Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/388

356 Protection introduced. [isie The House sent the Secretary's report to the appropriate committee, and soon had before it a Bill in accordance with his suggestions. The debate which followed made it clear that the majority of the House was in favour of protection, but that the greatest diversity of opinion existed as to the amount necessary. Some members adopted an attitude friendly to manufactures as they then existed, but opposed to any policy aiming at the production of manufactures. Others held that protection should be limited to such articles of manufacture as were of absolute necessity in time of war, and of the first importance in time of peace. Others again favoured protection as a national policy designed to produce the industrial independence of the United States; while a fourth class objected to protection in any form. The result was the passage of an Act (1816) which established prohibitive duties on cotton and woollen cloths and foreign articles of which a full supply could be made at home, put a duty of 20 per cent, on articles of which a full supply could not be manufactured at home, and laid a tariff for revenue on a long list of articles consumed in large quantities but almost entirely made abroad. To establish protection as a permanent policy was not the purpose of the Act. It was provided, therefore, that after three years the duty on cotton and woollen goods should fall to 20 per cent. The economic conditions which contributed so powerfully to the building up of manufactures were also instrumental in producing political changes of great importance. They brought about a period of business depression and hard times, threw tens of thousands of persons out of employment, turned the thoughts of men to the West where land was cheap and taxes nominal, and started a wave of migration from the seaboard to the Mississippi Valley. When peace was made with Great Britain in 1783, and the United States was recognised as an independent nation, three-fourths of the country were not inhabited by white men. West of the mountains, in the Mississippi Valley and on the shores of the great lakes, there were, indeed, a few outlying settlements ; but the mass of the people lived on the Atlantic slope, across which from the earliest colonial times they had been slowly moving westward. Had the western frontier been defined in 1783, it would have skirted the coast of Maine, crossed central New Hampshire and northern Vermont, passed round Lake Champlain to the Mohawk Valley, gone down the Hudson Valley and over New Jersey and the mountains of Pennsylvania to Pittsburg, and, following the Alleghany Mountains to central Georgia, would have crossed that State to the sea. West of this line were a few outlying settlements in Kentucky and Tennessee, and at Kaskaskia and Vincennes and Detroit, still struggling outposts of civilisation in the heart of the Indian country. The area of this inhabited belt was, in round numbers, 240,000 square miles; and on it dwelt, about the year 1783, a population of men, women, and children, black and white, slave and free, of less than