to fight, and I hold that it is best to avoid fighting as long as you can, and when you must fight to do it effectually, if it be necessary to fight, that is the position in which free trade places the American nation. The serpent of Mexico will We can have no wars upon the land. never lift up her head in defiance again. under our stars and stripes this blessed day, if we would receive her. We have no enemies upon the American continent. If we have any war, it must be upon the ocean, and such a war would be trivial, if with any power excepting Great Britain. Over her power we shall predominate within four years from the present day. Now look at the other side of the question. Our whig friends say, that General Cass is an able and excellent man; they have nothing to say against his private life or public career as a statesman, with one single exception, he is too much inclined to war. We are told, that the democratic party is the party of war, and that we shall be involved in a war with Great Britain. A liberal policy in commercial affairs increases our navigation and strengthens our naval power, and Great Britain is not quite as ready to go to war with us since 1812 as she might have been; because some of my friends from Gloucester and Marblehead, happened to meet some of her children, and they gave Great Britain then a touch of their quality which she is not likely to forget. And now you have trebled your tonnage since 1830, so that it is close upon the heels of the English mercantile marine, and increasing every day. When our ships and sailors are more numerous than those of Great Britain, will Great Britain be any more disposed to go to war with us than in 1812? The party, then, that pursues a liberal commercial policy, that builds up navigation, and causes your sails to whiten every sea, and your stars and stripes to float in every port, pursues the policy which makes peace certain, because nobody will desire an enemy so strong as the United States will make herself. On another ground we have less cause to fear. With whom do people go to war? With their enemies; with those who they imagine have given them cause of war. Now, take the war policy of restriction. It shuts every man up within himself, and every nation within itself. We do not want to sell you any thing, or buy any thing of you, is its spirit. Keep yourselves to yourselves, and we will keep ourselves to ourselves. That makes enemies. Mountains interposed made enemies once; but the railroad that crosses the Alps, and the railroad that crosses the Pyrenees, will take away that cause of war. Now, restrictions make enemies; take away those, and we are friends to the world, and have no enemies. If we take the starving Irish population and feed them; if we take the operatives of Manchester and other English manufacturing cities, and strengthen their arms for labor by filling the bellies of those unfortunate men, do you think they will go to war with us who furnish the raw material for their labor, who furnish the clothing for their backs, and the food for their stomachs, and stop their own supplies? When they find us every day a better customer, will they go to war with their benefactors? ("Marblehead will keep them off.") "Free trade and sailors' rights," was what old Marblehead fought for in the last war. Great Britain then denied us free trade. Great Britain has come to her senses since. She tried the "protection" of labor, until it had starved thousands and tens of thousands. She now proposes fair and free exchanges of our products with hers. And I say that liberal and free exchange makes friends of all nations, and makes a war impossible. General Cass, then, is the man of peace; and not such a man of peace as my whig friends have conjured up, who has spent all his life in the camp, whose trade is war, and who has been so devoted to that trade that he has not had time to examine the Constitution of the United States, to see whether a United States bank or a high tariff is constitutional or not, so that he has no opinions on the subject! A man who has confined himself so closely to the trade of killing men, is not quite so likely to be a peace man as General Cass, who has been all his life a civilian, and who adopts and supports that policy which makes all nations friends, because it makes them mutual benefactors. I will take up no more time with this discussion. Let me say to you, that the democracy of the country is to decide these great questions. The democracy of the United States is to determine whether hereafter the policy of our nation in the world, shall be to make an enemy of every other nation; to keep at home its own food, and to shut out its neighbor's clothing; to provoke and irritate, instead of conciliating and making friends. There never has been, and there never will be, excepting in this manner, such a scene of universal brotherhood in this world as will follow the general adoption of a liberal commercial policy. "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," and the fraternity of all men. That is the doctrine. which thirty-four millions of Frenchmen now hoist at their masthead, and that is the doctrine that is to circumnavigate the globe with our ships, and their ships, and the ships of every nation, as they float upon the sea. Shall we join in this policy? Shall we say, let labor have free scope; let the untilled lands be brought into the market at the cheapest rates, so that agriculture shall have free play? Let the products of the West be sold, in God's name, in Ireland, in England, or anywhere else where there is an opportunity to sell them. May our commercial greatness, vast and towering as it now is, go on increasing as it has done; and let our onward march in greatness, in wealth, and in prosperity, be accelerated, as it will be when we adopt that policy which makes a Christian brotherhood of all nations, and unites their before discordant interests into one. SPEECH ON THE INTERESTS OF THE OLD STATES IN WESTERN AVENUES OF INTERCOURSE.