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ting that no other impediment existed, our system itself is an effectual barrier against extensive exports of our manufactured articles. The very means which secures the domestic market, must lose the foreign. High prices are an effectual stimulus, when enforced by a monopoly, as in our own market, but they are fatal to competition in the open and free market of the world. Besides, when manufactured articles are exported, they must follow the same law, to which the products of the soil are subject, when they are also exported. They will be sent out in order to be exchanged with the products of other countries; and if these products be taxed on their introduction, as a back return, it has been demonstrated that like all other taxes on exchange, it must be paid by the producer. The nature of the operation will be seen, if it be supposed, in their exchange with us, instead of receiving our products free of duty, the manufacturer had to pay forty five per cent. on the back return of the cotton and other products, which they receive from us in exchange. If to these insuperable impediments to a large export trade, be added, that our country rears the products of almost every soil and climate, and that scarcely an article that can be imported, but what may come in competition with some of the products of our arts or our soil, and consequently ought to be excluded on the principles of the system, it must be apparent that the system itself, when perfected, will essentially exclude all exports, unless we should charitably export for the supply of the wants of others, without the expectation of a return. The loss of the exports, and with it the imports also, must in truth be the end of the system. If we export, we must import, and the most simple and efficient system to secure the home market, would in fact be to prohibit exports; and as the constitution only prohibits duties on exports, and as duties are not prohibition, we may yet witness this modification of the American system.
The committee deemed it more satisfactory to explain the operation of the system on the southern states generally, than its peculiar operation on this. In fact they had not the data, had they the inclination, to separate the oppression under which this state labors, from that of the other staple states. The fate of one must be that of all.
The committee have considered the question in its relative effects on the staple and manufacturing states, comprehending under the latter all the states who advocate the Tariff system. It is not for them to determine whether all those states have equal interest in its continuance. It is manifest that their situation is very different. While in some the manufacturing interest wholly prevails, others are divided between that and the com-
