goods. It appears that the receipts at the New- York custom-house 

 for the month of August, this year, are greattT than ever before 

 known. If this be continued, how soon will it in\olve our country 

 in pecuniary distress! The friends of free trade assure us that there 

 is no danger. We shall see. We must wait patiently for results^ 

 and hope for the best. But if, two years hence, our country shall be 

 found in, the condition to which it was reduced in 1842, by the ex- 

 cessive importations under the operation of the compromise act, the 

 same remedy which saved us from bankruptcy then, will again be 

 applied, by the irresistible force of the public will, without the least 

 regard to party considerations, which indeed should have nothing to 

 do with the subject, — and in defiance of every principleof the uni-- 

 versal system of free trade, — asystem as visionary and impracticable- 

 as the everlasting and universal pacification of the w©rld. 



