Great Britain and her colonies, which were of a peculiar, a complicated, and, in several respects, of an undefined character. It is a simple question, under the Constitution of the United States, whether "the power to regulate trade with foreign nations," as a distinct and substantive item in the enumerated powers, embraces the object of encouraging by duties, restrictions, and prohibitions, the manufactures and products of the country. And the affirmative must be inferred from the following considerations:—
1. The meaning of the phrase "to regulate trade" must be sought in the general use of it; in other words, in the objects to which the power was generally understood to be applicable when the phrase was inserted in the Constitution.
2. The power has been understood and used, by all commercial and manufacturing nations, as embracing the object of encouraging manufactures. It is believed that not a single exception can be named.
3. This has been particularly the case with Great Britain, whose commercial vocabulary is the parent of ours. A primary object of her commercial regulations is well known to have been, the protection and encouragement of her manufactures.
4. Such was understood to be a proper use of the power by the states most prepared for manufacturing industry, whilst retaining the power over their foreign trade.
5. Such a use of the power by Congress accords with the intention and expectation of the states, in transferring the power over trade from themselves to the government of the United States. This was emphatically the case in the Eastern, the more manufacturing members of the confederacy. Hear the language held in the Convention of Massachusetts.
By Mr. Dawes, an advocate for the Constitution, it was observed—"Our manufactures are another great subject which has received no encouragement by national duties on foreign manufactures, and they never can by any authority in the old Confederation." Again—"If we wish to encourage our own manufactures, to preserve our own commerce, to raise the value of our own lands, we must give Congress the powers in question."
By Mr. Widgery, an opponent—"All we hear is, that the merchant and farmer will flourish, and that the mechanic and tradesman are to make their fortunes directly, if the Constitution goes down."
The Convention of Massachusetts was the only one in New England whose debates have been preserved.[1] But it cannot be doubted that the sentiment there expressed was common to the other states in that quarter, more especially to Connecticut and Rhode Island, the most thickly-peopled of all the states, and having, of course, their thoughts most turned to the subject of manufactures. A like inference may be confidently applied to New Jersey, whose debates in Convention have not been preserved. In the populous and manufacturing state of Pennsylvania, a partial account only of the debates having been published, nothing certain is known of what passed in her Convention on this point. But ample evidence may be found elsewhere, that regulations of trade, for the encouragement of manufactures, were considered as within the powers to be granted to the new Congress, as well as within the scope of the national policy. Of the states south of Pennsylvania, the only two in whose Conventions the debates have been preserved are Virginia and North Carolina; and from these no adverse inferences can be drawn; nor is there the slightest indication that either of the two states farthest south, whose debates in Convention, if preserved, have not been made public, viewed the encouragement of manufactures as not within the general power over trade to be transferred to the government of the United States.
6. If Congress have not the power, it is annihilated for the nation—a policy without example in any other nation, and not within the reason of the solitary one in our own. The example alluded to is the prohibition of a tax on exports, which resulted from the apparent impossibility of raising, in that mode, a revenue from the states, proportioned to the ability to pay it—the ability of some
- ↑ Except a portion of the Convention of Connecticut. See vol. ii.
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