FARMER AND THE PLANTER as the first or principal producers of wealth, and those whose interests should be the first consulted. It is true, these are our great and vital interests at present, and these interests we are most anxious to serve. But how does free trade benefit the one or the other ? How can we serve them, if we neglect the manufacturer and the mechanic ? We can have no home markets if we are all farmers and planters, and the manu facturers of Europe cannot buy more from us than sell back to us. They have always bought less than they sold. If they buy a cotton, they pay for it with a piece or bolt of cloth. If they want a barrel of flour, they send us a bar of iron. But if we had the manufacturer and the mechanic side by side with the farmer and the planter, we could obtain two bolts of cloth, or two pieces of calico, and two bars of iron, for the same price.
It is notorious that the protection of war has advanced cotton from six cents to fifty cents a pound; while we know that free trade reduced it from twenty-five cents to its lowest limit. Free trade reduced corn to ten cents or less per bushel, while protection advanced it to fifty cents and above.
That is not economy which robs the generous soil of all its richness in order that its productions may be sold cheap in foreign markets. Yet such has been the economy of
the planter and farmer in this country. The soils of Virginia and the Carolinas are nearly exhausted, and yet the planters did not acquire wealth, though provided with the cheapest of labor, which only received coarse food and scanty raiment for its hire. The result is, exhausted lands and poverty-stricken people. The magnificent prairies of the West yield, year by year, less and less to the farmer, because their export trade pays but a scanty pittance for their labor, and returns nothing to the impoverished soil.
But, while free trade is racking the rich soils of the planting South and impoverishing the prairies of the farming West, the sterile hills of manufacturing New England are in creasing in richness and production; while the soil of Great Britain, which cannot com pare with those of the South and West in original yield, now produces from two- to three fold greater crops. It is therefore evident that the farmers and planters are decreasing instead of increasing the national wealth, by exhausting the strength and consequently depreciating the value of the soils, and that free trade and foreign markets cannot return the wealth thus extracted. The conclusion is plain.