hundred bales of calico. And now came the injustice and the grievance. They both, so the case was made to run, preferred the Charleston market; they both, the illustration assumed, arrived by sea and proceeded together, each with his invoices of one hundred bales, to the Custom House. There the Northern man is told that he may land his hundred bales duty free; but the Southern man is required to leave forty of his in the Custom House for the privilege of landing the remaining sixty.[1] It was in vain for the Southerner to protest, or to urge, "You make us pay bounties to Northern fishermen under the plea that it is a nursery for seamen. Is not the fetching and carrying of Southern cotton across the sea in Southern ships as much a nursery for seamen as the catching of codfish in Yankee smacks? But instead of allowing a bounty for this, you exact taxes and require protection for my Northern fellow-citizens at the expense of Southern industry and enterprise." The complaints against the tariff were, at the end of ten or twelve years, followed by another compromise in the shape of a modified tariff, by which the South again gained nothing, and the North everything. The effect was simply to lessen, not to abolish, the tribute-money exacted for the benefit of Northern industries.
Fifteen years before the war, it was stated officially from the Treasury Department at Washington, that under the tariff then in force the self-sustaining industry of the country was taxed in this indirect way in the sum of $80,000,000 annually, none of which went into the coffers of the Government, but all into the pocket of the protected manufacturer. The South, moreover, complained of the unequal distribution of the public expenditures; of unfairness in protecting, buoying, lighting, and surveying the coast. She laid her complaints on grounds like these: for every mile of sea-front in the North, there are four in the South. Yet there were four well-equipped dockyards in the North to one in the South; large sums of money have been expended for Northern, small for Southern defences; navigation of the Southern coast was far more difficult and dangerous than that of the Northern; yet the latter was better lighted, and the Southern coast was not surveyed by the Government until it had first furnished Northern ship-owners with good charts for navigating their waters and entering their harbours.
- ↑ The tariff at that time was about 40 per cent.
