( 15 )
industry of the southern states, through the Custom House alone. This sum deducted from the $37,000,000, the amount of our products annually exported and added to the 20,000,000, the amount of the exports of the other states, with the profit of foreign trade and navigation, would reduce our means of consumption to $22,000,000 and raise theirs to $35,000,000, still leaving $3,000,000 to be accounted for; this may be readily explained, by the operation of the remaining branch of the system, the monopoly, afforded to the manufacturers in our own market, which empowers them to force their goods on us at a price equal to the foreign article of the game description, with the addition of the duty, thus receiving in exchange, our products to be shipped on their account, and thereby increasing their means and diminishing ours in the same proportion. But this constitutes but a small part of our loss under this branch. In addition to the $37,000,000 of our products, which are shipped to foreign markets, a very large amount is annually sent to the other states for their own use and consumption. The article of cotton alone is estimated at 150,000 bales, which valued at $30 per bale, would amount to $4,500,000 and constites part of this forced exchange.
Such is the process with the amount in part of the transfer of our property annually to other sections of the country, estimated on the supposition, that each section consumes of imported articles an amount in proportion to its population; but the committee are aware that they have rated our share of the consumption far higher, than the advocates of the system have placed it. Some of them rate it as low as $5,000,000 annually, not perceiving by thus reducing ours and adding to that of the manufacturing states, in the same proportion, they demonstrably prove how oppressive the system is to us and gainful to them, instead of showing, as they suppose, how little we are affected by its operation. Our very complaint is, that we are not permitted to consume the fruits of our labour; but that through an artful and complex system, in violation of every principle of justice they are transferred from us to others. It is indeed wonderful, that those who profit by our loss, (blinded as they are by self-interest,) never thought to enquire, when reducing our consumption as low as they have, what became of the immense amount of the product of our industry, which was annually sent out in exchange with the rest of the world; and if we did not consume its proceeds, who did, and by what means. If, in the ardent pursuit of gain, such a thought had occurred it would seem impossible, that all the sophistry of self-interest, delusive as it is, could disguise from their view our deep oppression, under the operation of the system. Your committee do
