THE STATUS OF OUR NEW TERRITORIES. 39 ' gable waters through which the products of all foreign countries could easily be imported into them, and, if admitted free of duty, could be smuggled thence into the States.* With the acquisition of Hawaii and the Spanish islands, however, all these conditions are radically changed. None of these islands have been acquired with a view to their being admitted as States, and it is to be sincerely hoped that they never will be so ad- mitted, i. e., that they will never be permitted to share in the gov- ernment of this country, and especially to be represented in the United States Senate. Their agricultural capabilities are very great, their products enter almost wholly into commerce, and all or nearly all of them are dutiable under our tariff. Some of them consist of articles from which the government raises a great amount of revenue, and most of them, if admitted free of duty, will compete ruinously with home products of the same kind. Lastly, none of these islands are manufacturing countries, nor are likely to become such, and none of them import articles which compete with their home products, and, therefore, duties should be levied on articles imported into them only for purposes of revenue. The strongest possible reasons, therefore, exist for abandoning totally, in respect to our new territories, the practice which has hitherto prevailed of extending to territories the revenue system of the United States, and for giving to each of them a revenue system of its own.' This is required as well in justice to them as in justice to this country; for, while the admission of sugar and tobacco, for example, from those islands into this country free of duty, would ruin the producers of those articles in this country, and would make it necessary for the government to resort to new and oppressive modes of raising revenue, the extension to those islands of our tariff on imports would compel their people to buy
- On the 14th of August, 1848, the then military governor of California wrote to the
War Department as follows: "If all customs were withdrawn, and the ports thrown open free to the world, San Francisco would be made the depot of all the foreign goods in the North Pacific, to the injury of our revenue and the interests of our own mer- chants." See Cross v. Harrison, 16 How. 164, 183.
- Congress seems to have taken it for granted that the revenue system of the United
States was to be extended to the Hawaiian Islands; for the resolution by which those islands were acquired declares that "until legislation shall be enacted extending the United States customs laws and regulations to the Hawaiian Islands, the existing cus- toms relations of the Hawaiian Islands with the United States and other countries shall remain unchanged."
