This brief sketch of our economic history in the United States seeks to
show that Protective Tariffs have always impoverished a majority of our
people, the Agriculturists; that agriculture has thus been made a most
unprofitable vocation throughout the States, and that this unsoundness
at the very foundation of the business of the American people has often
forced our finances into such makeshift conditions, that under any
unusual financial strain a panic, with all its wretched accompaniments,
has resulted.
To consider this properly, we must note the well known fact that in this
land, those who live by agriculture directly, are more than one half of
our population. Their votes can cause to be made such laws as they see
fit, hence, one would expect the enactment of laws to raise the price of
farm products, and to lower the price of all that the farmer has to buy.
But the farmers vote as the manufacturers and other active classes of
the minority of our voters may influence; and only twice in our history,
from 1789 to 1808, and from 1846 to 1860, have enough of the minority
found their interests sufficiently identical with that of the
unorganized farmer-majority to join votes, and thus secure at once their
common end.
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