2-06 [Assembly 



in our nightly skie?, will be explored bj adirentiiroiis feet, to 

 adorn the beauty, and gratify the taste, and please the senses, not 

 of a few favored children of wealth alone, but of the great masses 

 of the people, whose diversified industry may diffuse .univei*£al 

 competency. Thus would the wealth created by labor, occupied 

 in every possible employment, react upon foreign commerce, tmtil 

 no wave should Avash the remotest shores of the earth, but would 

 bear up our richly-freighted fleets. ^ Need I argue that the com- 

 merce sustained by such a people, would more enrich this mart 

 of universal trade, than the comparatively barren and constantly 

 diminishing business of carrying to an impoverished, spiritles*, 

 unemployed people, the few foreign necessaries which they were 

 unable to make for themselves, and which their poverty scarcely 

 permitted them to- buy ? No greater mistake can be made than 

 to suppose such a city as this, sitting enthroned as she does, like 

 a commercial queen, between two great arms of the sea, can grow 

 in wealth by cherishing foreign commerce at the expense of do- 

 mestic industry. The ships which repose their huge proportions 

 bes"de your docks, might rot and moulder there, but for the vast 

 interior which they supply. The policy which enriches the arti- 

 sans and laborers of our vast republic, whose commercial metro- 

 polis is her*?, is the policy which has made this city what it is, 

 and will make it what it will become. Ever since the foriaa- 

 tion of our government, through every period of uncertainty and 

 discouragement, sometimes aided, sometimes depressed by legte. 

 lation, the genius oi our people has aspired to industrial inde- 

 pendence. It has been in a measure acquired ; and to this so faar 

 as it exists, is much of our prosperity to be attributed. It is now 

 by no means perfect. There j|^ yet human labor unemployed, 

 whose earnings might swell the demand for the mcrchandixo 

 which fills the warehouses of commerce. Exhaustless beds of 

 iron still lie dead and unless in our mountains, where a kind 

 Providence has stored it away for the use of our people ; yet we 

 are dependent for tliis great staple on a nation, whose far lightear 

 yoke of taxation, our lathers could not brook three-quarters of a 

 century ago, when this city was a village, and this State a wil- 

 demes?. Which would most enrich this city and her commer- 

 cial sisters, Pliiladelphia, Boston, and Baltimore — to supply tke 

 wants of the labor which should forge our own iron, or to c^rry 



