its whole trade was fettered for the benefit of
other interests within the Union that it has now
cast off as a hopeless clog upon its progress.

The last grievance of the South was the
Morrill tariff, passed as an election bribe to the
State of Pennsylvania, imposing, among other
things, a duty of no less than fifty per cent. on
the importation of pig iron, in which that State
is especially interested. As the freight of
Glasgow iron to New York itself adds another
fifty per cent, to its price in America, the
protection is no less than a hundred per cent. in
favour of the Pennsylvanians. Protection in its
most extravagant form is the characteristic of
this tariff. On the same article there will be
both a specific and an ad valorem duty. We
will illustrate by a few sentences from Mr.
SPENCE'S account of the Morrill tariff the
ridiculous complexity arising from the selfishness
of this impediment to trade:

"As the Morrill tariff illustrates, in a striking
manner, many of the views expressed, and has
hardly been analysed as its merits deserve, it may
be well to look a little closely into this latest
specimen of American legislation. The effect of doing
so will be astonishment that such a law could be
passed, at the present day. The outrageous amount
of the duties imposed on articles of prime importance,
at a time when all other civilised countries are
reducing duties and removing impediments to trade,
will not excite more surprise than the blunders, the
petty favouritism, the absence of all rule or system,
the want of all legislative capacity, which it
displays. It would be difficult to contrive more
ingenious machinery for dealing injustice, restricting
commerce, perplexing merchants, creating disputes,
inviting chicanery, or driving officers of the customs
to despair.

"A specific duty has the advantage of being
definite, simple, and free from risk of fraud; but as
prices fluctuate, it may become much more light or
onerous, in relation to the cost of the article, than
it was designed to be. An ad valorem duty escapes
this evil, but is without those advantages. To
attach to one article two duties, one on the specific,
and the other on the ad valorem principle, is a
contrivance by which to obtain the evils of both, with
the advantages of neither. It is incredible that
any one reflecting on the subject could fail to see
the impolicy of imposing the two on the same
article; yet the Morrill tariff does this, not in a few
instances, but generally throughout the range of
manufactured goods."

If a measure like this were passed by collusion
of interests—which the American legislator
familiarly recognises as "log-rolling"—"You
help to roll my log, and I'll help to roll yours"
—if it were so passed and its doubtful fate secured
by delay, lobbying, and a final rush, so much
the more was it disgraceful to the Union, so
much the more might it disgust those to
whom it was the crowning injury in a long
course of injurious legislation. Congress has
met again and added to the measure, making it
more, not less, protective and restrictive. That
it disgusts the best half of the North we
heartily hope; we see also that it has severed
the last threads which bound the North and
South together. The severance, already far
advanced, needed but one little stroke more
along the whole line of division.

In each year since 1837, the North has taken
at least eight million of pounds, for the avowed
purpose of protecting its own manufactures
and shipping. Every year, for some years back,
this or that Southern state has declared that it
would submit to this extortion only while it had
not strength for resistance. When the day of
resistance came, the dishonest compromise
attributed to Mr. Seward is a suggestion to the
Southerners of Mexico and Cuba tor themselves,
and Canada for the North. The secession, for
six mouths after it was complete, was
unresisted by the North, and the departure of
South Carolina from the compact was not as the
departure of an English county from its loyalty,
but of a sovereign state with its own legislature,
laws and law courts, its own civil and
military organisations. Whether secession be a
constitutional right it is not worth while to
discuss by refinements of interpretation. The
whole argument turns on a nice distinction
between fact and law. What question is this
where every feeling and interest of one side calls
for political partition, and every pocket interest
calls on the other side for union, with violence
enough to breed a civil war, horrible almost
beyond precedent? The conflict is between
semi-independent communities, differing in many
cases as widely as possible in manners, laws, and
interests, and all jealous of their freedom.

Each state has been the country of its citizens,
a country not seldom larger in itself than
France or Germany. Of all these countries,
over a vast region, the people declare the Union
is no longer advantageous to them. And all
this, as the Oxford professor of international law
has well observed, "in a country which has
treasured the right of revolt as the charter of
its own freedom, and regarded the exercise of
it as restrained only by motives of prudence,
and needing no public justification except out
of ' a decent respect for the opinions of
mankind;' a country—the only one in the world
—which has made the theory of a social compact
the basis of its institutions; which was the first
to promulgate formally the doctrine that 'all
just governments derive their power from the
consent of the governed,' and has never ceased
to applaud every application of that doctrine
abroad, nor to teach and proclaim it at home."
So the case stands, and under all the passion of
parties and the cries of battle lie the two chief
moving causes of the struggle. Union means
so many millions a year lost to the South; secession
means the loss of the same millions to the
North. The love of money is the root of this as
of many many other evils.

While these pages are passing through the
press, a new proof has arrived from the States
that the quarrel between North and South is, as
it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel. In the political
heart of the North itself a separate secession
is threatened by the Abolitionists. The standard
they have raised, as if it were a new one,
other than that under which the South is