own in return could not but expose them to a state of impoverishment, compared with the opulence to which their political and natural advantages authorize them to aspire.
Remarks of this kind are not made in the spirit of complaint. It is for the nations whose regulations are alluded to to judge for themselves whether by aiming at too much they do not lose more than they gain. It is for the United States to consider by what means they can render themselves least dependent on the combinations, right or wrong, of foreign policy.
It is no small consolation that already the measures which have embarrassed our trade have accelerated internal improvements, which, upon the whole, have bettered our affairs. To diversify and extend these improvements is the surest and safest method of indemnifying ourselves for any inconveniences which those or similar measures have a tendency to beget. If Europe will not take from us the products of our soil upon terms consistent with our interest, the natural remedy is to contract, as fast as possible, our wants of her.
Second. The conversion of their waste into cultivated lands is certainly a point of great. moment in the political calculations of the United States. But the degree in which this may possibly be retarded by the encouragement of manufactories does not appear to countervail the powerful inducements to afford that encouragement.
An observation made in another place is of a nature to have great influence upon this question. If it can not be denied that the interests, even of agriculture, may be advanced more by having such of the lands of a State as are occupied under good cultivation than by having a greater quantity occupied under a much inferior cultivation; and if manufactories, for the reasons assigned, must be admitted to have a tendency to promote a more steady and vigorous cultivation of the lands occupied than would happen without them it will follow that they are capable of indemnifying a country for a diminution of the progress of new settlements, and may serve to increase both the capital value, and the income of its lands, even though they should abridge the number of acres under tillage.
But it does by no means follow that the progress of new settlements would be retarded by the extension of manufactures. The desire of being an independent proprietor of land is founded on such strong principles in the human breast that, where the opportunity of becoming so is as great as it is in the United States, the proportion will be small of those whose situations would otherwise lead to it, who would be diverted from it toward manufactures. And it is highly probable, as already intimated, that the accessions of foreigners, who, originally drawn over by manufacturing views, would afterwards abandon them for agricultural would be more than an equivalent for those of our own citizens who might happen to be detached from them.
The remaining objections to a particular encouragement of manufactures in the United States now require to be examined.
One of these turns on the proposition that industry if left to itself will naturally find its way to the most useful and profitable employment. Whence it is inferred that manufactures without the aid of government will grow up as soon and as fast as the natural state of things and the interest of the community may require.