* The House having taken up for consideration the bill granting to the State of Missouri the right of way and a portion of the public domain, to aid in the construction of certain railroads therein, the Speaker said the gentleman from Massachusetts, [Mr. Rantoul,] was entitled to the floor. Mr. Rantoul said: The question before the house seems to me to be very far indeed from a question of mere sectional and local interest. The disposition to be made of the public domain is certainly a great national concern, and ought to be argued with a view to its bearing upon the great national interests of the country, which are common to all sections. I do not see clearly -I cannot be certain, and I think no other man can be certain - that the national domain will continue to belong to the United States as common property, to be applied as it is now applied; for probably without looking very far into the future - it is probable, that some means will be found to withdraw the public lands from their present position, and to put an end to the long series of controversies somewhat sectional in their nature, to make a final adjustment, upon general, just, and national principles, of the whole subject. But into the question whether such an adjustment be possible, and if it be possible, how it ought to be made, I do not now propose to enter. I intend to confine my remarks to the question, whether appropriations, such as are proposed to be made in this bill, ought to be made for the opening of great avenues of internal trade. The old thirteen States have certainly great interest in determining what shall be done with the public lands,and interest as great, in some views, as that of the States in which the public lands are situated,—and I wish to inquire, what use can be made of the public lands, at the present, and until some final adjustment is agreed upon, and of the proceeds thereof, which shall be equal in its advantages to the old States, as well as to the new! The proposition. * Delivered in the United States House of Representatives, Feb. 18, 1852. now before the house, is for a grant of alternate sections of land to aid in the construction of roads in the State of Missouri. It stands upon the same principles as other similar propositions which must soon come before us. What can be done with the public lands that will so conduce to the benefit of the whole country, as to use them so as to bring about especially if it can be done without cost to the national treasury-to bring about, I say, the opening of all the great channels. of internal commerce? I cannot conceive of any other use to be made of them so beneficial. A general plan of roads has already been commenced, a plan, not the product of any one mind or any one set of minds, and yet well combined, and mutually harmonizing, from the natural tendencies of the trade and intercourse which occasioned their construction, and so, without pre-concert, forming a portion, so far as they are completed, of a great and well-contrived system. Your roads, from Boston, by the way of Buffalo, to the west; from New York, by the way of Dunkirk, to the west; from Philadelphia, by the way of Pittsburg, to the west; from Baltimore by the Ohio river, to the west; from Alexandria, Norfolk, and Portsmouth, through Virginia -awake at last to her commercial capacities—to the west; from Charleston and Savannah, promising also to rise from their long depression by their connection with the west,-I say all these roads furnish the beginnings of chains of intercourse which must be carried forward further than they now are, in order to derive from them their full benefits to those sections of the Atlantic slope through which they pass. The Atlantic slope can have no valuable commerce, I might almost say, except what she derives from the west; that slope being barren, as compared with the valley of the Mississippi; and the old States being unproductive, as compared with the new States. That western commerce, and that western delivery of agricultural products, which already employs far the greater part of the navigation, will, at no very distant period, employ, comparatively, almost the whole of your navigation. The products of the Atlantic slope to be carried to foreign countries, and the products of foreign countries to be brought here for delivery and distribution to the inhabitants of the Atlantic slope, will be as nothing compared with those products which are to be delivered from, and the merchandise and manufactures to be forwarded to, the valley of the Mississippi. This being the case, then, and the commerce of the nation being, in fact, destined to be an interchange between the valley of the Mississippi and the rest of the world, it becomes extremely important to all who are interested in the commercial prosperity of the old States, that these channels should be opened, and should be made cheap, speedy, and convenient. Now, so far as this bill proposes to continue and aid in the construction of these channels of communication, it proposes to do so without loss to the general government; without loss, I say, of a single dollar to the general treasury. You take one thousand two hundred and eighty acres of land lying along-side of each other, and you say to the State of Missouri, Take one half of this; take six hundred and forty acres, and apply the proceeds thereof to the construction of railroads, and pay the same price for the remaining six hundred and forty acres which you formerly paid for the one thousand two hundred and eighty acres. You say it is the settlers in those States who are to pay the additional prices, for the sections taken together pay as much as they did before, and the sale is much more likely to take place within a limited period of time, much more likely to take place in a year, or a few years,-than it would be at the old prices, and if the access to those lands had not been facilitated. What makes lands within five miles of a great city more valuable than those a hundred or five hundred miles distant? It is simply because the produce of that land has a market, and because the time and expense of getting to that market is comparatively small. Diminish the time and expense of reaching a market from a section of land in the State of Missouri, and you raise the price of that land instantly and largely the moment you do so. Now, sir, of all the inventions that science has struck out, a good railroad is the machine that shortens the time, and lessens the expense, and puts a market at your door most effectually and most surely. That, this bill proposes to do for the inhabitants of Missouri along the line of this road, and proposes to do it in a manner which will not draw from the national treasury one dollar, and which will not prevent from passing into the treasury one single dollar; for you will not in Missouri, you will not in any State where a a railroad is needed-and if it is not needed it ought not to be constructed—I say, you will not fear, but may be certain that the demand for land, at double prices, will be much more rapid than at the ordinary prices elsewhere. You propose to give lands, at the present value, at $1 25 an acre, amounting to six sections, worth $4,800, for each mile of railroad to be constructed, which mile will cost something like $20,000. Of this sum $15,200 are to be contributed by the State of Missouri, or by individuals, who, it is to be presumed, will not throw away this amount of capital without some examination into the question, whether the business of the route is sufficient to yield an adequate return. And, indeed, through the fertile regions of the west, if the business is not there, let your avenue point towards a great market, and the road will bring it there. Ultimately, routes running towards natural centres of commerce will pay. The title does not pass from the United States, unless the road be |